SCENE TEN (X)

“какими судьбами”

Pronunciation: kaKEEmee sud’BAHmee Meaning: how surprising to meet you here

Literal translation:  

“BY WHICH FATES”

Set on the Onderdonk Fields between the border of Brooklyn and Queens on Friday morning of the Labor Day Weekend. Newyorkgrad is sizzling with fete and fever. Thousands of people are about to be gunned down in the streets of Brooklyn. They just don’t all know it yet. Most of the high class Blan are still in the countryside. Most of the Neg have a three day weekend they don’t understand. The sun is shining and also baking us all alive. The late summer humidity. It remains oppressive. The Flushing Avenue highway leads from Brooklyn deep into the greener pastures of Queens passing through a vast industrial district along the border. In a sense it and the Dutch Kills creek are the East to West Breuklyn-Queens border. A heat wave of unprecedented proportions has been ravishing the city for the entire three weeks.

They put that little bitch Greta on TV again, to talk about Global Warming. She mumbles something in Norwegian about no longer using airplanes. But really it’s all just Capitalist Modernity. You can only gang rape the earth for so long before she begins to die inside. And then die outside too.

Dozens of multicolored tents have been erected at the top of a green hill whose perimeter is a steel fence. At its north side is a small Dutch historic home and the rest a campground in the badlands of Industrial Bushwhack. A big band stage is almost finished in erection to blare live Gypsy Latin music is being set up and sound tested. A four day proclamation of lawlessness has been posted, but only the social club staff and its regulars will truly be encamping. At forty dollars a day, it’s a rather pricey venture to go camping in a field in the heart of a barren industrial wasteland between Breuklyn and Queens known for salvage yards, construction material stockpiling, biker gangs, and various front operations. A railroad to a poisonous green river called the Dutch Kills Creek separating Breuklyn and Queens officially.

Slavi, stone faced with black hair until he cracks a jovial grin only to those he knows is Sasho’s brother. The sometimes grinning Bulgarian enforcer is at the gate nominally charging people whom he doesn’t recognize as the spoken for “regulars’ ‘. Justin O’Azzello, “the General Manager ” is cooking up “kielbasa” and barking grinning efficient commands on set up.

“What are the kielbasa made of,” asks Viktoria, who has booked all the bands and done much of the production work to make this Bohemian Festival occur.

“What are they made of Pendejo,” repeats her husband Raphael.

“A special type of chicken,” says Justin with his mouth, but ‘people’ with his teeth and she refrains from trying.

 At various points Justin Toomey O’Azzello has come and gone as Mehanata’s General Manager. He’s quit, gotten fired, quit, gotten sober, quit, found HaShem, rehired, lost HaShem, gotten wicked drunk, gotten very sober, and now, he seems to be conducting business well enough and is back in the good graces of the management. Which means Sasho, and maybe to a lesser degree in reporting and accounting; Misha Kishbivalli, but Sasho is the boss. The Onderdonk Fields are now held by a colorful gypsy mafia. Sasho and his young son join a game of football game now underway.

Around 16:00 pm Kawa Zivistan shows up. He’s carrying a large red medical tech bag. The big red bag contains various basic life support that should hopefully not be utilized, and also two bottles of red wine. He joins Victoria and Raphael on the top of the hill by the main encampment. Raphael and Kawa comrades embrace as they always do. They grin because they know what is coming in the next 72 hours. Debauchery punctuated with acts of defiance and sedition. 

A large and gregarious man rises to introduce himself as Oleg. A slinky, slender dark brown-haired woman at his side does not introduce herself at all. Also seated in the main encampment at the hill top are Lia Monteleone with her big French tits. Georgie Rabanca and Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. Daria ignores his arrival completely, as though she doesn’t know or care who he is. The burly Post-Soviet Oleg with a cropped beard and fashionable dress with a camera around his neck steps up and offers his hand.

“Oleg Medved is my name,” the big Russian fellow says.

“Kawa Zivistan,” Zivistan replies, “this is my ambulance partner Jared Forgetter, medical partner for the encampment, not homosexual lover to be clear.”

Oleg grins and pours everyone drinks. Zivistan takes out a large bottle of Spanish red wine and uncorks it. He passes out real wine glasses wrapped up in socks.

They all then dance and dance and drink and steal and make art and chat about the world. The fearsome, but utterly kindhearted Ukrainian Illubadori gangster Oleg Medved ‘from Boston’ takes a wide assortment of photos of former and Post Soviet models. Victoria has arranged a series of photo shoots and allegedly Alan, who most call ‘Oleg the Bear’ is local celebrity “up in Boston” and he takes tons of fashionable pictures. Kawa in his blue paramilitary-style EMT uniform with a red bandanna arm band is soon dancing the half tango, half salsa with Dasha clad in a yellow mesh cocktail dress with blue Indian war paint under her eyes; it makes for a lovely picture. “I didn’t recognize you in that faded blue uniform and your strange little partisan cap,” Daria exclaims.

The four day Bohemian Gypsy Festival is on Friday day one full swing by evening. It’s a very Old Soul-Old School movement of a moment. They’ve taken a barren camp ground in a bad part of the warehouse district and turned into something of a cross between the Gypsies of Patagonia and or a cold war partisan encampment. Zivistan has little actual medical work to do. Zivistan begins working on a sketch of Georgie and the big French tits on Amelia. Georgie with a laugh mentions he found black and blue marks all over his woman’s body the night she went back to Kawa’s home two weeks prior. ‘The night Dasha nearly killed you.’

“I fell down some stairs,” is all Amelia says. Georgie laughs it all off because he knows Kawa is a very tragic man. A good man but a tragic man. Kawa doesn’t have it in him to have any affairs. We barely even ask anyone to dance. Georgie who is a CUNY Graduate Center professor and also a computer scientist has affairs all the time, but he is not an American, or tragic, or rarely ever sad. However, Amelia’s black and blue marks are from someone fucking her dirty and rough. Not fucking her with love making. Just one week ago.
Georgie wonders when it will be that Dasha Skorobogatova gives him the opportunity for a good fuck. How much will that cost? Admittedly such a conquest seems expensive in a few regards. Probably a grand an hour. Georgie feels sad for Kawa at times. He buys him drinks periodically with an ugly Romanian smile. Recently he became aware of the possibility of the small and short affair between Kawa and another regular Tavern mistress, the French girl named Amelia. He was shocked that any beautiful woman could find pleasure with such a sad, broken man. Kawa can’t dance and Kawa doesn’t ever smile. 

 Low and behold Dasha and Kawa are dancing up a storm tonight. To the Latin Gypsy Ska Jazz Band Escarioka now playing a cover of the ‘DunDunbanza’. Followed by brass jazz of the Sunny Side Social Club. Their front man blows through coke like a champion snow blower. George has never even seen the ‘Kawabumga man’ dance more than two or three highly forced times. No use of hips at all!

Daria is a woman at the tavern that turns all the heads. Even more so than that American girl Jessica who always takes off her clothes and climbs the downstairs stripper poles. Even more than Amelia who has slept with almost everyone. Even more than the Moldovan twins who kiss all the time. Daria arrived perhaps six months ago and now certainly has a very regular card. Kawa turned his card in for some time and has just begun to reestablish it.  A Mehanata regular doesn’t just show up early and stay late two or three weekend days open. They make themselves part of the tavern’s ecosystem. They have riotous affairs. They get into fights with the Shqiptarëtis. They make a huge scene to the scene!

“Now I could not have seen that happening,” says George to Raphael, “he never ever dances!”

“She’s just fucking that hot, Prosto,” Raphael says. Prosto is Russian for simple as can be.

Daria Andreavna is never far from the fact that Kawa not only has steel-toed boots and two left feet. She takes him up on his hand to dance over and over. Kawa is so happy to be dancing again. He aims to do it well. He swore to her on the night she almost killed them that he never dances anymore. So that night before the fall, she made him two-step in a mirror as she watched and pressed her weight against his hip until he came correct.

“Your hips man! Move your goddamn hips.”

He almost crushes her bare foot with a steel toed combat boot dip.

Rafael is wearing a gold baseball cap and sits watching with his wife Viktoria manically trying to direct this shit show. Bands not showing up, nothing going to schedule everyone getting more and more furiously drunk. In yesteryear and future years Raphael commanded men, now he mostly makes life. With his music twice a week at the tavern as part of Bordel Dali and he also makes love with his camera twice a week and always maintains a slave job at a boutique blue jeans fashion repair shop where wealthy clients send their favorite expensive jeans for salvage. But, a revolutionary is a revolutionary and when asked by the resistance three weeks ago to activate his cell and raid the big blue tower to deposit the transmitter for the Fire Switch Station to broadcast orders and shut down government coms during the Labor Day Parade, he agreed. Jumping out of planes, carrying out raids and building non-lethal bombs, or taking hostages is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it.

“I like to see him pretending to be happy,” says Raphael to Viktoria.

“They are too tricky. A thing moving too fast,” states Viktoria as she watches out of the corner of her eye. Viktoria is very happy with herself for it was she who made this four day festival come together. It is mostly out of control, of course money was never Sasho’s aim this time. She has no idea her husband and most of the Peruvian Ska band Eskarioka are about to stage a raid on the tallest building in Queens. She has no idea that Oleg Medved and Yulia Romanova are poisoning half the camp with vodka based neurotransmitters. She has no idea there is a dead hooker in the tent next to hers. She has no idea that an Iranian sleeper cell is carrying a bomb into the heart of Times Square to black out the city in an electromagnetic pulse early Monday morning. She has no idea that 2 million black women, men and children are coordinating their revelry amid an armed uprising. She just isn’t aware of those things.

Viktoria doesn’t know about all that many of her husband’s affairs. She certainly doesn’t know he used to lead a guerrilla band in Peru. Called the ‘Bolivarian Hotshots’. They had gunned down many capitalists in the Fujimori Years. She loves Raphael, her husband with all her heart. She partially likes Kawa Zivistan as her tragic brother. She loves but also hates Sasho who gives her a platform for her fashion, art and music. She came to this city and got a job at the Tavern as events producer and tavern has taken over most of her life and time. She doesn’t see the world like Raphael does, or Kawa did before his friends put him into sleep. ‘Sleep is the cousin of death’, but not physical death. It is simply reducing the size of the world one can see, third, fourth and fifth and sixth dimensionally.

    Kawa and Viktoria can only really see a couple days into the past and future. Whereas people like Raphael, and Dasha Andreavna can see things much further back and forward, see things happening in other realities. It makes them very, very functional in this reality. The more one drinks, the less they see. If Viktoria Contreras was aware of any of the danger near her, she’d have a baby heart attack. Probably move back to upstate New York where the world is a bit safer. Back to her hippy parents’ Alpaca farm. Way out of the coming crossfire.

“She can’t be tamed by any man,” states Raphael in Spanish.

“He will try, but when he fails I’ll have to pick up the messy pieces yet again,” states Viktoria. She’s already had to coax him gently from his old Russian geisha Ms. Maria Parsheva. As well as his Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna and then to freedom and then through the affair where he broke the French girl Amelia’s heart. It’s now back to the bondage of his wanton reckless emotions from the look of it. Kawa’s habit of loving early and often is the source of his exceptional art and writing. She admires that about him though, she’s a hopeless romantic herself. It is Viktoria’s shoulder where Kawa does his most cathartic crying over the past three years since they all met on Floyd Bennett Field at the original Bohemian-Gypsy-Tabor festival on the abandoned tarmacs of the abandoned Idlewild airport. A cool breeze breaks the city’s August humid heat wave.

“Spin me even faster man!” commands Dasha. He is under her spell.

She feeds him still more red wine. He can be known to drink in uniform when a General like Sasho gives him the green light to do so. Kawa has at least some discipline, but like a regular rank and file loses this discipline if the drinking lets him and the front seems far. And surely it takes a lot of drink to render him incapable of splinting extremities or dealing with overly intoxicated people, the most likely of injuries. But now, he’s really not good for much but chasing this woman. He knows nothing of Nikolai’s “great big hectic job.”

As a card-carrying ‘Banshee member’ he has several local ambulance crews on speed dial, worse comes to worse. There are endless bottles of wine and vodka miraculously stashed away about the encampment. All need more than tasting.

Kawa Zivistan is no obvious martyr today, or yesterday. Obviously for all his past mountains of zeal he’s built up, he saw the loveliest girl in the camp teach him how to dance and then try and kill him two weeks prior. He cannot be unaffected by the contrasts there. And if he was aware that his closest circle is up to something very large and possibly violent, he “is asleep.” He is out of the chain of command until reactivation after his paramedic graduation. Which is in Nivôse.

After his work in Haiti, they brought him to the bathhouse. They submerged his consciousness in the great waters of a temple buried in the earth; and to keep him safe they closed his eyes and made him aware only of what was around him in a small circle of seeing. A hint that there was a close bout with death has been made. Did our protagonist antagonists actually plummet to death off a rooftop? The night Daria and Kawa boxed ferociously after he yanked the cigarette from out her mouth, she shoved him off a roof.  That was two weeks prior from the night before the Blue Moon now. He grabbed out for her and they both died falling into the deadly drop pit. She did shove to kill, but rather than make suicide assembled he pulled her along, to death. They definitively toppled off the roof into that pit of death. But angels quickly and immediately came to their rescue, in some form. Only Nanoseconds after lying broken and dead in a pit of death having killed each other over nothing. Over posturing and arrogance and lack of respect for physics. For the pair reality reset. ‘The angels’, on behalf of ‘the spirits’ , took their two souls from their corpses and went back in time five seconds. Put the souls impolitely into two new bodies of Kawa and Dasha, waiting in a clear blue-white chemical bath. It took just five human seconds to reload them. A near-death experience was now a vodka-based-near-life experience. Because ‘the spirits’ were protecting them both. 

Panting hard, as if post-coitus she grabbed his right hand. Daria then bit down into his right index finger to draw blood. He made no reaction; his animal soul hasn’t fully absorbed itself into his new body. Then they lay panting by the edge of the precipice staring each other down, bitten hand clasped and bleeding; and then she confessed to him things that were highly unnerving.  Some were true. And some were white lies.

Now, back to the festival!

Now, “she remembers nothing” and keeps urging him to explain their first night of misconduct under the good night almost blue moon and tell her what happened on the “roof of the financial district.”

Had they fallen into that pit having no spirits or angel to aid them you could have taken their bodies out a side basement door and it wouldn’t have even been real news. Senseless tragedy only bothers all of the living as everyone is missed by someone. So now they dance and self-seduce, she would say she is incapable he is above it, so they self-seduce. They are engaged in a passionate stare down, but it is more playful than hot. She is very used to drunken men desiring her. He is very used to being a sober gentleman and sometimes also a drunken man.  

Viktoria Lynch can see the steam and glow from the tent camp at the top of the hill. It reminds her vaguely of the wild passion that came over her several years ago when she wrested Rafael from the arms of a wealthy temptress and got the ring of marriage around his ways.

Kawa is a marvelously incompetent, albeit enthusiastic dancer. Dasha drags him off here and there and they imbibe relentlessly without even seeming to stagger.

Night comes and the darkness falls.

“Tender to see you saving the life of Sasho’s son,” Dasha had whispered earlier, making a dry Russian joke out of his earlier handy work. 

He had put an ice pack on a not that sprained ankle of the eleven year old son of the club’s owner. But, it was a smash hit. Calling an ambulance can cost between $475.00 and $4,000.00 in Newyorkgrad.

“Saving lives is much easier than taking them,” he says with a grin, “in the long run anyway.”

“So what happened again on your fateful roof! Tell me the whole story!” she demands.

“So no one meta died, or really died. Only almost died. Because when dawn broke two weeks prior we were still standing, I called you a cab and we begrudgingly agreed to meet again, only by fated coincidence, as we are both members of the same social club.”

“Fascinating,” she says, staring out into the bonfires of the encampment. Pouring perhaps the fifteenth glass of wine. Knowing behind her bluff they were about five three dimensional seconds were warm, bloody broken and dead.  

They had gotten quite drunk on wine, then Astika, then Rakia and then Russian Standard Vodka, eventually. 

Again she pressed him for, “The whole of the fucking story blat.”

“We boxed out. You drank hard and boxed me harder. Then we fell twenty stories to our deaths in a sub-basement pit,” he explains, “Prosto.”

 “And now we dance like two lovers who could have been just two separate funerals, in two separate languages, with Raphael Rafael and Victoria being the only overlapping guests of note,” she notes and winks at him.

The festival has become an alcoholic blur to all involved by midnight thirty.

Dasha and Sebastian dance, dance, and dance like they almost died for nothing just a week before. Under a bog moon taking shape in the night sky above the border between Queens and Breuklyn.

Earlier in the day Oleg Medved took a good many pictures of her and the three lesser former and Post Soviet models from Bucharest, Bulgaria, and Transdeisnester Republic. And also of lovely Victoria who always looks lovely and charming and caring for this rowdy band that gravitates to the tavern. While refusing to let the sometimes dirty laundry of her marriage ever be aired in public views. Though there have been improvements lately.

Kawa kisses Dasha’s hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets an inch from the ground with her long golden locks. It is not a smooth or graceful motion, but he tries the best he can. They nearly topple over.

Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. And they eye into each other, taking in the passion that they are generating without necessarily acting any further on it. 

“I will call you Sebastian!” she declares. “My name for you from this point out will be the name on your passport. The name you were given at your Trinidadian birth.”

“I will call you Dasha.  As I have from the very beginning.”

“You are like a devil, you have way too many strange names,” she smiles. 

Drunkenly they declare what each had planned to name to the other already. Then more dancing, dancing and more dancing; sway and grind like they almost died for nothing. Kawa kisses her hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets inches from the ground with her long golden locks. For the second time now with not much more grace than before.

Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. Again. I could fall for her quite hard, he thinks, but he obviously has thought such thoughts before. A rather ferocious amount of wine first. Then the Russian Standard Vodka Oleg the Bear has in a large Casque and also numerous Astika beers are consumed. These are not amateurs by any means. 

“A little party never hurts nobody! An Old Illubadori slogan of the night,” says Oleg.

Finally around 3 am the camp gets quieter, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for Dasha and Kawa to sit almost on top of each other, leaning in, coloring the sketch he’s made of their near fall and of her beauty over two pages of his black archive.

Daria then colors away at his sketches enthusiastically. She smiles radiantly and takes each color rendering his work into a superior rendition via the brightness of the combined war effort. Then they go and dance their asses off. 

Finally around 5 am the camp gets quietest, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for bonfire calm without drumming. Rafael , Dasha and Kawa sit at the edge of a terrific fire now also dying down. They are quite drunk. “Derangedely” speaking on the subject of “phantom physics” and “meta-reality”. Kawa is waxing philosophically, as Dasha’s eyes roll, on the theoretical possibility of parallel reality and past lives. He pulls this from somewhere, according to Dasha, “His own ass.” 

A little faux-intellectual rant positing his personal theory of existence. 

Raphael Contreras nods in agreement, adding his own deductions. His own Mayan prophecies mixed with some Peruvian socialist folklore of the Arequipa Province.

“What if there are other lives running right alongside this one!” exclaims a dazed and inebriated Kawa Zivistan, “other possibilities, other potentialities had tiny little digressions been made on the course we follow in this waking life? What if, mind you, the slightest digression and decision had yielded a vastly different outcome from what we experience now? And, what if there was some way to step from one reality to another. Moving about time, changing your body while keeping your soul and memories intact?”

Ironically, as if he had ten thousand spoons and all he needed was a knife; Kawa Zivistan has in his drunken stupor articulates exactly what has happened to both he and Dasha just two weeks before.

“Fascinating talk boys before we die,” remarks Dasha yawning.  

It is to Kawa Zivistan like one of those grand conversations he once one had in the East Village coffee house Yaffa Cafe over red wine when he was younger. Or on the Golan Heights hills in Syria. Sweet and danger-filled mental nostalgia.

“Do you believe in past lives?” asks Rafael .

“Well certainly! It’s so primitive to think this is all a showdown between god and the devil over souls, one person, one life, one try! How pedantic!” 

“So then you believe in alternative realities, and also reincarnation?” Rafael asks.

Dasha makes faces at Kawa as they go on. The fire continues to die down.

“Tovarish Philosopher I’m tired and need to be put to sleep,” she says.

“Soon, soon,” Zivistan says.

“The Old Soul is what I heard it called once,” says Rafael , when I was a boy in Arequipa Province, “the body is but a vessel my father and mother said. Like a suit for the soul strolling across time, across many lives. An Old Soul remembers these lives and in doing so has a mission to accomplish, what the Hindu call a dharma.”

“Boys! To bed!” yells Dasha.

Kawa asks her for five minutes to finish his idea. She scowls and gives him three and takes off in a pout.

Raphael Rafael with a devilish smirk says, “Speak of reality later. Go after her or I will.” Kawa catches up with her mid-hill and takes her hand.

“Lie down with me,” he says.

“That conversation was a lot of bullshit, you know,” she says.

“It’s fun to speak about this bullshit sometimes.”

“Where will there be the best sleep for us?”

“I have a blanket,” he says, forgetting about the inflatable mattress.

 Dasha and Kawa sit almost on top of each other at the top of the hill under the trees. He pulls a black and green Arabian blanket from his rucksack. She finds another bottle of wine as if out of thin air. Pours them both glasses. Watch him prepare the bare accommodations. She pages through and returns to late-night coloring the sketch he’s made of their fall and of her vastness over two pages of his black archive.

She stares into him with Old Soul eyes.

“Will you be my sweet Tovarisha for the whole of the festival?” he asks her, “We can share our wine and food and I will watch over you.”

“Ha, ha! Tovarish is gender-neutral. It is not changed to “Tovarish-a” for women. We are not Hispanish! We were all equals in Soviet Russian. Only word in Russian without gender inflection. Also, I need not be watched after. I am always safe.”

“Be my Tovarish then and look after me then.”

“We will see. For now; this is just an okay plan. I will leave you in the morning.”

They draw closer into a cuddle and then complete a spoon. She wraps herself within his arms and he holds her like it is his duty, but it is also a thrill of some buried passion. He holds her tight like a little partisan as the trees whisper and the two double blue moons that are out late can blot out reasonable doubt. He likes to hold her. They curl together on an inflatable mattress and a green Arabian blanket. They are both, for a variety of reasons unaccustomed to the perfect fit of a well-intentioned cuddle. 

They fall into what passes as sleep, her first. As if on demand.

“We almost died for nothing,” he says.

“What if I just kill all your hope,” she mutters in a foreign tongued whisper.

“What if I love you until you know just what hope is truly so good for?” he responds to her in a muted tone. Possible in Hebrew.

“Don’t speak now of such goddamn stupid and impossible things,” she whispers.

They lie together in that Gypsy camp draped into each other on the air mattress and floating on a dream the only two partisans without tents. He dreams of escaping the struggle against the reaper to be forever in her arms and she dreams of a big black cat with a fiddle while a man on the moon plays the world’s smallest violin just for her little Amerikanski. No, that’s just a romantic little literary device. He dreams of her and she dreams of nothing at all. Nothing at all she will ever, ever talk about to a man. And that nothingness is subjective, but not the objective of her “inebriations”.

A good night for Kawa is not to dream at all; his dreams are clusters nightmares. She has thus rendered him peaceful. A good night for Dasha is to drink and dance until the night is a blur of happy smiling, swirling dance movies and escaping in a peaceful haze. He watches the moon and feels her breathing heavily against him. He is reminded of some great peaceful moment. Whether that is because a beauty lays in his arms, or something more ephemeral, magically real forms an underlying narrative, he cannot say.

“We will leave these bodies and make our way to higher ground,” is the last thing she tells him in primal low Ivory. Almost Aramaic. Strange that she speaks any Ivory at all. Being so fucking Russian and surly. And mad. And also quite Blonde.

She snores at him just a little. Makes unintelligible little cute moans. The last thing he thinks holding her looking up at the huge blue moon is that if some hideous monster or bandit came from the tree line, if bad men, werewolves, monsters or devils came to hurt them, if they sky fell out above them, if the blue moon became a meteor, he’d never, ever leave her behind. He’d fight on whatever level he had to keep this woman safe, to marshal every ounce of his abilities to deliver her from any impending strife.

It all felt like a terrific overpowering déjà vu, as if it happened a few, or perhaps very many times before this very moment. Daria sleeps indifferent to his hold or his guard. Daria has survived a nation of thieves to get here and scuttled through a den of vipers since arrival. Sleeping in a park, with or without “protection”, with or without a mattress or a pillow, these are not so high on her hierarchy of concerns. 

Amid many other pressing troubles, the Vodka and his many yarns sung her eventually  to sleep. The big blue full moon lit up the sky marking on the lunar calendar the end of an epoch and beginning of a functionally existential war for what will ultimately be the fate of this backward species. So much work to emancipate a mostly self-interested race of violent monkeys with space guns.

The partisan Kawa Zivistan, named such by the Arabs and Kurds of Rojava who’s American passport documents say he is also “Sebastian Adoneav ” has also an Ivory name. So does Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova. Amid all the slumbering carnage of the Gypsy encampment, two old souls are reunited. Their breathing synchronizes chest to chest. Their beating hearts match up, and then. Then, there is no beating, no breathing and also no heart beating anymore. Two very attractive husks clasped to each other. As if they had done it so often, for so many lives it was now just a drill. To die and become reborn wherever and whenever they pleased.

SCENE NINE (IX)

“час от часу”

Pronunciation: chas at CHAsu Meaning: just keeps getting better (sarcastic)

Literal translation: 

“FROM ONE HOUR TO THE NEXT”

Set in the Atlas Park Hotel in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. You can rent a hotel room with the expectation that no one cares what you do there. That’;s true in almost every part of the civilized and uncivilized world. If you pay by the day, the month or the hour. People stay quiet. You get what you pay for, which is that quiet. 

“Make another fucking dirty movie, blat, or we’ll slow kill your fucking mom,” he said. So she ended up fucking nineteen guys in a series of movies. “I’ll kill her in front of you bitch and make you eat from her fucking corpse.”

In pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia a beautiful woman of the gentry, with a powerful father and a substantial dowry even if she were so inclined, was not able to release thousands of photographs and short videos of her pretty face and enormous ripe breasts indiscriminately to potential suitors, horny aristocrats and common serfs, and petty criminals. The technology simply did not allow it in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. And frankly speaking then, never mind honor and propriety and the status of women; it would not have been strategic for an adventitious coupling. From a matrimonial happiness point of view, but we are not in the 19^th century certainly we are not. It is the future now. Women have no dowry, they have rights! Our gentry is far harder to access but not as bound by protocol and convention.      

“Sometimes I’m highly classy lass, and sometimes I take off enough of my clothes over a smile.” That’s what Dasha’s private Instamatic declares. In the City of Penza where she grew up she was a brunette, but now while in America a meticulously dyed blonde. Her name at the agency is ‘Gold Fish’.

So she sits there in her modest Brighton Beach apartment, sometimes in suites paid for by suitors in the then Atlas Park Hotel or the Waldorf Astoria, the Benjamin or the Sofitel.  By the hour she has to work, and she takes a lot of pictures of herself. Thanks to technology, thanks to the future over 160,000 men, well they get these pictures immediately. Sometimes with a selfie stick, sometimes on remote, sometimes she has a professional photographer, but it’s hard to make men do things on a long enough timeline without putting them in.

She’s never depicted of course with her john’s only where they take her. It’s sophisticated art showing strangers on the internet that you’re classy and upper-middle-class and unavailable for immediate purchase, but you like things.

She has a shape that wins her many admirers. 176/57 93-61-95, serious measurements to shape her like a highly erotic, but angelic doll, one social media account is more doll and one is more tits. But the modern man, maybe all men like doll and tits in tandem. It’s hard to say whether this venture is actually sustainable, but she is getting popular. It sure beats working. As a student, a model and lover of fitness this has been a good racket so far. She’s just 24 in this life. It’s sensible but not impossible to get the kind of man who will send a 100 rose bushels across town, to you know, buy groceries and pay your rent.

It’s hard to get in her head, that’s the idea. Her smile is a perverse fake smile, it’s not a happy smile, and you have to work real hard to have a good and winning fake smile. Often thanks to technology men in London or Newyorkgrad can see her rub her enormous breasts and do strange little things with her belly, or play with a cat. She does it all from her iPhone, links it into VKontackte and Facebook via Instamatic to two accounts. And then the offers come in. Most of them are just kind of disgusting. Well at least she can afford to fly her mother here once a year.

She’s never walked a European runway, that’s for sure. What she is a student of no one could guess. Her father thinks this is beyond dishonorable, but she’s his favorite daughter. And honestly despite having big baby eyes, and a tiny, tiny waist and ‘tits for days’ as she says, truly massive breasts for a petite figure like hers, and everything is real. Well suggestively is the color she paints with. It’s gotten her an international following. 

Because that is how the modern commodification of flesh works, the horizontal voyeurism, but not consumption, of designer curves and suggestiveness. On SUPE you can get more, shall we say intimate with Daria Andreavna’s form.  

“You’re getting way too skinny,” Sergei Abromovich once told her, it was almost the first thing he told her and you have to be careful telling a woman like that she’s anything but perfect. “It’s totally normal” she told him,” and referred him to a website of Russian models, but honestly none were as slim as her. 

Sergei supposedly works as an accountant at the Atlas Park Hotel in Midtown. Though that is dubious. He pays for her classes, her rent in the shared apartment, he pretty much pays for everything. He loves her too much to be a legitimate sponsor.

Now no one wants to believe they are exploited, or being manipulated. No one likes to be deceived, you want to get what you paid for, you want out more than you put in, this is capitalism. Exponential reward for diminishing volume of work.

“I worry that in your desire to please your clients you take on dimensions that are unhealthy. And I mean not say this so boldly, you must consider your own health and longevity above the peering eyes and thick wallet of the fans,” Dmitry Khulushin, her top sponsor wrote.  

What a stupid, almost Ivoryish thing to say, she thought looking at this message from the Atlas Park Hotel. I am adored exactly how I am. In all my skinny and all my round. I will make someone send my favorite dumplings, she says. Or roses, or new victory bras for my big and beautiful, you know. Maybe Red bottoms, also a new puppy. New Years is coming, options, so many options. Hopefully a brand new life, in a brand new time and place. In a brand new life, everything could be okay. It would all be simply amazing. Should the impossible become possible, the untrue become true and the nightmare somehow transmogrify into a happy dream.

“I’ll tell you what though. Whatever they do, did, are still gonna do to me. My sisters had it much worse in the long run. Because I was eventually allowed to die. They both had to live with what our father was capable of.”

If I give in and I eventually marry Sir Dmitry the Oligarch I can move to the City and put all this, shall we call it; ugliness, behind me. He will be able to secure me. Stupid people say that money cannot ever buy happiness. But it certainly can buy one of all the main options. Thus, with many options you can get about as close to happiness as human life can get. But, when you are cold and hungry and have no green card. Both options and happiness are just abstracts. First comes security at all necessary costs.

SCENE-EIGHT (VIII)

“взять себя в руки”

Pronunciation: VZYAT’ siBYA v RUki Meaning: to pull oneself together; to calm down

Literal translation: 

“TO TAKE ONESELF INTO ONE’S HANDS”

Set in another Supper Club over on 189 Chrystie Street.

“I’m not fully happy with some highly central elements of my life”, thinks aloud Siegfried Sassoon the actor. I cannot exactly say that I am satisfied, though I do have many elements of a good life going; I am not using my human potential; not as an actor and not as a man. Siegfried Sassoon, the Cuban American actor is a begrudging friend of the resistance. He works as a bartender in the nightclub called ‘The Red Fox Box”. 

There are only several places where they cannot hear you, see you, record you and file you by number. And these places are not one hundred percent secure, they only make your detection harder and prolong your date of capture.

Bathhouses, fitness clubs, loud electronic music venues, camping & wilderness activities, dancehall parties, and in the back of municipal ambulances.

I take to the woods. There are so many things we forgot to do when we became civilized; we lost innate mechanisms for our self-preservation; we became reliant on government, on governance, on divisions of labor so infinite that we no longer possess any intrinsic individual use. Well, a great deal less anyway.

I am following a new serial on Netflicks and Chill. I have no stomach for film or TV! I was classically trained in Moscow for the stage! For the fucking stage, but that is a dead medium now. I have a bachelor’s in philosophy. I wrote my thesis on the history of time travel. I work as a bartender at an elite supper club in the Isle of Mann. I have a pleasant and attractive girlfriend, she is not as amazing as my last girlfriend, but she makes me happy and keeps things mostly drama-free.

My father works for the military-industrial complex. I rarely see him. My mother is still a hippie. It’s peace, love, and light, and then you marry rich; it’s good for your future, your children’s future. My father has a job I don’t know the details of; his company holds patents to space craft and commercial airlines, it builds them for the United American States; the U.A.S. has been the name of the 87% of the U.S.A. that was not lost to socialism during the Separatist Wars of 2012-2015. The Capital is now in Chicago. The 13% lost is called the Autonomous Administration of North and East AmericaThe Isle of Mann is just over the river from the so-called ‘Breuklyn Soviet’; which is one of the most heavily armed hotbeds of the sedition. The Bronks and Queens are confederated with it; Staten Island is an enormous military garrison, it got very blood for three years, now it’s all quiet. The rebels threatened to use atomic weapons and took hostages, I will tell you what appears to work; terrorism it seems to work every single time. It is actually understood to be far less bloody than conventional war, and a lot less expensive. Who fundamentally funds these rebels is a subject of great debate in the high class circles I run in. Oh yes, the upper classes are composed of big brained thinking men.

My particular club, like many of the establishments in cash rich, high stressed Isle of Mann, high tower living; caters to the millionaires and billionaires that compose what you might call were you to cite rather populist rebel propaganda; the 2%. Wealth in the United States of America and subsequently in the United American States is a maldistributed slope like absolutely anywhere else in the 206 habitation sectors, em, countries. In virtually all 206 national harvest units the distribution is about the same; though there are sharp gradients in the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones; social welfare systems and trickle down economies have enabled most of the 46 Core nations to eliminate all obvious forms of extreme poverty; life below $1.25 a day. Underclasses of course exist; the Muslims in Europe and the Noires and Mestizos in the U.S.; but they are not volatile, starving underclasses, but observe the slope; same in peripheral zone Kenya, as Semi-Peripheral zone Brazil, same are core zone France; a slope of the underclass and “middle classes” that in raw net wealth and assets are not radically disparate. Suffice to say you could call much of the middle class, the working poor. And in any society, the distribution of reported wealth, emphasis on reported wealth would show that with welfare, with subsidy; the majority of the citizens of any county; 80-90% are all on a slope that tapers off at its highest mark at annual earnings of $100,000 per year; then you have a 5-10% of the Bourgeoisie, the Upper Middle Classes, white-collar managers, athletes and celebrities with earnings let’s say between $100,000 to 1 million per year. This still is not a radical accumulation of wealth, not on the scale needed to exercise power. Control of political and productive mechanisms. And then you have a class in itself, what they called in Occupy the 1% is actually 0000.1% of the remaining population; a Kleptocracy; more appropriately called; the Oligarchy. Organized into clubs and factions that see national boundaries as mere human resource brands, or more appropriately the names of various large scale mega plantations. 

I did not come to any of that by reading the manuscripts or hearing the speeches of Zivistan, Solomon, DeBuitléirs and other famous and familiar rebel orators. I am no prole, nor were their Partizan songs written with my class in mind.

These Oligarchy men do not even come to my supper club. But I pour their managers drinks. I pour their entertainment drinks. I stay sober sometimes while their supervisors drink and I know about things like robots, clones and the great salt mine. I knew that the ‘new Panama Canal’ had already been built in the 1980’s. I knew this from the mouths of babes. The call girls these lackeys bring around. I have smoked joints with fellow help and shared what we’ve all heard about the great wide world.

Zivistan tried to recruit me no less than twice to twenty three times a year in round about and direct appeals to my level of awareness. I long suspected he would ask to spy for him, or something trickier. I’m a man of privilege, but not impervious. My father is well connected because of his company’s trade in trains and planes and missiles; but if the secret police took me there would not be very much he could do. I have friends too from the Club in which I work; but honestly when they take you they take you away. Your body is found in a tragic accident or a suicide, but that’s not your real body; you end in a container ship and then in a secret prison and that’s all she wrote.

I once wondered if “Kawa Zivistan” could ever analyze the sacrifice of his own privileges. Being white, being raised upper middle class from a family with land. Well his father is no lesser oligarchy but still they were the House of Zivistan! Excuse me, the House Adoneav. An esteemed lesser Ivory house allowed into certain elite clubs, given lands in both the District Financial and the Hamptons. Allowed in professional trades despite being Ivory. Well, suffice to say that house was eventually outlawed and obliterated after the Great Revolt.

They stripped his Ivory father of all his land and military rank. Then they executed his entire extended family. This is all I read in the underground papers. Sometime immediately after the Great Revolt began. The 803 Martyrs of the House Adonaev. They even hunted down and killed and tortured many of Sebastian’s past lovers. 

‘The world to come’ is not a much-changing world from all the many worlds before it, though Sebastian Adoneav now more infamously known as “Kawa Zivistan” is still working overtime to make his many enemies pay for their crimes. There are always barbarians at the gates, slaves in electrified sex cages, and bloody bloody unrest in the colonies. It has always been this way, it will always be this way; who am I or Zivistan or any in the Resistance to clamor for ‘a new world and a new way’. Zivistan and I used to sit in the downtown bathhouses and I would hear his yarns. I could hardly believe much of it was real. We were in university together, though I never joined his movement officially. Never took the plot outside the steam room. The House of King and House of Zivistan were of relatively equal social stations. He seemed to disregard my sympathies to him and grew angry as we got older that I didn’t wish to die on some barricade like him; but there are no barricades now; there are only strange events. Strange changes to reality that happen to keep up with the future science and black magic making war.

Nothing is what is what it seems! Are these vast plantation camps or are they so-called developing nations? Is democracy about speaking freely or is it about governing together? Why has the winter not ended for three years in grim Massachusetts? Why do proles take trains to serve others in the Isle of Mann and those trains take 45 minutes, but I know and Zivistan knows that to get from Manhattan of Breuklyn Soviet you need a plane or a 40-mile base jump down a mountain. Are you a citizen or are you a serf? Did America win the Cold War? Why is it half of the lesser, and one-third of the greater oligarchs all have Russian names? What is a Princeling? What is the Bohemian Grove? Who are the Free Masons? When is it time to smoke a joint and join a conspiracy theory, or get your cock rubbed via Netflicks and Chill? How much is human life really ever worth?

Make us a good price! I came to much of these realities during my senior thesis called ‘A History of Time Travel’; which explores the metaphysics behind parallel reality states, fourth-dimensional travel, and such themes of Pre-Soviet parapsychology.    

My ex, I can’t say her name as it was so painful to lose her. Her father is a well known Greater Oligarch. From she and from Kawa Zivistan and also from the whispers of the lower echelon elites assembled at the Red Fox. I learned that truly nothing is as it seems.

Kawa Zivistan, before he embraced the Baha’i nonviolence teachings of Sheikha Saadiya Usmani and was inducted into the Blue Lodge. He was a killer. I watched him evolve. I saw him go between talk and action over a period of ten years, he was changed by his experiences in the colonies. Palestine first then in Haiti, then Syria, and into the imagined wilds of Greater Kurdistan.

I think almost nobody knows what year it really is. How far in the future we actually are. But this actually was the profound elegance of the New Social Gospel, it is open-ended and egalitarian. Disciplined, principled but wildly inclusive. Most importantly as it tidies up mythology, religion, and science; it grounds all who approach it. Ground you in the now as well as the infinitive continuum of being.  

I will not speak to what did or did not happen during ‘the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis’. There are wildly different accounts. I never saw him again after that night when the whole country first learned his name. They say he died. As did thousands of hostages being held all over the country that night! Then calm. Then a great gold mist blew over North America. The internet turned off. The world outside our country was blacked out. In that gold, happy mist huge changes were made. There was no more Zivistan. There was no more United States; the entire population was put to sleep. When we woke up out of the dream, out of the week following the Millennium Hostage Crisis. Some estimated 13 % of America was a wild rebel “free zone”, and 87% was called the “United American States’ ‘, had always been. And you couldn’t take a 45-minute train to Breuklyn, no this violent anarchic thing called Breuklyn Soviet was a 40-mile drop off a cliff where the East River used to be. There was a mile-high wall between the edge of that cliff; and I was still in the U.A.S., which had always been the U.A.S. But, Breuklyn, Queens, and the Bronks were no longer Federal territories. These were now autonomous zones we were prohibited from traveling to. Rebel cantons. Lawless zones of sedition. American Soviets.

I got a letter in the mail from Kawa Zivistan, after he supposedly “died”. I guess a courier moved it across the lines. The letter stated he was interned in a special engineering camp not far from Boston, another recently liberated City State. He told me that shortly his compatriots would be taking him out of the camp ad returning him to “Breukelen Soviet”, which was of course he claimed now ‘free.’ And what did he want, why had he written? Of course, he wanted something. He never was capable of just having a normal friendship. He had taped a micro USB chip to the letter; it contained god only knows what. Nothing would shock me. His letter asked to go to 7^th FDNY EMS Outpost in Chelsea. To find a paramedic named Anya Drovtich. To buy her a non-alcoholic drink and give her the chip. Just commit treason. Flatly speaking.  

I had met Anya Drovtich once before the letter said. ‘A real bad-ass Muslim sexy Polish chick with the dreadlocks and red Hijab.’ That narrowed it down quite a lot. What the rational person would do, despite having knowledge of a highly irrational world, even sympathizing with the resistance secretly. Having bathed and been friends with supposedly dead public enemy number three, behind DeBuitléirs and Solomon, ahead of famed Jamaican Rebel Tabor commander still at large in the so-called Breuklyn Soviet Mickhi Dbrisk. I remembered this Anya, I let them both in the Red Fox Club once on the night against my better judgment. They were planning to take hostages. In the end, they were ordered to stand down. Zivistan got drunk and pole danced for her in a private room. He wasn’t always so dower, unsmiling, and totally humorless.

I look at this letter in my hand and I wonder what I should do. Turning it in means incriminating myself. The televisions have said he was killed in the hostage crisis along with co-terrorist Emma Solomon. This is proof of sorts he is alive; maybe his prints are on this handwritten letter. His security culture is sloppy I know. Maybe throw it away? What’s on this micro USB chip? Should I even open it? Maybe this is all a setup, maybe the Joint Terrorism Task Force is looking at anyone Zivistan used to know and I used to Banya with him twice a year, he’s been to half my theatrical openings. Maybe it’s another purge. And why would he send this to me? All of these years later. He’s been officially dead for over three years. 

Yes, the hostage tragedy happened in 2015? I think so. 2017? Maybe, they say never forget but I do forget. So much happened, so much was changed. So many people died in the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis. I know, what the public doesn’t know is that the rebels were very close to using nuclear warheads against major American cities. Leveraging that was what allowed the Separatist victories. I know that the Department of Security in the Homeland pumped gas into all of the hostage points, four if I remember and that gas killed most of the hostages, not the rebel small arms fire.  I know the official story is that Emma Solomon, a citizen of Spain and Kawa Zivistan a dual citizen of the USA and Trinidad, some allege, also Illubador lead some forty terrorists into a packed showing of a new Broadway play and held hostage some 850 people, mostly the Creme de la Creme of the lesser Oligarchy in New York and celebrities; and then coordinated seizures of buildings happened in Las Angeles, Atlanta, Houston and Chicago; and then there was 48 hours five site siege; and the terrorists called for an end to the three-year Separatist Wars and independence for 13 Soviets; 13% of USA’s territory, including all of the Puerto Rico sex colony. Then, blood, fire, gas, and then as if nothing had happened all. Just like a mass shooting or a bombing in Baghdad.

I ask myself, I ask you; what would you do? The world is falling apart, the wars are closer and closer to the top of the mountain; no one is safe. What is on this USB could be highly consequential, or could be a test or a setup. Plot upon sinister plot!

Anya Drovtich who I have met only once. How consequential is her role in the Resistance, how close she is to Zivistan. What should I do? We all know at the Box that the Secret Police are cunning; 17 whole agencies spying on us. You never know when you’re being filmed only when you’re maybe not being filmed; we carry these fucking phones everywhere like the mark of the beast.

In the woods I am free. There are of course cameras in the woods too, there are even cameras I have read inside dogs and cats. Even inside bees! It can make you a little insane to keep reading. There is no conspiracy your rational mind declares! There is no oligarchy! There are just the high, the middle, and the low classes; a product of their merit and work ethics. Whites are on top because they work hardest, we all know that! And life is certainly better in the United American States, which has always been the name of our country; than anywhere. Definitely better than that corrupted, vile violent mafia Federation of Russia. I do live dearly having studied there as an actor for a year. And evil red China with its pollution and one child-woman killing policies, which I do love dearly, my ex the love of actual life being half Russian, half Haan. I digress. Well, most of the proles have never left America. Most of the upper-middle class if they have left America they’ve gone to Europe or the tourist garrisons of the Caribbean. Or banal Costa Rica, the C.I.A. eco-colony-sugar brothel. Who can say they’ve seen the world! Who has laid eyes on the Salt Mines! On Kandahar! On the night train from Beijing to Moscow. Almost none, and thus they cannot believe the things the resistance says are happening, are even real.

One year, maybe it was Gregorian 2010 CE, Zivistan and I went to the Russian bathhouse on 88 Fulton and maybe he liked the Banya so much because we can talk freely. No phones, no hidden mikes, you’d hope, no cameras, you’d hope. Or at least the illusion of privacy in the stream and sweat. He took out an envelope and showed me pictures of the atrocities in Syria. He told me they were preparing to send fighters and medics. Would I go? Would I raise money? Well, I feigned enthusiasm but ultimately contributed nothing. Like when he’d asked me to carry out some operation on the trains they were planning. Well anyway, everyone they sent into Syria was killed. He was shortly after arrested and tortured for sedition. And by Fructidor 1st, Labor Day 2012 the Great Revolt had begun and the rebels soon took over, slash “liberated”Breukelen, Queens, and the rest.

History will absolve almost everyone! I have looked this man dead in the eyes in the steam of the baths and heard him say seditious things and never informed. I am still absolved. One day people may look back at their uprising and say they committed atrocities, they were extremist, anarchists even! They tipped the arch with their fuckery! If you showed me a video of Zivistan executing four men with a shotgun, like the one they played on TV. If you tried to tell me Zivistan was really a Persian sleeper; a Shi’a triple agent. Like they said on TV. I wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe he’s killed a single person. They just seek to ruin him so his words mean nothing.

I ask myself again what on this latest USB? A list of names? I could bring it to Haan Town, they would tell me for a pretty small price. Or maybe I’ll bring it to Anya Drovtich. Hand it over to the Banshee Underground to get it where it needs to go. Those people can move anything. 

I want this last thing to be clear. I am just an actor. Like Jews, we are not really supposed to be able to even vote. I am here to capture the human experience and make it relate. But the craft on stage is dying, it’s a bourgeoisie fringe event. That Hamilton brought back black face-white face, claiming to empower people of color, forgive me while I quietly vomit in my hands. I am making the last round of drinks on the Titanic, and knowing what I know, seeing what I saw; you cannot escape the coming war. Too much was accumulated for too long and now, well now I need another drink.

A New Orleans whiskey or a Mescal maybe. Something mega Smokey. I’ll just head to work and if I can think of a clever way to get Ms. Drovtich this token of our mutual friend’s appreciation, I’ll do it not for some cause, not because of the atrocities, not because of anything. Because if Kawa Zivistan is alive, if he’s passing women notes again. Well a loyal droog, and I think myself a loyal droog to him; I will pass his little note along.

I am not an old soul, but I do remember the past. I did write a book on time travel; I know that Kawa is a serious person who has suffered a lot. That he is also a mad man and possibly a terrorist, well cheers he is also my friend.

Comrade, I know you cannot hear me! I know it is not safe or prudent to hand Anya your calling card. I will either follow her after her shift ends on the ambulances, or I will call 911 to fake a medical emergency, have her take me, or some accomplice to the hospital and in the back of the ambulance where we believe no one is filming us; I will hand her the USB.

They used to say on the TV; ‘if you have nothing to hide why do you care if we watch over you’. Then there was fucking Snowden. Who defected to the Russians and testified that every single cell phone call, text, email, even ToR and snap chat was stored in National Security Agency server warehouses. Filed and linked to social security numbers. Even when Patriot Acts I, II and III came out; basically canceling out whatever ‘proud sacred rights’ the Americans thought they had; we said we were not terrorists! Who cares?! Brink booze and watch Sports! Free Netflix and Chill! They used to try and tell us on TV Democrats and Republicans were different somehow. Well, the things they say are different, but now both parties are suspended under the War Powers Act of 2077. 

Who’s the President of the U.A.S.? That’s what Anya the N.Y.F.D Paramedic will ask me or my accomplice. After our name and ‘if we know where we are and what day of the week is it. The orientation questions. If she asks me ‘who’s the President of the United States of America’, instead of asking me who is the President of the United American States; well that’s a resistance code.

Kawa told me in the letter, ‘When they take you, pretend you’re very, very drunk, just as the Russians trained us!’ 

I wonder if I will see my old supposedly dead friend ever back to happiness. What would make a man like him happy? A nice girl. A life on the beach? A fast car? A published book? Well everyone has a price do they not, we all have a price. Sadly, what I think will make my old friend happy, as happy as he can be at this juncture. “Falsify a medical emergency, avoid detection by using some proxy you seduce, and pass off that card to the underground. That would make me so happy.”

Well, he put as much in explicit pamphlet writing: “The aim of the entire Great Revolt, therefore, is to take full control of the means of human development at the most localized levels without using unnecessary violence to do so. Thus we harness our collective might to secure our human rights entitlements once and for all.” But there was something more to what he was doing than all this rhetoric. That’s why people listened to him and risked their lives for his various visions. Albeit sometimes very begrudgingly. 

One time he was very, very drunk. Or at least pretending to be so. And he told me about the alleged execution. The highly brutal execution of his first love and first rebel co-conspirator. Some woman named Emma he had known in the Jewish Military Colony when it existed. On the eve of the dark years.

Initially. I helped him because of that story alone. Not any political style idea. I was moved. By just how much they had taken from him and how far he was willing to go to hit them back. All the way up the mountain. Into every castle and high tower. Thus my ‘sympathy with the resistance’ was not based on an ‘imagined community’. It was based upon a basic human bond. Something inside me knew this man was going to take this all the way to the most secure Ziggurat, on the highest peak of the mountain, to go as far as he could. And we all need something to believe in.

SCENE SEVEN (VII)

“собраться с силами” 

Pronunciation: saBRAT’sa s SEElami 

Meaning: to regroup, to gather the strength, to get the nerve

Literal translation:  

“TO GATHER WITH FORCES”

There is a little Asian Tea Room above the Tavern. The infamous Bulgarian Tavern has roughly four doors in and three tunnels heading out in different directions. Also a roof hatch. You could completely miss the whole place if you weren’t looking for it. For the nine to perhaps thirteen million rats in their various stages of the great race to make it here in America: this city never fucking sleeps. 

It’s go-go-go-go-zoom-zoom! Rush-rush to rush! Slaves and Serfs to the cattle trains for wage service. It’s all an illusion, it’s fun here. With no currency, with endless wage work the place is bleak urban hell. It’s a filthy place except at the very center. “The fucking Isle of Man-no place to be a working man”. Getting in too early with red eyes and then leaving late with near nothing. Back on the multi-colored lettered cattle cars. The masters dangle enough to cover the ever rising rent and some groceries if you’re lucky. You’re so lucky to be here in this cage! The hope dies out. You whore yourself somehow. You have to! You drink more than you should. It feels worse if you’re not from here. Even the yellow cab driver has more education than most of the rest of the country-true story! The black sports utility vehicles, with tinted windows and important people that don’t want to look at you. The constant sirens. Everyone running somewhere not making eye contact. Always a fucking siren going off for some emergency that isn’t probably real. The city itself was built on the very top of the mountain. Its highest towers hold more rich and powerful people than anywhere on earth. Except maybe Moscow and London. This apple is all poison and rotten. The high octane hyper diversity is just a sex circus. Plus a racial death trap. Plus an ugly overcrowded sprawl more regularly breaking than making those who arrive from the interior or abroad. 

Nikolai Trickovitch is somewhat bleary-eyed. He stinks of cigarettes. Some cheap men’s fragrance from the tables of the black market and also often of a raw smoked Rum. The climate here is repressive towards the end of summer. Rum Barbancourt Nine Star on the rocks isn’t served in this part of town. So he brought his own bottle to the tavern. For their troubles were about to mount exponentially. Their bravest battle was about to arrive. 

‘Heroes will be separated from hooligans. The cowards from the brave. The sacred from the profane.’ Well anyway so said the voice of their leader Emma Solomon on the Fire Switch Radio.

Nikholai by very early association with the even more militant Kawa in the early days of the Resistance is part of the innermost core of the leadership of the Z.O.B. The clandestine network of insurgent cells and for a time the editor of its underground newspaper, ‘the Banshee News Service.’ He highly prefers conducting his revolutionary duties from the computer of his uptown Penthouse. Moving things about the internet, correcting pamphlets and public movement speeches Kawa and their comrades give in soap box parks and on the trains. Nikh was persuaded to manage the logistics for the very First Haiti Operation.  He did pretty well. Only two had gotten killed. He was then later persuaded to manage ground logistics in Port-Au-Prince for the expeditionary forces. Still, later, he joined the medical guerrillas in their ill-fated expedition into Gran Colombia. Where most of the partisans were wiped out and he barely survived the long walk home. But, he has only so much willpower to back up such walk and warfare.

‘I might need yet another drink!’, thinks Trickovitch. He knows it will be a long meeting and the AC won’t work well in the private upper clubhouse. The night is really just getting started work-wise even though it’s past 4 am. The curfew in place for another 3 hours. They’re erring toward minimal street traffic, but even the rats and pigeons here work in shifts. Well, that same night Nicholai Trickovitch put together a little squad to do, “another messy little big job.” There were big jobs and little jobs. There were protracted campaigns that took many years. Some jobs where social engineering was needed. Others where brute force was the best approach. A job that has a lot of force commitment is called ‘an Operation’. Several coordinated large-scale operations are dubbed a ‘Campaign’.

Nikh has to get better buy-in. No one is ever fully in charge of the structure. Now, outside Newyorkgrad, ‘the Resistance’ gets very eclectic with who is involved. It would be inaccurate to say anyone could possibly ever lead it. It is bad in NewYork where well over 70% of the population wasn’t even born here. A lot of players. They all “Relied heavily on Neg, Blan, and Gray magic to keep this whole thing together,” as Nicholai was fond of saying, “But in New York Fucking City, we still do things the old fashioned way. By having a real tight crew.”

Based on the Kurdish origin of their military doctrineTheir “crew” was typically organized into a “Kol” or ‘section’ of 7 to 10 gender-mixed fighters. Two or three ‘Kols’ were organized into a “Takim” or ‘squad’ of up to 30 people. 2 Takims make up a “Tabor” fighting group or “Platoon” of 40 women and men. It had been some time since the Z.O.B. deployed a defense structure of any larger size inside the country.  

For many, many years Newyorkgrad was not ‘the old Newyorkgrad’ that so many who had never visited imagined it to be based on movies and television. In the dead of something, where night creeps toward dusk, around a table on the fourth floor of 113 Ludlow Street, they meet. That is to say, the restaurant is immediately above the Mehanata Tavern. A little talk is underway, a briefing. Maybe also something of a sales pitch. 

“There are forty elected leaders of the Z.O.B,” Trickovitch explains, “Two have absolutely been disappeared. We don’t fill their seats, but we consider them probably, most likely dead. One, she is living in a submarine somewhere hidden. Two are sleeping. That’s a polite way of saying: they were grabbed off the street by the secret police and thrown in a filtration camp and very badly tortured beyond sanity or recognition. Most of them kill themselves sometime after. That means at any given period thirty five Cadro are left. Left in charge of all the cells in the division called the Greater Newyorkgrad Oblast.”

The table is wooden and plates of tapas have all been cleared. Nobody got in from the street. They got in from the various tunnels. It’s time for black tea.

“Let me tell you how this is gonna go down,” says Nikh to his fellow partisans which include the tall well-polished Jamaican Gangster Mickhi Dbrisk. He is wearing a slightly baggy black suit, with a black inner vest with no tie after coming from work at a previous engagement. Where girls were still jiggling. 

Mara Fitzduff O’Sage is a half pint Fenian. Barely ever smiles. A dirty blonde rebel famous for her firebrand speeches on the Fire Switch Radio. Also present is Rafael Ernesto Contreras, the Peruvian disk jockey. A photographer too. Retired child soldier and lesser officer of a defunct guerrilla band in the Arequipa Province. The fifth member of this ad-hoc unit is Mr. Siegfried Sassoon. He speaks very well with great emotion in his face. He should be expected to as he is an actor classically trained in Moscow. He too is just getting off work as a bartender at a flashy supper club up the street called the Red Fox Box. A dashing swaggerous man of Cuban descent. The sixth man in this last minute, late night call up was the light skinned Haitian smooth criminal Watson Entwissle. The seventh at the table wasn’t made yet. A smooth young blood from East New York. His name is Joshua Hunter. Has just okay references and they are going to test him out. Could be a plant. A follow follow man. A live snitch.

Watson is looking pretty pissed tonight. You can always tell when he’s pissed, because he doesn’t pay attention at all. Speaks incredibly in the third person. It’s based anyway on all this being way past midnight. That and he’s gonna have to kill soon. He left his favorite sexy chocolate in bed in Yonkers for this very tedious bullshit of a meeting. Oui! He doesn’t get to see his new old lady enough. She lives in Boston. Ms. Charlotte from Kampala, Uganda. A real high class, class act.

In the often confusing and albeit vaguely disjointed chain of command Mara, Watson, Mickhi and Nicholai are all title holding inner party leadership. Only one is from the inner nine of forty. Siegfried Sassoon, Hunter and Raphael were called in as Hevals. Though technically Hunter was not even a ‘provisional member’. Hasn’t made rank or been sworn in. Not written in the book of life. But they were told he can do the good work by Dbrisk. He unfolds a map.

“The Labor Day weekend begins in 72 hours and you all know what’s coming,” explains Mickhi, “The West Indian Day Parade ain’t heading south at the Grand Army Plaza. Oh no, they’re gonna head north right over the bridges and attempt to occupy the mostly empty City on Isle of Mann.”

Everybody except young Joshua Hunter knows that already. They are gonna stick Hunter with Watson and Watson will keep him working this weekend until he is trust-able, or dead. They are all aware of the score. 

“As most of us know this revolt is a three stage campaign in Newyorkgrad is being coordinated mostly by the Pan-Africanists, the Garveyites, the B/N.L.M.M., some of the liberal and radical medical trade unions, the I.W.W. of course, the Shi’a Muslims, the Occupiers, the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, the various affiliated radical student movements in C.U.N.Y., the 1199 Trade Union, as well as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and of course, our faction Uhuru and greater we,” explains Mickhi, “Namely the Brotherhood and the Banshee Group.”

“The dry runs were the messy occupations on Wall Street and around the country last year to assess the state defenses. Phase Two is Labor Day where we liberate Breuklyn, the Bronks and Queens. Phase three will be to hold ground and liberate ‘the City’ just before New Year’s Eve,” he continues, “The goal is to declare a whole series of confederated cantons up and down the east coast. Hunker down and defend them from federal counter-assault.” 

“Hectic shit,” mutters Raphael.

“Our role then is quite basic in phase two,” explains Nikholai Trickovitch, who knew indeed that the ‘General Rising’ was close in coming, but not actually a mere five days away.

“We all know what was revealed about the C.D.C. conspiracy. The h1n1, AIDS-HIV, the Malaria, the Chikungunya, and of course Ebola. We’ve all seen the damn reports. The documentation has been widely circulated and now our people are really ready for the fight. Enough outrages have occurred to spark something bigger than riots. The ‘Stop and Frisk’, the weekly shootings, the manufactured Fars and Illubabor war, conscription, and the new walking police drones of course. This time almost everyone expects death camps and prolonged urban warfare, not Capoeira,” Mickhi explains.

“The Z.O.B. has called up eight hundred light infantry organized into 20 Tabors. Snipers, Combat medics, anti-drone rocketeers, and agitation propaganda officers will all support the needs of the parade redirection. Our convoy of marauders. They will be attached to each major island band truck. 40 to 80 fighters per band. Each truck has been outfitted with bulletproof siding and once we pop off we’re going to mount PKM machine guns to the tops.” 

Trickovitch unfolds a layover diagram that goes over the map Dbrisk brought.

“Flying columns are on the ready in all five boroughs. Though we do not expect much action on Monday in Staten Isle, Queens or the Bronks,” says Nikh, “An additional three hundred and forty women and men will support the A.B.C.- Occupier mass actions in the Financial District as well as set up some casualty collection points in Brooklyn and Isle of Mann.” 

He points down to some markings on the map.

“Ecoute Moi (Listen!)”, declares Watson, “Watson knows all of this shit. Done known the plan for weeks. So brother please come to the conclusion so I can get Bronks bound with this new jack,” says Watson, “he can wash my damn car before we all die in the coming melee.”

“Watson, we just need this young blood briefed. You can get out the door in fifty minutes,” Mickhi tells him. Used to his friend’s way of being.

“Watson needs this to happen in far less minutes,” he replies with a smug grin.

“As usual,” continues Mickhi, “The two Haitian Convoys will bring up the middle and the rear. Unknown to the City parade organizers. And also unknown hopefully to the police intelligence forces that there are actually three Haitian bands this year of 10,000 masqueraders a piece. About ¾ up the route the Middle Convoy which is gonna be twice as big will initiate the raid across the Grand Army Plaza and then fight their way up Flatbush hopefully with the people behind us. That is when the uprising will begin.”

“What are our precise goals tonight, then please” inquires Siegfried Sassoon. Comrade Heval Siggy never goes to that many meetings. He never votes in Otriad elections except with his feet for what Kawa is drumming up. When Kawa is leading he steps back and when Kawa is sleeping he steps up. He did however vote for keeping Kawa asleep after ‘the last Ayiti job’ when the Hospitaliers took him very hard. Kawa is a serious knock-around guy; the best estimates think he’s been taken to the camps over twenty one times. About three years’ worth of his fucking life. Siggy, like Watson, does jobs not meetings. Neither ever-ever tries to be at these meetings. Rarely even the candlelight salons out in Breukelen. Which are sometimes cute. But often pretty fucking low level and boring.

“We’re gonna install Fire Station Transmitters on four very, very tall structures,” says Mara Fitzduff. Mara has over the years been the club’s ‘Chief of Staff’, worked in the propaganda bureau, in the academy on the ‘Science of Women’, and done much of the fundraising for the past ten years. It chewed her up badly. She’s not always officially even in the Z.O.B., but she is always very dependable. She has no salty broag. She’s got one kid with a soldier who ran off somewhere. Another kid with the Russian-Ivory loan shark Donny Gold who Kawa and Nikholai went to high school with ‘way back in the day’. So in that regard, she’s double tied down.

“Then Monday we’re gonna deploy some troops and blow up some infrastructure,” says Dbrisk. 

“Where we doing all that on Labor Day weekend?” asks Joshua.

“A lot of what-ifs,” Dbrisk replies, “But, focused on likely scenarios. We expect the initial uprising to punch through police lines and make it as far as downtown Breuklyn before it’s liquidated, pacified by drones and E.S.U. machine-gun nests.”

“So you don’t even expect us to make it into the City,” Hunter asks them.

“In short. No. It’s probably gonna turn into a bloodbath,” says Nicholai, “But getting into the city on Monday is not really the goal. While the Labor Day Parade gets routed toward Bridges up Flatbush Ave the Anarchists and students are going to try and storm the trading floors on Wall Street itself. To facilitate operation we’re gonna again have embedded fighters and medics, less but still 4 tabors. We’re gonna blow some things up to confuse the N.Y.P.D. efforts to guess what we’re really doing. Such as four ConEd stations and the two big N.S.A. biometrics and data warehouses.”

“What about the E.M.P.?”

“That’s just to terrorize them,” states Mara.    

“Hitting the Consolidated Edison building puts most of Manhattan in the dark anyway” says Mickhi Dbrisk, who has been the club’s Operation’s Chief since nearly the very beginning. Nikholai holds the official position of Logistics Coordinator, but he’s more hands on than many before or after him as a good logistic fixer should be. He’s the one who arranges a lot of the supply raids and bombing targets. Now that Kawa lives in a dream or a nightmare.

“The fire switch transmitters will override both the police and commercial radio system and turn whatever frequencies we feel like into dancehall tunes or rebel broadcast stations. We need them well hidden and we need them as high as possible,” explains Mara, “so we can keep broadcasting when they shut the internet down again.”

“We’ve gotten the four spots picked out well enough,” Nicholai explains, “each transmitter is about the size of a football. Pretty much get it high up, turn it on. We can transmit the Fire-Switch-Station over Wi-Fi from the hardware down in the Wild West Indies. Downstairs at coat check, there are silenced Macro-Uzi blasters with rubber knock-down rounds and also live ammunition. If you must.  There are iridium phones, hand radios, the transmitters, and of course flicker masks. One for each team,” Mara says.

She continues, “When we conclude here you buddy up and head to the staging points on thee hand notes here. Get in doors before dawn. In about two hours. You wake up again when it’s dark again. One team per location. Before you surface again, your masks go on to obscure your faces, before you head to staging. At staging and leaving staging. Those masks don’t come off in elevators, in lobbies, on streets anywhere near that building. The cameras are everywhere, as you know. You’ll live, or die or get tortured by that very mask. Each team has a high-rise structure. How you get on top of it, well each of your team leads knows that route. You will get up on the roof and turn on the transmitters.” 

“Try to hide them somewhere,” Nicholai mentions. Don’t just leave them lying around, they’re booby-trapped anyway. Whoever tries to turn them off will is gonna lose their arms and part of their face,” says Mara.

“Watson you’ll take Hunter with you to Manhattan North staging,” explains Nikh, “Heval Siggy and your crew you’re setting up downtown. Jon Denby and I will set up in Manhattan Central. Raphael and the Queens-bound crew will be setting up the Long Island City installation which is quite tricky because there’s nothing residential in the old CITICorp building so we’ll have to social engineer it. Dbrisk and your crew will go after the High tower on Atlantic Junction Downtown Brooklyn also with the same predicament.”

Mara continues “Once you get to the safe houses you’re staying at feel free to relax and take a very long nap. You’ve all been up for weeks. Some of you all month. This doesn’t have to happen at once or tomorrow. It just has to happen before we blow up the power stations on Monday morning. So enjoy, thank g-o-d it’s just Tuesday” grins Mara Fitzduff. 

“We’re working out of the apartment brothels yet again?” asks Raphael. The joy in his voice is real for he so loves the Manhattan apartment brothels. You can’t properly afford them as an internationalist Disk Jockey.

“We need these devices set up real high,” says Mara, “If we can knock out their power grid and maintain alternative systems of communications we’re keeping to our end of the mutual aid agreement with the Garveyite Movement, Uhuru, and the ABC; tip our spear. Without blowing our arsenal and fighters prematurely,” she says, “as you all know this is phase two of three. We’re only fully mobilizing forces and taking this national if we manage to take the City or if we can hold Breuklyn longer than a month. Otherwise, it’s the 1st Nivôse.”

“Joshua, so you gonna ride with us on this?” Watson asks him.

“Yeah one hundred percent in,” the kid replies.

Mickhi Dbrisk chuckles inside.   

“The four transmitters set us up to broadcast the good word from Ayiti. They allow us to speak to the people. We expect the masqueraders and Uhuru light infantry tabors to reach Grand Army Plaza around 11 am and begin the redirection maneuver toward the bridges by noon. As soon as we get confirmation from our people on the ground, then we are going to blow the Consolidated Edison power stations, the N.S.A. Data aggregation depots and finally, we will E.M.P. Police Plaza One and all of the district financial at noon thirty. Put the whole fucking city in the dark. In coordination with the Anarchist Black Cross who will simultaneously be leading the assault on Wall Street. If they manage to breach and hold. Which is a big if. Well, we push the spear deep in the beast as we can.“ 

“If the Garveyites and Uhuru are not all gunned down before they even reach the bridges,” says Watson.

Mara says, “Another real big fucking if.” 

Watson just watches the size of the pupils on young Joshua Hunter, watches him breathe, and counts the breaths. Because all of this is one big act of science fiction. One big feigning maneuver. Joshua Hunter from East New York is an informant. A police spy. None of the locations and targets being talked about are real. The Department of Homeland Security knows about the Labor Day Uprising and so do the police. They know about the A.B.C. Wall Street take over march. They know just about everything because they have informants in all of the groups and factions except the Z.O.B. Mara and Anya have been feeding loads of misinformation for months about what will happen on Monday and where. There will be an uprising in Brooklyn. There will be a coordinated attempt to re-occupy Wall Street. There will be a non-stop Fire Switch Pirate broadcast of the New Social Gospel. There will be bombs going off in power plants, data aggregation depots, and a black-out downtown with or without the use of the Electromagnetic Pulse Ordinance built by sympathizers in Stony Brook. But this is still all one big, bloody feigning operation because the revolution will actually begin until 1^st Nivose. Also called the Gregorian New Year’s Eve of 2012. This is all still a drill.   

“A really big Monday,” says Michkai Dbrisk, “I’ll be on the Parkway early with Watson and the rest of the Tabor.”  

Mara says, “All of you are in the trenches and I’m running the dispatch with Anya out of a secure location in the deep Bronks. Things are going to pop the hell off. We’ll do the best we can to keep up with impossible expectations, any questions?”

No one has any. Except for Joshua.

“Where did ya’ll get them E.M.P. from?”

“Josh. That’s not a very adult question,” says Mara.

“So we just gonna done black out downtown and hit from two sides?” he asks them.

“Yessir,” says Watson, who honestly just wants to get back to Yonkers. 

“I love centralized democracy,” exclaims Mara, “All of you please grab your gear at coat check and get out via the tunnels you came in on,” Mara tells them, “Good luck. Don’t get needlessly killed this weekend. Shahid Namaran!”

Things were about to go smash bang! Then fully explode. In tall flickering flames and death in the night. To the sweet blaring tunes of the Wild West Indies.

SCENE SIX (VI)

“уходить с головой”

Pronunciation: uhaDIT’ s galaVOY  Meaning: to be fully engrossed/immersed (in something) Literal translation: 

“TO LEAVE WITH THE HEAD”

Set in a Tavern on Ludlow Street. The Island of the Well Hatted Man also called the “Isle of Man”, or once “Manhattan” has a place to drink just about every ten paces. Libation prices vary radically from palace to place. Based on who the owners want inside at what price point of downtime. What class of a man, what tier of society, and so forth. Some several hundred years ago the races were allowed to mix, it ended in a disaster. As it says in several chapters of one’s school book for the under 30% of the nation that has access to a college degree of any kind. The staff at the tavern doesn’t care how fucking educated you are. Or even if you pay cash or card, stones or fingers. They only care about the things you can’t see.

You wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it. The entrance isn’t loud and the clamor inside is well insulated by its system of layers. The Lower East Side area is a drinking dancing seven-day-a-week shit show anyway for university students and the children of the interior provinces upper-middle classes. Mehanata is also the club of choice for New York’s newly arrived undocumented immigrants from South America, Central America, and the former Soviet Union. You’d only be looking for it if someone told you about it. Perhaps you’d hate them for it later, but very few people are not amused the very first time. There never is just a first time. But, in the New York wilderness, a tavern of eclectic wilding foreigners and untamed domestic people dancing to the tunes of South America, the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, and the Roma can draw to it both angels and demons by word of mouth. Since 2000 it has been surviving pogroms, police raids, and venue changes via fire. The police department is doing everything in their human power from keeping the Breukelen Okrug location from obtaining a liquor license. Sasho has been trying to open it for three or four years it seems. Who is Sasho? He’s of course the boss. Of course a rule of the roof; for every boss, there must be an underboss’. 

Misha, the Bulgarian diamond dealer speaks with his hands: 

“It is rumored that there is a vast tunnel system running from under the City to multiple places unknown in the interior,” states wild-haired Misha to a group of young Shqiptarëti toughs outside. 

In the Bulgarian language, the word for tavern is “Mehanata”. This is also the name of a tavern that was once on Canal Street but now is on Ludlow Street. Though officially not open for some time since the great pandemic. Yet, business still is being done Pandemic or no pandemic, legal or quasi-legal or extralegal? Many things done here are not legal at all. The Tavern is open for business officially only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Though typically and unofficially there are sometimes “underground lap dancing parties” happening very late Wednesday night in the basement’s Vodka cellar.  The lights are kept dim no matter what happens here. One needs that, that ambiance if you will hide subtle stains. From varying fluids. 

You can dance all night if you have to, but eventually, someone has to herd the cats out the door and hide the bodies on the floor. The Mehanata Social Club is tucked away discreetly on 113 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This is their second location. Numerous police raids, intrusive state inspections, and finally a full-blown raid which then transformed into a brawling multiblock melee and succeeded in burning to the very ground the original location on Canal and Broadway. In a very ugly incident that took place in 2005 the lights of the “Bulgarian Bar and Cultural Society” briefly went out. 

The new Ludlow location is about ten times the size spread over three levels. Surely it will not be the final location. “Given the tumultuous nature of the existing times.” Sasho the owner has already begun planning an even larger Breuklyn based location, a whore house-themed resort in Kyiv or Beirut with the same name; Mehanta” and also maybe a School for Alcoholism in the crisp mountain foothills of upstate New York highlands.

At such an infamous establishment such as this one ought to always know the names of the men standing guard. Or the various women shaking and pouring the drinks. Or the little indigenous people collecting bags and coats. Most importantly you ought to be “cautious of the seductive forces marshaled via awkwardly inexpensive liquor and the black magic to lead you to things you ought not to be playing around with.” Such as foreign persons desperately, self-compromisingly in need of valid papers. Or creatures, yes I said it; creatures! That drink blood. “Or war like Shqiptarëtis.”

There are strange signs all over the walls warning the guests to be attentive. ‘Anything not tied down will be carried away into the night.’ Your bags, your two souls, and virginities. Of nearly every single kind of stealable thing. Come to think of it, there are such overt signs hanging everywhere! Literal and figurative signs. One claims “three teeth are needed for the entry”. One says anything not checked will be stolen. One says “get naked get a shot, get fucked on the bar, win a bottle”. That is hardly a bluff, but the bottles given out for that are never top-shelf stuff. 

It’s a ‘Gypsy Bar’, they claim to the public which sometimes romanticizes Gypsies, but often does not. But Gypsy’s all steal. Gypsy’s will trick you with music and some dance, lure you for tarot cards and then steal your internal organs and you will wake up in an ice bath in Bratislava missing some elements internally, then die of blood loss. The name of this place literally means ‘the Tavern’ in Bulgarian. It lives up to that designation splendidly.

There are three floors to the Tavern. The website extols patrons to “meet their future green card holding spouse.” There is live Mestizo music. Live fire juggling. Bulgarian contortionists on Thursday alongside Bordel Dali. Rafael and his business comrade Georgie who is from Bucharest, Romania. Or maybe he just says that knowing no Americans know any other cities there. 

“But I’m not freaking Gypsy!” he declares. He’s getting a Ph.D. in Computer science. His specialization, the tracking of petrol futures purchasing and predicting in relation to major airlines. The cast of characters around here boggles the mind.

The club has the look of a vast lawless pirate ship or a wilderness brothel. It is sometimes dim red and under the cloth tarps of the upper galley level which looks down with little tables on the dance floor. The main floor has a dance floor, a bar, and a kitchen. The downstairs has stripper poles, blue light, a bar, and an Ice Cage. 

The Ice Cage has bottles of wall-to-wall Vodka, which is all the same Vodka, but when people pay forty Americans to enter the cage and slam that wall to wall Vodka orgy in Soviet officer uniforms; they don’t notice. Vodka drinkers of repute, do not go in the Ice Cage, which also sits above a hatch to the abandoned railways under lower Manhattan. So one can walk or take a private train to Breukelen or JerseyCityGrad. That is also why the place is only officially open Thursday through Saturday, to facilitate that kind of high level traffic.

The waitresses and bartenders are skinny or shapely. All Post-Soviet Bucharest or ‘Sophia girls’ just arrived recently though generally well educated and for now, un-indentured. Calling themselves Sofia. Some claim they are ‘from Moscow’. But they are not from Moscow at all. They are all from shitty little Eastern European towns no one has ever heard of. They mostly don’t stay long and the reason for that is partly because of the mental and physical demands of the work and because their boss is the devil himself. The club is only open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Things that go on during the week here are private and mostly didn’t even ever happen. There are private parties in the basement you’d do well not to crash unexpectedly or uninvited. Like the one on Wednesdays which is sort of high stakes a gang bang contest. There have been cockfights, dog fights, and also bear fights. But the biggest cash prizes generally are for bear vs. human fights and or human versus human bare-knuckle boxing to the death fights. There are a lot of meetings happening upstairs right before the place fills up in Eastern European languages that you’d do well not to hear.  The musical talent is highly varied. Normally three or four live acts a night on Friday and Saturday. A lot of live horns. There’s an anesthetic of “transcontinental bacchanalia ”. Or so says the liberal elitist Newyorkgrad Times. 

The booking agent for musical talent is petite and elegant Viktoria Lynch often wearing the hat of a Soviet officer, the shoulder-length locks of her hair falling over well old-fashioned skirts or flowing dresses. She was born in the Catskills, but has recently gotten her New Yorker residency card much to her delight; eight years later. The primary live acts are variants of Cumbia, Gypsy Jazz, some Peruvian Ska, and Balkan beatboxing, mostly. Roma meets Latin American for the most part. You get dancehall and reggae tone periodically from the Selectors, but for the most part ‘the brothers’ stay out of the place. The doughty wine happens, but as international, as everything remains, there are almost never any black people at Mehanata. Which no one has a problem with except maybe Kawa Zivistan who keeps bringing them there? But, they have one drink and politely leave after meetings. For some reason, the charms of the venue are lost on the brothers. One can blame magic, vibes, taste or structural racism, or all of them combined.

Since 2001 the Z.O.B. has made Mehanata its unofficial field office and also its social club. It’s a meeting spot and a drinking spot. Sasho allows all kinds of people to meet under his roof and being there has connected the movement to darker things. There is a power the club has to draw in the very worst and best of people. Mehanata is thus a fitting place for the Z.O.B. leaders to draw towards since many of the group are hardly saints. Its members are generally able to lump into general categories such as “ambulance workers”, “Party people”, “black market entrepreneurs”, “confidence criminals”, garden variety “sex workers”, and also some “post-leftist type radicals”. But in America, you can say you are whatever you want and no one even knows what you really mean. Sometimes a cadre, pronounced ‘Cadro’ is two or more of those things. A Cadro means a movement woman or man, to the very core. Zealots. Lifers to the end. Kitsuniim. Everything a Cadro can own can fit in one small bag. Party people as it were. The people that carry, the people that are addicted to the struggle.

Salsa, Dancehall, Balkan Beats, Bachata, Reggaeton, even the Tango, Cumbia, sometimes even a little Zouk are played by the various selectors, but ‘the brothers’ always immediately depart when the meetings are over. No one can say exactly why they don’t like the place, but they really don’t. it could just be that Eastern Europeans are their own type of ugly racist after all. But as it is a central location for all five boroughs, it’s remained an unchallenged haunt. It checks all the boxes one needs for not asking any questions or spending a lot on holding a meeting. The place has way more atmosphere than an Irish pub anyway.

Sasho and Kawa allegedly go all the way back to 2001 Gregorian, but they don’t always remember or like to talk about all the events in between. 

The most popular disk jockeys are Raphael Contreras Lynch also called Selector Rafflex and Georgie from Bucharest also called Selector Mishto. As stated Romanian but “not a fucking Gypsy”. Recently booked is the bearded, crazy-eyed Serb Adrian Jankovitch. The most famous of the current bartenders is Moxy Martina Hella Dubreskaya. She has been here a good deal longer than the others. A black-haired Bulgarian journalist, music blogger, and BDSM enthusiast. She has the special constitution that a bartender needs to work the shit show around here longer than a month. Though many suspect she will quit soon. Perhaps go into Real Estate. Martina smiles at everyone in ravishing hate. She is technically speaking the first person to publish the work of Kawa Zivistan by putting his sad poems on her website. She regrets that she encourages him, but secretly likes some of his work.

Outside and inside is James O’Burns the feisty retired Fenian cop on ¾’s pension. They call him James White because he’s white. After his ACL was torn chasing down a perp he retired to bouncer work. His partner is James Behemoth Brown Pererez a smart-talking, burly Mestizo from the Bronx. They call him James Brown because he’s Mestizo. Always outside is Slavi the stone-faced brother of Sasho, but no one trusts they’re actually brothers. Until sneaking a sly grin the Bulgarian strong man collects people’s papers, scans their IDs, and directs them to be retina scanned via this Illubadori device at the door which then biometrics all the guests.

 Slavi collects the cash or directs drunk patrons to use the external ATM which charges an ultra-extortionist ten dollar service fee, almost the highest in New York actually. The irregular admission charge never gets a smile, because Slavi doesn’t charge people he knows in money. Then he sneaks a sly happy grin, has a quick smoke, and sometimes, only sometimes asks people for money to come inside wearing a black Soviet wolf fur ushanka hat except during the summer. 

You should pay cash upfront for everything. Unless you’re a card-carrying regular. Giving them your credit card is simply a horrible idea. It means you’ll just keep drinking and very often, leave without your card. James White and James Brown are sometimes easy-going on admission for just about anyone not overweight and female. The regulars never pay. The various mob tough guys never pay. The Z.O.B. members never ever pay. Sexy young girls never ever have to pay. The endless Korean bachelorette parties never pay except to ride the Gypsy Bus. The guests of regulars, mobsters, musicians, D.J.s, rebels, and girlfriends of friends never pay. It’s between 15-40 dollars though if you’re just sort of showing up. Except on Thursday when everyone is in for free.

James White, James Brown, and grim stone faced Slavi sometimes have to get fierce quick to squash the brawls which happen, generally around 02:00 AM, generally instigated by the Shqiptarëtis, but often before and after. They can’t seem to keep the Shqiptarëtis from breaking people’s faces over the most stupid of things. But that’s part of their cultural charm, some say. Well anyway they always settle their debts.

Justin Toomey O’Azzello is the General Manager. He is a full-blood Fenian and has ‘wandering hands’ some women say. He is quite jovial and likes to tell elaborate stories about his days in the Air Force flying bombing missions over former Yugoslavia. He blames his flirtations with alcoholism over the years on bombing runs he inflicted over Bosnia. But Justin was never in the air force or ever in Bosnia. His hands do wander though. Recently he has taken up painting. Some say he’s Sasho’s top Capo. Misha is too much a playboy to really be a useful enforcer. He’s just not really violent enough for it.

The owner of this place is a fearsome, allegedly Bulgarian, yet likely at least half Ukrainian Ivory named Sasho, but his real name is Alexander Dmitrievich Perchevney. He was born in Kyiv, then Kiev. He lived in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, and later moved to Sophia, Bulgaria before arriving here in America in 1992. He used to be a type of advanced dentist. He used to be a person of real note and importance in the now-defunct U.S.S.R., in the Inner Party. He thus has something of a soft spot for revolutionists. The debaucheries of fallen men too. As well as a hard spot for undocumented women of theater. Misha Kishbivalli, the long-haired millionaire playboy from Georgia also is his silent partner. No one ever knows or asks what Misha does for a living. But the answer is actually blood diamonds. The Mehanata “cooks” are all from the tropic of Capricorn but nothing is ever very good to eat except the beet soup or the Bulgarian salad; cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and pepper, and some strange white cheese. The feta cheese over fries is pretty safe too. Some type of Borscht which is rumored to sometimes contain menstrual blood. The pork dishes are outright made of the ground-up parts of poor unfortunate souls that used to be people. 

Sasho’s wife Tanya isn’t the cook anymore. It’s always undocumented Mexicans Sasho brings on over the years through ‘the under-tunnels’. They say the Breuklien venue, when it opens, will have ‘traditional Bulgarian food’, but no one knows what that means exactly. Tanya is not a vindictive person, but she cannot stand this ‘so-called Kawa Zivistan’. There is a very valid reason for that contempt, beyond him being something of a troublemaker. They have a history in other lives.

“Stop cooking mother fucking people and maybe more people would eat here,” Kawa once suggested, looking sullen. Seated at the bar.

“Stop being a fucking Communist, Blyat! And maybe, one day. Perhaps Daria can consider dating you, yet again, if you weren’t just so crazed and poltical!” was Tanya’s response.

“Democratic Confederalist!” Kawa replies, “Communism is so 1984!”

Some nights, Misha Kishbivalli pontificates outside of the club with clearly manic eyes: 

“An American engineered mega tunnel system runs under the entire country in case of insurgency, general emergency or nuclear winter.” 

The traffic around here is always hard to predict. 

“Of course I’ve been to camps,” Misha exclaims, ‘let me tell you, one time I followed the tunnels all the way back to Bulgaria!’

There are tall glass pitchers of apple cider ginger vodka that sit atop the bar, sitting there for HaShem only knows how long. There is a sign informing people that “get naked get a shot, get fucked win a bottle” and people seem to win all the time. Also, the rule that patrons ‘must have at least three teeth to enter the establishment’, is untrue. You just need to have cash money. Preferably American type. Or be vouched for by a regular. But, things are always pretty fucking negotiable.

The music is playing loud at the Mehanata Social Club where Daria Andreavna makes eyes. She then orders a Vodka-based energy drink. She then slides up to Kawa at the bar. He is wearing a slightly baggy black suit with a vest with lots of pockets this time. A week since his death, no one acknowledges or recognizes either of them.

“Well then. I thought you were dead,” Kawa exclaims.

“Martyrs never die, am I right?” Daria replies and then she winks.

“It seems that we have found each other yet again,” she then whispers.

“You are completely misbehaved I dare tell you,” he says, “you got us both killed yet again. This time for true blue bullshit.”

“I was bad. Bored? Rude should I say? I am told. The other night, I insulted your hospitality, very greatly.”

“That you certainly did.”

“What are you drinking Tovarish?” she asks with a smile.

“Astika,” he replies. The Bulgarian beer that is never in stock. It hasn’t been in stock since 2001. But he always asks for it. Knowing they one squirreled away somewhere.

Daria catches Martina’s attention and gets him his special drink. Martina winks at her. ‘Good work you little whore’, Martina thinks in Bulgarian. One man’s hot commodity. Still is the cheapest drink in the whole damn house. 

“So,” Daria whispers again, “Cheers. I have no memory of anything last weekend. Forgive me for that. I don’t even know what I did. Or didn’t do. Might have done? Fuck it. Cheers.”

“So you remember nothing more?” 

She just gives him a coy but devilish smirk. And she shakes her head.

“I drink a lot for fun. I don’t always remember my Friday or my Saturday nights. Outside work, where I also drink, the week gets interrupted by the school, and then I party hard on the days off. I was told I was really bad to you. So, I’m sorry. For the being of bad. What are you really drinking? This is our custom. Astika is total shit,” she says.

“Nothing? No single recollection?”

“No nothing at all. Oh, okay,” she smiles at him, “you were wearing a suit that’s a different color from the suit you’re wearing now. This I remember for sure.”

Kawa is now in a black suit. The night she almost killed them last it was white linen. It’s almost always a pretty cheap party style suit. Or a navy blue uniform.

“You never acted all that drunkenly. You were calm and in control throughout, your, shall I say outbursts. My friends have told me that it’s too late to stop your vodka calamities from unfolding sometimes. But, you nearly killed us. And you bit me,” he says, showing her the red ring around his index left finger.

“Well we all have our demons in there, don’t we? I’m good at drinking. Until I sometimes fall down. I fell down those steps one night,” she says pointing to a long downstairs plummet into the downstairs floor where the Ice Cage is hidden.

The Ice Cage is a freezer box in the basement where people pay forty ahead to slam wall to wall cheap vodka over a period of two minutes. It never ends well for those who get in that cage. There is a perilous flight of stairs down to the basement where they keep the stripper poles and the blue-lit fuck cage by a second bar and dance floor.

“That looks like it could have hurt,” he replies, “if you remembered it”.

“I don’t remember it,” she smiles wide and seductively.

But that’s a silly thing to say. Seductively. Dasha is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Her proclivity for homicide aside, she is fascinating. Describing just how beautiful she is almost doesn’t fit in a later play he could end up writing. Her golden locks are like a lioness. Her eyes are capable of quick swing between fierce, curious, and loving. She loves to hear men say it, how beautiful she is, but beauty isn’t where a man falls from when he falls from the heart not the groin. Beauty is a thing of lust. It has no bearing on love when that love is real love and not lust with imagined feelings. Love is energy, a wave crashing over you. Kawa has drowned several times before. He’d be very careful to use the word again. In that regard, he is reckless to no end. He feels an attraction and can’t comprehend it, it must be love. The previous formula for the same emotion dictated that whatever woman resisted his affections the most adamantly and then let down her guard to an elegant seduction of deeds and art, must be love. There were loves at first sight, or interaction as well as friendships that became romances and he was unafraid to say the words again. The words often came out without his permission. 

Over time several women had accused him of bastardizing the loaded phrase via serial usage. There were over a dozen women he’d uttered it to over the course of his twenty-eight some years. Generally after the conquest of kisses, but to a couple stupidly even before. 

They were all very different women of course and they all brought out very different rolls to his emotional dice. Side to his coin being a limited idiom. Supposedly in popular fiction man or woman is supposed to have only one true love in a lifetime, to marry them or be parted from them tragically. So Kawa was working hard by that standard, which truly in real life can never be that simple, that limited. 

“You’re really something to write home about,” Kawa says.

“Absolutely I am. And I never say sorry to men, but Rafael said he would cancel his friendship with me if I didn’t say a true sorry to you. Apparently, I underestimated that you are the favorite host. The dashing revolutionary saint. The darling also of the owner. The grandeismo! Wait, I’m not sure what that word means blat! You’re great. Also as the confidant of Raffo and Viktoria, you should become my confidant too.”

“I’m just Kawa on my very best nights. Good old reliable Blacksmith Winter.”

“And on the bad nights then who? Tell me some of your other silly names,” she whispers at him up close.

“Zachariah, Valera or Vasyli Pveada, or, wait, wait, my memory is growing back, perhaps your papers really say: Sir Sebastian Adonaev! Ha! A royal victory? Where did you concoct these strange and slightly atrocious monikers? Moniker, is that the right word?”

He nods slightly.

“I’m Kawa when the drinks flow and the desire to dance returns to my hard hips. All other times I’m at war. With myself and my nature, with a world of sheep and a den of wolves. In such circumstances, I require a hard Russian name, and the luck of a royal victory.”

“Hmm. Well, it sounds ridiculous the way you say it. I’ll call you Valera, highly sparingly, it’s an insult you know! Some girl insulted you and you made it your Russian name. We can get you a new one. But, Kawa is okay too. I’ll see what rolls better off the tongue. All that other stuff, well I have no idea what you’re talking about.

“Martina, two shots, Russian Standard please,” Daria proclaims, dropping another twenty on the bar. Martina the bartender comes over and gives Dasha a little wink again. She pours them out.

“This is sorry alright,” she smiles “I have said the words sorry! Now I again reserve the right to be rude to you and forget about it later. Fair game, yes? You got two drinks.”

He looks deep into her blue eyes and gives a half-smile wondering how much she really remembers. In her eyes he sees someone looking out at him below the swagger of her posture, behind her beauty is a much older beauty.  

“Well aren’t you impressed with my new manners?” she asks

I find you quite a bit stunning, he thinks and almost says.

“Of course I am.”

“What are you drinking next?” she asks.

They clink the shots and she proclaims, “Nazdrovia!”

She drinks like a fish, but really she just drinks like a Russian.

“Astika,” she orders for him.

She has years of recent training in anticipating the needs of men. By realizing those needs, controlling them. And she thinks, what terrible piss but of course she orders him another one from Martina. The raven black-haired Bulgarian bartender who knows exactly what she’s doing. Since Daria never buys men drinks. Because Russian apologies are based on acts, not words.

“Are you coming to our little festival?” Daria asks him almost casually.

There will be a four-day Bohemian Festival happening Labor Day Weekend where all manner of fuckery will take place in a park in Queens called the Onderdonk Public Historic Fields. Sasho the owner had let Victoria allow Kawa to do a benefit concert for their Haiti efforts at Mehanata a month ago. So a week from now Kawa and his colleague EMT, a Paramedic in training Comrade Jared Yetter the Forgetter from distant Kalifornia will be freelance EMTs covering the first two days of the festival. 

“Wait,” she pauses.

“You are working the festival as our very own people’s paramedic,” she says as she presses her palm to his sideburn and face-side.

“Sharp as a dagger you are Dorogaia,” he smirks. 

She smiles with big bright eyes. Who the fuck taught you that word, she thinks.

“Don’t call me your dear ever again, I’m not so old! I’ll alert you that I may well come to some of that festival and if I fall down, drunk, I will ask for very intimate and professional service.”

“Hand pressed ice,” he promises, reaching for her waist then thinking again.

“Hand-pressed absolutely everything,” she demands.

“It’s at the service of all attending,” he declares.

“You are a true servant of the people!” she mocks with a wink.

“Dasha, you’re a tough act to follow.”

“You’re gonna keep calling me that are you?”

“Is that still a problem?”

“It’s rather intimate. I don’t know if we know each other like this or that.”

“Well, I suppose we can work on that over the festival.”

She smiles a lovely, well-practiced smile.

“Kawa, or whatever stupid name you’re calling yourself tonight. Press me the best you can. The risk is completely yours, not mine.”

A song about the great and noble Commandant Che Guevara by the Buena Vista Social Club comes on and she thrusts herself into his arms for the last dance. They take the floor to themselves.

“I wish knew you back in Cuba,” she whispers in his ear.

“I’ve never been to Cuba,” he replies with a stone face.

She Latin sashays with him across the dance floor muscling out the other couples with her buxom way. She’s part crass and part wonderful. She lets him lead and he does a fairly good job under pressure to keep up. It’s been over a year since he’s danced with a woman of any substance.

“You dance like you’re actually from the Illubabor,” she whispers to him.

“But I’ve never been there either,” he repeats., “since it doesn’t exist yet.”

He dips her slightly. She’s a gorgeous, powerful woman who will always get what she wants in the end so it seems. Except perhaps happiness which no power or money can so far buy.

“You’ve gotten much better at playing an Amerikansky style radical lately,” she tells him in an old Ivory language. 

“You are even better at playing. A tragic but dangerous Russian courtesan,” Sebastian replies and they dance the rest of the night.

It is way past 04:00 am now and efforts to clear the worst kind of rabble out the tavern have begun. Only card-carrying regulars and lovers of staff can remain and light things up or pound things down. It’s now with the storm shutters sealed just over two dozen left lingering around the bar. Smoke them if you got them. They count out the cash on the bar. For some reason, with almost no music, drunk as hell, Kawa and Daria are still dancing. Slumped into each other.

“Right never on fucking schedule,” says Justin Toomey O’Azzello to Sasho, the burly owner smoking a cigar at the end of the ground floor bar passageway, packed up with intoxicated core circle patrons, tight except around his circumference. 

“Hasn’t changed his partisan cap or tune much in ten years,” Justin notes.

“I know him of course,” Sasho says without looking up, “with or without the ridiculous peasant cap. He’s been the same good man for over a decade. Dependable killer. Knocked the fuck around while in Ayiti, that is for sure.”

“He’s dancing with Daria Andreavna, good for him! She’s got great big ones for him,” O’Azzello says.

“He’s always dancing with Daria,” replies Martina, “or at least trying to dance with her anyway.”

“You’re thinking of…” ponders Justin.

“No my friend O’Azzello. I’m thinking exactly what I mean to be thinking! He’s always dancing with my Dasha right before things get interesting around here. And it sure will get interesting fast.”

“They just met, boss!” says Martina.

Sasho slams his fist on the bar and almost yells in Bulgarian: 

“You’re thinking of things three-dimensionally and I am thinking of things fifth dimensionally, even sixthly or seventhly and I know that when those two dance! Fucking trouble. Chorney with fire and arms in the streets! Illubadori mind games. Decapitations on camera and lynchings off bridges to boot. Lynchings I say! Gays being flung off the rooftops! And lots of piles of burning bodies. Walking dead and fucking flying robots. It’s time to call up all our troops, every single man to the front!”

Justin the General Manager sometimes suspects the boss is fucking insane, but the old man had a gift for utilizing that insanity. The lights come on and the remaining guests not vouched for are herded like drunk cats out the second exit onto Ludlow street until no one is left inside but the staff, a handful of regulars, and of course Sasho with his cigar. Daria and Kawa wander out into what’s left of the night on the Lower East Side. Wander out into the time before dawn.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sasho notices the mini Mexican weight staff are carrying the body of a man out of the tiny room upstairs where people go to fuck whores, or their drunk lady girlfriends, or college students. Or, he supposed less frequently, but evidently in case tonight; kill a man, drain his blood and empty his pockets. A little room to the very back of the second-floor mezzanine. You can fuck or even murder at the top of your lungs and no one would know.  Of the four little Mexicans, none are taller than four feet apiece and they must drag the body down the stairs. The corpse is pale from exsanguination. Having been totally dry. 

“Into the soup or the soap?” asks little Enrique from Monterrey in Spanish.

Sasho nods, “Let the dead keep eating the dead as they do out in the colonies.” 

James White and James Brown sit with their drinks in near silence. Tanya just counts money. Martina counts more money with smoke in her pouty mouth. For some reason, she is as naked as the day she was born. Justin Toomey the General Manager sits on the bar next to Sasho wondering how many days the Tavern in its current incarnation has left above ground. 

 SCENE FIVE (V)

“так и быть”

Pronunciation: Tak i-BYT’ Meaning: so be it

Literal translation: 

“SO BE IT!”

For the record there has never been such a thing as an independent Ukraine. It’s always been a part of Russia, before the Golden Horde. The U.S.S.R. was just a bizarre type, a red branding of the Russian Empire. The Russian Federation, then, is just the latest brand. People with the contradictions of wild autocracy and enduring serfdom in the blood. A race of wiley people!  

Set back in Bila Tserkva Oblast, U.S.S.R. Little blonde and gigging, wide-eyed Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna Perechenova was born at the end of the U.S.S.R in the Ukrainian City of Bila Tserkva Oblast on Messidor 2^nd,1987. The rest is all misinformation. Gypsy legends and mere ignorant speculation. The seemingly miraculous particulars surrounding her allegedly virgin birth were manyfold and are to this day recounted. Her mother Tanya Ivanova seemed to have reversed in age by ten years over the course of the pregnancy. When she finally gave birth to her first child she bore the resemblance to a girl in her late teens. Not a woman approaching nearly thirty-four. Sasho’s closest men patted him on the shoulder and told him, ‘very, very well played.’ But honestly, at that stage, he not even gotten his ‘dick wet’.

“Is that what you say in American?” 

The second highly strange miracle occurred shortly after little infant Yelizaveta’s birth. All the animals in all of the forests surrounding Bila Tserkva Oblast began to show up at the city hospital. So congested with various fauna wandering about the city that a whole task force of Red Army men from Kyiv were needed to attempt removal of this glut of birds and bears and deer as well as animals that the authorities in the Ministry of Social Ecology had long thought were rendered extinct. These animals seemed drawn to the hospital and for a whole lunar month after little Yelizaveta’s birth they were drawn to the family dacha of the Perchevney family to the south a day’s journey from the city.

  The third strange miracle was that infant Yelizaveta was not only able to speak Russian within the third month of her infancy but by her third year Americano English, Castile Spanish, Old High Ivory, and a bizarre dialect of French called Ayitian Creole spoken exclusively on the Caribbean island ‘Republic of Palmares’ also called Hispaniola. So marvelous was this behavior of an infant which spoke multiple complex foreign languages that Alexander and Tania Ivanova agreed to conceal this from the world and hide the girl on a dascha as long as possible so no knowledge of this genius might alert the proper authorities to auspicious comings and goings which might result in the borrowing of their prodigious infant. Although the phenomenon of animals and birds flooding the forests and airspace of the dascha made a clandestine upbringing quite hard to arrange.

        The fourth miracle occurred at Yelizaveta’s fourth birthday when she turned to her mother and said that as long as the family stayed happily in Bila Tserkva, no one in that city would ever die. So it was for a time of around two years.

           In 1989 the Soviet Union began to completely unravel. The despotic red dream crumbled country by country and the quality of living markedly dropped off.  Life, as they understood it in relation to the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, came to an inglorious end. There was not one instance of reported death in a hundred-mile radius of Bila Tserkva Oblast though for the two years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time Alexander was away from the family for extended periods of time. As the only Ivory left in Bila Tserkva his admittance to the inner Party was highly unorthodox. Also, his admittance to Medical College and his marriage to Tanya Ivanova who came from a prosperous Ruus family of Slavic Russian intellectuals close to the local seats of Communist power in Kyiv. To court, win and impregnate Tanya had been a complicated and also costly venture. Men lined up longer than the ration lines of the 19080’s for the chance to date the daughter of this local Party boss. Alexander was not only a half Ivory by paperwork but from a family that had devolved slowly from yeshiva benchers to raw smuggler highway people and then back into lazy migrant Rabbis.

By forging a passport and bribing several dozen people Alexander was able to change his ethnic designation from “Ivory” to “Bulgarian” and then later with more bribes to “Russian”.  And thus was able to arrive in Kiev at age 18 to begin his medical training. It was there in university that he encountered the affluent and ravishing daughter of a party boss. Ms. Tanya Ivanova who was studying engineering in the same college. After a lengthy and tumultuous courtship he gave her a tiny watch encased in a gold heart. He said that if she ran away with him to the Sakhalin Soviet upon completion of their studies, an island to Russia’s far east past Siberia, north of Japan then they would one day escape to Illubador and eventually to America as soon as the Cold War ended in seemingly inevitable capitalist victory. This was the end of the eighties and the writing was written clearly on the Berlin wall. One night she secretly packed her bags and joined him in a waiting car and they finally eloped in in the Spring of 1984.

He told her that by the time the watch stopped running they would be in Amerika and by the time it started up again they’d never want for anything again. They barely made it as far as the city limits. Goons in blackcaps in the employ of her father Ivan Ivanovitch stopped them at a checkpoint. They beat Alexander rather badly. They returned a crying distraught Tanya to her father and threw the covert Ivoryish doctor Alexander Perchevney into a jail for special prisoners who committed crimes that were handled in the cold and quiet.

The night of this attempted elopement and calamity the father of Tanya, Ivan Ivanovitch had a terrible dream. He dreamed of an army of many of thousands of four-foot Mayans parachuting out of the sky and attacking Bila Tserkva in an effort to rescue the young Alexander. He dreamed of the strange days of nightmare and plague about to wreak havoc on all of Kiev and the whole Soviet Socialist world if necessary should the detention of his daughter’s lover go on. In the dream his daughter Tanya fell into some inexplicable coma and for each day of Alexander’s captivity ten men disappeared without a trace. Then twenty men. And so on. Until by the end of the dream month of Alexander’s imprisonment, there were virtually no Russian or Ukrainian men left alive in Kiev. The strange wave of disappearances swept through the local Party apparatus and military and leaders of state owned business cooperatives and even the secret police and soon like a strange and miraculous and ghostly purge had been carried out. Finally, finally Alexander was not just the only secret Ivory in Kiev, but conspicuously the only person left alive with a passport that said “Russian”. Finally, after the third lunar dream month, it began to snow. To snow with such determination that obstruction and paralysis took hold. Throughout the eerie disappearances, the drop in temperature, the sky falling out, Ivan Ivanovitch’s daughter Tanya hovered in a mesmerized trance. Alexander languished in prison although there was no one left to guard him beside Ivan though he did not even three months into the nightmare connect his interference with the love of his daughter for this Ivoryish medical student to anything so “otherworldly”. Yes, people did disappear from time to time, but not often the entire Inner Party Cadre of a major Soviet capital city. Yes, it did snow but not with the endless and unceasing siege of white deluge they were experiencing, or in the month of Prairial! 

Finally, in the dream, the sun itself ceased to ever rise. And without party leaders, bureaucrats, draped in over forty feet of snow, Kyiv underwent forty days of night. During this time Ivan never left the dream police garrison where he and Alexander Perchevney would bond intermittently over Go and Vodka. Bonding begrudgingly, for Ivan spoke no Ukrainian and by the fourth month of these phenomena, no one was willing to speak any Russian anymore under the superstitious belief that it would bring death. So Alexander the Ivory and Ivan, party boss of Bila Tserkva spoke for the first time. First, on the subject of HaShem, then on the subject of the devil. And then also a bit on women which both agreed was stronger in will than either HaShem’s or the craft works of some lesser spooky devils.

“You love my daughter, but what do I care, fundamentally speaking? Love, is after all, just bullshit and chemicals. You offer her and as importantly me nothing, really, at all,” Ivan informed young Alexander.

      “As I have never loved or even thought to love another woman, so do I love your Tanya!”

      “You will never be accepted here or anywhere as a damn Ivory! Even a party Ivory is suspect. Even with a new name and a medical certificate. Your Ivoryish horns and tail cannot hide!”

     “You could sponsor me! You can sponsor me to the Inner Party and allow me to marry her.”

  “I’m not frightened by the evil weird  Ivory magic outside. I know these are only cruel vodka lullabies, whispers in the ear of a man-made hard and hateful by life. I will wake in my bed tomorrow! There will be no Mexican invaders, no disappearing apparatchiks, no endless snow or black endless night. You will be sent to deep Siberia for some infraction. Tanya will wake up and marry a Russian Cavalry officer. Or someone from the foreign bureau.”

   “How can you be sure?” asked Alexander Perchevney, “How can you know if your dreams are real or if some dark power has unleashed itself against your house for obstructing our basic and sincere love?”

“Because there is no love or magic allowed here. Those are of course bourgeoisie inventions. I will wake up soon, I feel it. And then order you shot!”

For nearly two fortnights General Winter took full hold of Bila Tserkva. It did not stop snowing. It did not become day again. By the third fortnight of his imprisonment and Tanya’s mysterious coma, there was no Russian anything left in the darkness. Ivan in his solitude became like a prisoner too. The heavy snows then cut Bila Tserkva off from all of the rest of the Soviet world and the wakefield Ivan hoped would come; nearly a year later still had not transpired, nor had he ever slept.  

“You damn cursed Ivory! What kind of dark magic have you unleashed?”

“This is not my doing man,” yells young Alexander instinctively if not defensively.

      “When will I wake from this perverse nightmare of ‘upsidedownhood’, of idiotic dragfootery?! You cannot ever marry my daughter. You are not a whole man. You will never give my daughter a good secure life.”

       “This is not my doing man! Not by any means! You’ve brought this damn nightmare upon yourself. I have no such powers like these.”  

“A typical Ivoryish (Jew) response.”

Lost and asleep in an endless nightmare Ivan Ivanovitch turned to mankind’s oldest imaginary friend. He implored the Russian Orthodox HaShem to end this plague of darkness, deprivation, and Ivoryish parasitic blight!  But as we all know, if there is a Hashem, it is a Mayan long gamed if not vaguely Soviet HaShem, a go without understandable morals or temporal reward for the seemingly righteous. Whatever lesson it wishes us to learn is like algebra to an ant farm. It has been lost on us completely in its magnitude and scale. For ten years little auspicious Virgin born Yelizaveta was kept with her mother Tanya in the family Dascha, studied by the K.G.B. then its successor the F.S.B. Eventually between 1989-1991 the Soviet Union totally collapsed, and the Iron curtain was briefly lifted for a time. 

The sun never rose and Ivan Ivanovitch never yielded. At the beginning of the spring of the third year of Alexander’s imprisonment there dropped from the sky blue and red parachutists of four foot stature. One a day. Grinning bandoliered Latin American Pararescuemen each gliding down into the outskirts of town and taking up position in the woods. One a day. With all the Russians gone, the Ukrainians began hiring these men as day laborers and yard workers. Ivan Ivanovitch began to suspect that there was a growing secret army of these Latino Pararescuemen waiting in the shadows awaiting the right moment to break young Alexander out of prison and spirit him into the wilderness of North America. Slowly Ivan Ivanovitch lost his mind and ordered endless torture on Alexander. And in the tumultuous days of the Mafia Wars and so-called “Shock Doctrine”, anyone could have had anything done to anyone.

While Alexander ‘Sasho’ Perchevney sat a long miserable five years in confinement punished for his love and his allegedly part Semitic race. 

The young aspiring dentist had nightmarish dreams and a vision. A voice would come to him after midnight as he hung by his arms in solitary. The voice, a female voice from an ephemeral belly dancer would whisper, “And I will raise you up and make you richer and more powerful than any living man. And three daughters will you have by the spirit of HaShem, all born without intercourse to three women I will show you. And therefore you will be made mighty to protect and raise the children of G-d. Three candidates for Messiah. One to defeat the dragon, one to defeat the eagle, and one to tame the bear. You will know the Lord is with you. And your house will be most feared and respected among the houses of man. Now you are weak from torture, but next year you will have American dreams.”  

The future founder of the fearsome Bratva that would bear his family name and that would so loot the banks of the world stayed only a bit longer in the hands of his tormentor. He sat in his own thoughts and the belly dancing spirit laid out for him a most elaborate plan. Awaiting rescue and reunion with his beloved Tanya. A most auspicious woman to be sure. Along with Yelizaveta his little bear cub. While languishing in solitary confinement it was revealed to him a way to steal the very most secret secrets of the ancient tribe called the Ivory. Thus when and if, a big if, ‘the world to come, eventually came, it would be a world completely under his control. Subservient to his whims and ambitions. 

“Once someone or something has successfully attacked you, mauled your face. Has violated your family. Fucked up your pocket. Fucked up your reputation or your life. You make sure. You fucking make sure! You will never be in that position. Not ever again. You will never ever be a Suka, not ever,” sums up Sasho, “I just took that idea one step further. I sought to make the whole world my little bitch.”

Neither HaShem nor the Mossadnik agents facilitating his protracted revelations cared at all about the dubious morality or the long-term motives of Mr. Perechevney. There was a need in 1991 to give people something to believe in because very dark days were right around the corner.

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 Brooklyn, 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 en-stowed 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 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 get 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.”

“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.”  

“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 piedaterres 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 again the painful agony of our tumultuous separation.’

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 upon 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.

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.