Scene 8

Scene Eight

Mehanata

 

 

The yellow cabs fly by on Tuesday night. You could cook things on the sidewalk, that’s how vile and hot the concrete jungle is this summer.        For the nine to thirteen million rats in their various races, this city never fucking sleeps. Its go, go, go, zoom, zoom rush! Slaves and serfs to the trains for service. It’s all an illusion its fun here with no currency. It’s a filthy place except at the center. Getting in early with red eyes and leaving late. Back on the cattle cars. The masters dangling enough to cover the rising rent and some groceries if you’re lucky. You’re so lucky to 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 have more education than most of the rest of the country.  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. 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 over crowed sprawl more regularly breaking then making those who arrive from the interior or abroad.

 

Nikholai Rosetree Trickovitch is bleary eyed. He stinks of cigarettes, some cheap men’s fragrance and also of Rum. The climate here is repressive towards the end of summer. Rum Barbancourt Three 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.

 

Nikholai also technically, mostly by association with more militant Sebastian; part of the core of the leadership of the Z.O.B., a network of insurgent cells and the editor of its underground newspaper, the Banshee News Service. He highly prefers conducting his revolutionary duties from the computer of this same Penthouse. Moving things about the internet, correcting pamphlets and public movement speeches Sebastian and his comrades give in parks and on trains. Nick was persuaded to manage the logistics for the First Haiti Operation.  He did well. He was then 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 Colombia. But, he has only so much will power to back up such walk.

 

 

I need another drink, thinks Trickovitch. He knows it will be a long meeting and the A/C won’t in the club house. The night is really just getting started workwise even though it’s past 4am. 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 a messy little big job.”

There were big jobs and little jobs. There were campaigns that took years. Some jobs where social engineering was needed. Others where brute force was the best approach.

This required some of both and right away. He had to get buy in. No one was ever really in charge. Now, outside New York the Resistance got very eclectic who was involved. It would be inaccurate to say anyone could possibly lead it. It was as bad in New York where 70% of the population wasn’t even born here; they were born everywhere else. A lot of players. They all “relied heavily on black, white and grey magic to keep this thing together,” as Nicholai was fond of saying, “But in New York City, we still do things the old fashioned way. By having a real tight crew.”

In the dead of something, where night creeps toward dusk, around a table on the fourth floor of 113 Ludlow Street, they met. That is to say the restaurant immediately above the Mehanata Tavern. A little talk is underway, a briefing maybe also a sale pitch.

 

“There are thirteen leaders of the Z.O.B,” Trickovitch explains, “Two have disappeared. We don’t fill their seats, but we consider them probably dead. Ones in living in a submarine somewhere hidden. Two are sleeping. That’s a polite way of staying they were thrown in a camp and badly tortured. Most of them kill themselves sometime after. That means at any given period nine are left. Left in charge of all the cells in the division. Greater New York City.”

 

The table is wooden and plates of street meat tapas have all been cleared. Nobody got in from the street, they got in from the tunnel.

 

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

Mara Fitzduff Donahue is the half pint Irish, dirty blonde famous for her firebrand speeches on the Fire Switch Radio. Also present is Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contras, the Peruvian disk jockey. A photographer. Retired child soldier and lesser officer of a defunct guerrilla band in Arequipa Province. The fifth member of this add-hock unit was Siegfried Sassoon. He speaks very well. He should be expected to as he is an actor classically trained in Moscow. He too is in the black. Just getting off work as bar tender at a flashy supper club up the street called the Fox. A dashing swaggerous man of Cuban descent. Perhaps the closest man to be able to influence things after Trickovitch and Dbrisk. 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, a smooth young Shatah from East New York. Said his name was Joshua Hunter. Had ok references and they were going to test him out.

 

Watson is pissed. You can tell when he’s pissed, he doesn’t pay attention at all. It’s based anyway on the past midnight hour. He left his favorite chocolate in bed in the Bronx for this “bullshit.” He doesn’t get to see his lady enough. She lives in Boston. Charlotte from Uganda.

 

In the confusing and albeit vaguely disjointed chain of command Mara, Watson, Mickhi and Nicholai are all title holding inner leadership. Only one is from the inner nine. Siegfried Sassoon, Hunter and Raphael were called in as volunteers. 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 could work.

 

“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 attack the mostly empty City.”

 

Everybody except Joshua Hunter knew that already. They were gonna stick Hunter with Watson and Watson would keep him working this weekend until he was trustable, or dead.

 

They were all aware of the score.

 

“As most of us know this revolt is a three stage attack in New York was being coordinated mostly by the Pan-Africanists, the Garveyites, Black Lives Matter Movement, some of the liberal and radical medical trade unions, the I.W.W. of course, the Muslims, the Occupiers, the student movements in CUNY, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and of course; Uhuru and us,” explains Mickhi.

“The dry run were the occupations on Wall Street and around the country last year to assess the state defenses. Phase Two is Labor Day where we take Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. Phase three will be to hold and liberate the City before New Year’s Eve,” he continues.

“Hectic shit,” mutters Raphael.

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

“We all know what was revealed about the h1n1 and Ebola. We’ve all seen the reports. The documentation has been widely circulated and now the people are ready. Enough outrages have occurred to spark something bigger than riots. The Stop and Frisk, the weekly shootings, the Iran war conscription and the new walking drones of course. This time almost everyone expects death camps and prolonged urban warfare, not kumbaya” Mickhi explains.

 

“The Z.O.B. has called up eight hundred riflemen, combat medics and agitation propaganda officers to support the needs of the parade. Our convoy of marauders. They will be attached to each major island band truck. Flying columns are on the ready in all five boroughs. An additional three hundred and forty three women and men.

 

“Listen, Watson knows all of this shit. So brother please come to conclusion so I can get Bronx bound with this new jack,” says Watson.

 

“Watson, we just need this young buck briefed, you can get out the door in fifty minutes,” Mickhi tells him. Used to his way.

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

 

“As usual,” continues Mickhi, “The 2 Haitian Convoys will bring up the middle and the rear. Unknown to the City parade organizers, and hopefully the police intelligence forces, 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 hope fully with the people behind us. And this is when the hectic bloody melee will begin.”

 

“What’s our precise role tonight,” asks Siegfried Kenly Sassoon. Siggy, who god or his parents made tall dark and handsome never goes to that many meetings. He never votes in otriad elections except with his feet for Sebastian. When Sebastian is leading he steps back and when Sebastian is sleeping her steps up. He did however vote for keeping Sebastian asleep after the last Haiti job, when the hospitaliers took him very hard. Sebastian is a serious knock around guy; best estimates think he’s been taken to the camps over 21 times. About three years’ worth of his life. Siggy, like Watson does jobs not meetings. Neither ever-ever tries to be at these meetings. Rarely even the candle light salons in Brooklyn. Which are sometimes cute.

 

“We’re gonna install Fire Station Transmitters on four very, very tall structures,” says Mara Fitzduff. She has been the club’s chief of staff, worked in propaganda, women’s affairs and fundraising for the past ten years. She’s not officially even Z.O.B., but she is dependable. She has no broag. She’s got one kid with a soldier who ran off and another with the Russian loan shark Donny Gold who Sebastian and Nikholai went to high school with ‘way back in the day’.

 

“And then tomorrow we’re gonna blow up the Consolidated Edison building, putting most of Manhattan in the dark” says Mickhi Dbrisk, who has been the club’s Operation’s Chief since nearly the very beginning. He was in prison for a year as a teenager. When the cops accused him and four friends of all robbing a liquor store and no one talked.

Some people say he’s a Crip, but he’s not a Crip anymore.

 

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 raids and bombing targets. Now that Sebastian lives in a dream, or a nightmare.

 

“The transmitters will override the police radio system and turn whatever frequencies we feel like into dancehall radio stations. We need them hidden and we need them high,” explains Mara, “so we can keep broadcasting when they shut the internet down.”

 

“We’ve gotten the four choice spots picked out well enough,” Nicholai explains, “each transmitter is about the size of a football. There are blasters and flicker masks in the bags at the downstairs at coat check. But those are for getting out of the buildings later. Soon as this meeting is done, if you agree to this shit, you’re all getting in the town cars outside and getting dropped near bye all four targets,”

 

“Fuck the girls if you feel like, if that works for you. We want you rested and loose. The town cars bring you to apartment brothels we work with and you sleep there. Whatever you decide to do,” Mara says.

 

She continues, “You wake up again when it’s dark. One person one location. In the bags with the guns and flicker masks are the addresses and names of four sympathetic venues, but really the car will just take you pretty near there. You’re going to get dropped at some of the tallest buildings on the island. Masks go on to obscure your faces, before you get out of the town cars. The girls will have you over for a drink, and whatever. Don’t really drink. Fuck if you wanna fuck and go to sleep. Then they will give you roof access when you get up. Those masks don’t come off in elevators, in lobbies, on streets anywhere near that building. The cameras are everywhere, as you know. You will get up 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 face,” says Mara.

“Watson, you are assigned to the Heights. You’ll take Hunter with you. Siggy you’re in Midtown working with Ha Chi as usual. Denby and I will work in lower Manhattan. Raphael you’ll be setting up the Long Island City installation which is quite tricky because there’s nothing residential in the CITI Corp building so we’ll have to social engineer it. Nicholai and Dbrisk will go after the Hightower on Atlantic Junction also with the same predicament.”

 

“And by assigned, we’re asking you to accept the job as a volunteer,” Mickhi explains.

“For the good of the service,” Mara smiles.

“How is Jon Denby doing?” Mickhi asks.

“His father is real sick, it cuts into his out time,” Nickolai explained.

 

“So are you with this? You’re all Pararescuemen or Parapsychologists so I’m sure this will all just be fun. Once you get to the safe houses you’re staying at feel free to relax and take a long nap. You’ve all been up all week. 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 station on Monday morning. So enjoy, thank god it’s Tuesday. Some of these sympathizers are very attractive. I’m not saying any of you would take a whole a day to ravish the high end escorts at the brothels you’ll be staying at. Certainly not as either husbands, fathers, or Haitian gentlemen. But well it’s an option. Can’t have you stressed,” grins Mara knowing full well Raphael is married albeit a consummate adulterer. That Mickhi Dbrisk for all intents and purposes has three or four wives. That Siggy is secretly married to the daughter of a powerful Russian oligarch. That Nicholai is an incorrigible whore monger. And that Watson Entwissle is a very loyal family man. A true Haitian gentleman.

 

“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 afford them as a DJ.

 

“We need these devices set up high,” says Mara, “If we can knock out their power and maintain alternative systems of communications we’re keeping to our end of the mutual aid agreement with Uhuru. Without blowing our arsenal and fighters prematurely,” she says, “as you all know this is phase two of three. We’re only fully mobilizing if they manage to take the City or if they hold Brooklyn longer than a week. Otherwise it’s 1^st January.”

“I know I’m in,” asks Raphael.

“Shut the fuck up, Watson knows before he came here he was in.”

“Hachi will be a little pissed,” says Siggy, “But of course. It’s too late to get out.”

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

“Yeah 100,” the kid replies.

 

Mickhi Dbrisk chuckles.

“Four transmitters. Then we blow the Consolidated Edison NSA depot on Monday morning and EMP the district financial at noon thirty Monday with the anarchists, if they breech. Monday. All of you are in the trenches and I’m running dispatch with Anya out of a most secure location. Things are going to pop the hell off prematurely. We’ll do the best we can to keep up with impossible expectations, any questions?”

 

No one had any.

“I love democracy. All of your please grab your shit at coat check and get in the cars outside via the alley doors,” she tells them, “Good luck don’t get killed.”

 

Things were about to go bang in the night.

 

Scene 7

Scene Seven

The Atlantic Ocean

 

 

 

After everyone and their family was safely disembarked in Port of Spain, conditions became a little looser. They were allowed to leave the two conjoined rooms and walk about the lower deck. A strict military order presided here. Which was to be expected as the ship carried the women most responsible for gathering the tribes, uniting the factions and ramping up the war path from the colonies now into the heart of the empire.

 

Of the four on this team none had been at Madeira. That place of balance, of mountains and springs, of constant Spring and Fall had served as the main rebel base for the Democratic Confedralists outside of Qandil Mountain and the growing revolution in North Syria. The island of Madeira is located south west from Portugal into the Atlantic and about 400 kilometers north from Tenerife, Canary Islands. It’s on smoldering still, but’s still there physically. Though far less of attraction after a carpet bombing wave.

 

By Oleg the Bear’s estimation they were four days from American shores when Emma called them into a conference room on the deck above them for briefings. Red cushions and steel benches.

 

“Why are we here?” Emma asks them.

Oleg raises his hand.

“You young man, in the front,” Emma says.

“Your uprising begins in about three weeks,” Oleg replies.

“The core revolution beings in about two weeks. The peripheral revolution has been going on hard since 1791,” she says.

“Why are we really here?” Yulia asks.

“The American’s have been slow to contribute,” Oleg says.

“They contribute erratically,” Kudzai cuts in.

“Stop talking and listen please,” says Adelina.

 

“Something is wrong and we need you all to find out the extent of it,” Emma says, “The cells in the U.S. are planning to launch the second phase of the uprising on September 1st, which is in thirteen days.”

“You in the leadership think something isn’t right,” Oleg tells more than asks.

“That’s very close,” Emma replies, “we are certain everything possible will go wrong.”

 

 

“Why didn’t you see Madeira before it happened,” Kudzai asks her.

“I’m not God,” she replies.

 

“What happened in Madeira?” Adelina asks.

 

“They have a lot of ability to lean on everyone until they make people change their sides. Someone gave away the base and set up half the leadership for slaughter,” Emma tells them, “but you were all hired before that. Those of you that didn’t volunteer.”

 

“So what happened in Madeira one last time,” Adelina asks again.

 

“Thousands of our best people, many of them with relatives there from the top positions of responsibility, officers, deputies and committee heads of the People’s Assembly were burned alive in their beds. Many of the leadership were shot dead by walking robots and commandos. Of the Confederation leadership of some 240 elected or appointed delegates, which included about half of key movers that very much mattered; all except 40 were murdered. Decapitating us right before the revolt.”

“What are we supposed to do exactly” Yulia asks.

“She wants us to..” Oleg begins.

“Stop being a jack ass,” Adelina interrupts.

“I’m here to do something highly specific for you,” Oleg says, “let’s be clear about that. I’m not one on the team who is volunteering. They massacred you all in Madeira. That was supposed to be a high level gathering on your super-secret base. That was someone’s fuck up.”

“Someone towards the top has clearly betrayed just about everyone,” Emma says.

“Ah,” interjects Oleg, “now I see. And based what I think I know there are only two people that could be.”

“That said you were quite smart,” Emma smiles finally.

“That is why you must be getting paid so well brother,” Adelina interjects.

“So you go in and blend into the mobs,” Emma tells them, “You watch how the thing all goes down and you join in when you must. You find out how bad the shape of their movement is. You find out who is giving us away. That’s what you’re doing out there. Most of you.”

 

“Sounds like quite a suicide mission,” Yulia states flatly.

“Stay out of New York,” Emma says.

“Why do we need to that?” Kudzai asks.

“We’ll get trapped there,” Adelina replies.

“How can we get this accomplished if all the primary leaders are in New York?” Kudzai asks.

“Well some of you might will probably get trapped in New York and the rest of you can wait up for them in Boston. As everyone is either paid by the day or volunteering. You’re all aware this can’t be rushed. We don’t even know where Avinadav is.”

“Who’s Avinadav,” Yulia asks.

“What are you paid to do again?” Oleg laughs.

“She’s paid to murder people, just like you,” Emma retorts, “Avinadav is the military commander of the Resistance in Israel & Palestine. He helped found it in 2001 with Sebastian and I, he disappeared in 2005. We think he’s being held by the C.I.A. somewhere but he could be dead.”

“For a prophet you sure have a lot of questions,” Yulia remarks.

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” Emma replies.

 

“Where will Sebastian be when the uprising begins?” Adelina then asks.

“They put him back to sleep,” Kudzai states.

“What does that mean?” asks Oleg the Bear.

“They took him and wiped out his mind again. He doesn’t even probably remember what he’s helped organize. We don’t know what state he is in,” Emma says.

“We don’t know how many rebel leaders have flipped. We don’t actually know how far the secret police have gotten in. We have no way of calculating the probabilities of success for the September 1^st rising.”

“How many cities and towns are going to rise up after New York? How well coordinated is this expected to be?” Kudzai asks.

“If they succeed on the 1^st, maybe three dozen other City groups will follow suit the next day. If they get quickly repressed. Everyone else will wait for January, we think,” Emma says, “but it’s Democratic Confederalism so honestly we can’t command and control very much. The other groups will all follow New York.”

 

“So we get in, we wait. We get close to Sebastian and other leaders. We wait. We take pictures we make an assessment. Then you tell us who will die?” Yulia asks.

“Unless they all get killed in 13 days and then you just try and find where Avinadav DeBuitléir is,” Emma says.

 

“You’re a questionable ass prophet,” Yulia says.

“I can’t vouch that we will ever see each other again after this voyage,” Emma replies, “I don’t lead alone, nor do I lead with some mandate of certainty or belief in my own divinity. But I assure you it will be a Great Revolt.”

 

 

Scene 6

Scene Six

Mehanata

 

 

The lights are kept dim no matter what happens. You need that to hide subtle stains from 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 its second location. Numerous police raids and finally a raid which transformed into a brawling melee succeeded in burning to the ground the original location on Canal and Broadway. In an ugly incident that took place in 2005 the lights of Bulgarian Bar and Cultural Society briefly went out. The new location is about six times the size 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 Brooklyn location, a whore house in Kiev with the same name and a School for Alcoholism in upstate New York.

 

At an infamous establishment such as this you ought to always know the names of the men standing watch or the women pouring your drinks. Or the people holding down of your 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 in needs of papers. Or creatures that drink blood.

 

There might was well be signs on the wall telling you anything not tied down will be carried away into the night, your bags, your souls, and virginities of every kind. Come to think of it, there are such overt signs hanging everywhere! Literal not figurative signs. One claims three teeth are needed for 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 bottle is never top shelf stuff.

It’s a Gypsy Bar, they claim to the public which romanticizes Gypsies. But Gypsy’s all steal. Gypsy’s will trick you with music and some dance, lure you for tarot cards and then steal you 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. And it lives up to that designation splendidly.

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 NYU college students and the children of the upper middle classes. Mehanata is 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 Latin American, 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 Brooklyn location from obtaining a liquor license. Sasho has been trying to open it for three of four years it seems.

Who is Sasho? He’s the boss.

There are three floors to the Tavern. The website extolls patrons to “meet their future green card holding spouse.” There is live Latin music. Live fire juggling. Bulgarian contortionists on Thursday alongside with Bordel Dali; Ernesto 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 a Gypsy!” he declares. He’s getting a PhD in Computer engineering. 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 in the dancefloor. The main floor has a dancefloor, 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 $40 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 Brooklyn or New Jersey.

And that is also why the place is only open Thursday through Saturday, to facilitate that traffic.

The waitresses and bar tenders are skinny or shapely, all Post-Soviet Bucharest or Sophia girls just arrived recently though generally well educated and for now, un-indentured. Some claim they are from Moscow, but they are not from Moscow. They are 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 unexpected or uninvited. Like the one on Wednesdays which is sort of high stakes a gang bang contest. There have been cock fights, dog fights and also bear 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 various. Normally three or four live acts a night on Friday and Saturday. A lot of live horns. There’s a rather Pall Mall esthetic of transcontinental bacchanalia.

The booking agent for Music is petit and elegant Victoria Lynch often wearing the hat of a Soviet officer the shoulder length locks of her hair falling over well 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 Gypsy Jazz, Spanish Ska and Balkan mostly. Roma meets Latin American for the most part. You get dance hall and reggae tone periodically from the DJs, 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 black people at Mehanata. Which no one has a problem with except maybe Sebastian Adon who keeps bringing them there. But, they have one drink and politely leave after meetings.

Since 2001 the Z.O.B. has made Mehanata its unofficial office and social club. It’s meeting spot and its 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 lumped into the categories of ambulance workers, criminals, sex workers and leftist radicals. Sometimes a cadre is two or more of those things.

The salsa, the tango, sometimes even a little Zouk are played by the selectors, but ‘the brothers’ always depart when the meetings are over. No one can say why they don’t like the place, but they don’t. But as it is a central location for all four boroughs, it’s remained an unchallenged haunt.

Sasho and Sebastian go all the way back to 2001, but they don’t always remember or talk about all the event in between.

The most popular disk jockeys are Raphael Ernesto Contreras Lynch also called DJ Rafflex and Georgie from Bucharest also called DJ Mishto. As stated Romanian but “not a Gypsy”. Recently booked is the bearded, crazy eyed Serb; A.J. The most famous of the current bartenders is Martina Hella Dubreskaya. She has been here a good deal longer than the others. A black haired Bulgarian journalist, music blogger and BSDM 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 hate. She is technically speaking the first person to publish the work of Sebastian Adon 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 Burns the feisty retired Irish cop on ¾ 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 Pérerez a smart talking, burly Latino from the Bronx. They call him James Brown, because he’s Latino. 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, cans their IDs and directs them to be retina scanned via this Israeli device at the door which biometrixes all the guests. He collects cash or directs drunk people to use the external ATM which charges a ten dollar service fee, the highest almost in New York. The irregular admission charge never gets a smile, because Slavi doesn’t charge people he knows in money. Then he sneaks a grin, has a smoke and sometimes asks people for money to come inside wearing a black Soviet wolf fur hat except during the summer.

You should pay cash up front for everything unless you’re a card carrying regular. Giving them your credit card is a horrible idea. It means you’ll just keep drinking. James White and James Brown are sometimes easy going on admission for just about anyone not over weight and female. The regulars never pay. The various mob tough guys never pay. The Z.O.B. members never pay. Sexy young girls never pay. The endless Korean bachelorette parties never pay except to ride the Gypsy Bus. The guests of regulars, mobsters, musicians, DJs, rebels and girlfriends of friends never pay. It’s between 15-35 dollars though if you’re just sort of showing up. Except on Thursday when everyone is free.

James White, James Brown and Slavi sometimes have to get fierce quick to squash the brawls which happen, generally around 2 AM, generally instigated by the Albanians, but often before and after. They can’t seem to keep the Albanians from breaking people’s faces over stupid things.

Justin Toomey O’Azzello is the General Manager. He is Irish and has wandering hands people 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 in Bosnia. His hands do wander though.

 

The owner of this place is a fearsome Bulgarian half Ukrainian Jew named Sasho, but is real name is Alexandre Dmitrievich Perchevney. He was born in Kiev, lived in Belaya Tserkov, Ukraine and moved to Sophia, Bulgaria before arriving here in 1992. He used to be a dentist. He used to be a person of importance in the Communist Party. He thus has a soft spot for revolutionists. The debaucheries of fallen men. As well as a hard spot for undocumented woman of theatre. Misha Kishbivalli, the long haired millionaire playboy from Bulgaria also is his silent partner. No one ever knows of asks what Misha does for a living. But the answer is blood diamonds. The Mehanta cooks are all from the tropic of Capricorn but nothing is ever very good eat except the beet soup or the Bulgarian salad; cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and pepper and white cheese. The cheese over fries is safe too. Some type of Borscht which is rumored to sometimes contain menstrual blood. The pork dishes are outright made of people.

Sasho’s wife Tanya isn’t the cook. It’s always undocumented Mexicans Sasho brings on over the years. They say the Brooklyn venue when it opens will have traditional Bulgarian food, but no one knows what that means.

Tanya is not a vindictive person, but she can’t stand Sebastian Adon. There is very valid reason for that beyond him being something of a trouble makers.

“Stop cooking people, and more people would eat here,” Sebastian once suggested.

It is rumored also that there is tunnel running from under the club to places unknown. Some nights Misha Kishbivalli has pontificated outside of the club that 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.

There are tall glass confectionaries of apple cider ginger vodka that sit atop the bar. 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, that is untrue. You just need to have cash money. Preferably American type. But, things are negotiable.

 

The music is playing loud at the Mehanata Social Club where Daria Andreavna makes eyes then orders a Vodka based energy drink confection. She then slides up to Sebastian at the bar. He is wearing a black suit this time. A week since his death.

 

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

“You were misbehaved I dare tell you,” he says.

“I was bad. Rude should I say? I am told I insulted your hospitability greatly.”

“That you did.”

“What are you drinking,” she asks.

“Astika,” he replies. The Bulgarian beer that is never in stock.

She catches Martina’s attention, and get him his drink. Martina winks at her.

“So,” she whispers again, “Cheers. I have no memory of anything last weekend. Forgive me for that. I don’t even know what I did.”

“You remember nothing?”

She just gives him a devilish smirk. And then 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 school, and then I party hard on the days off. I was told I was really bad to you. So, I’m saying the sorry. For the being of bad. What are you really drinking? This is our custom. Astika is shit,” she says.

“Nothing? No recollection?”

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

Sebastian is now in a black suit. The night she almost killed them last it was white linen.

“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 a head 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 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 if would 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. Sebastian 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, must be love. Previous formularies 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.

Overtime 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 28 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. Sides to his coin being a limited idiom. Supposedly in popular fictions man or woman is supposed to have only one true love in a lifetime, to marry them or be parted from them tragically. So Sebastian was working hard by that standard, which truly in real life it can never be that simple, that limited.

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

“Absolutely I am. And I never say sorry to men, but Ernesto said he would cancel his friendship with me if I didn’t say 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! You’re great. Also as the confidant of Rafael Ernesto and Victoria, you should become my confidant too.”

“I’m just Sebastian on my good nights.”

“And on the bad nights? Tell me your other names,” she whispers.

“Vasyli Pveada.”

“Ha! Royal Victory? Where did you concoct this other strange and slightly atrocious moniker? Moniker, is that the right word?”

He nods slightly.

“I’m Sebastian 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.”

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

“Marina, 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. And 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 Fields. Sasho the owner had let Victoria allow Sebastian do a benefit concert for their Haiti efforts at Mehanta a month ago. So a week from now Sebastian and his EMT, Paramedic in training comrade Jared Forgetter from California will be freelance EMTs covering the first two days of festival.

“Wait,” she pauses.

“You are working the festival as our paramedic,” she says as she presses her palm to his side burn 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 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 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?”

“That 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 festival.”

She smiles a lovely, practiced smile.

“Vasa. Press me best you can. The risk is completely yours not mine.”

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

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

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

She sashays him across the dance floor muscling out the other couples with her buxom way. She’s crass and 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 from the Caribbean,” she says to him.

“But I’ve never been to Cuba,” he repeats.

He dips her slightly. A full dip might turn into quite un-romantic arms to floor plummet.

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’re good at being an Amerikanski,” she tells him.

“You’re even at better at being a Russian,” he replies and they dance the rest of the night.

 

It is past 4 am now and efforts begin 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 shudders 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; Sebastian and Daria are still dancing.

 

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

“Hasn’t changed his 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.”

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

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

“You’re thinking of…” notes Justin.

“No Azello. I’m thinking exactly what I mean to be thinking. He’s always dancing with Dasha right before thing get interesting around here.” And it sure can get interesting fast.

“They just met boss.”

“You’re thinking of things three dimensionally and I am thinking of things fifth dimensionally, even sixth or seventhly and I know that when those two dance. Fucking trouble. Niggers with arms in the streets. Israeli mind games. Decapitations on camera and lynchings to boot. Lynchings and lots burnings of bodies.  It’s time to call up all our troops, every single man to the front.”

Justin sometimes suspected the boss was fucking insane, but the old man had a gift.

The lights come on and the remaining guests not vouched for are herded like drunk cats out the secondary exit on to Ludlow street until no one is left inside but the staff, a handful of regulars and of course Sasho with his cigar.

Daria and Sebastian wander out into what’s left of the night on the Lower East Side.

Out of the corner of his eye Sasho notices the 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 murder at the top of your lungs and no one would know.

Of the four little Mexicans none are taller than four feet a piece and they must carry drag the body down the stairs.

The corpse is pale from exsanguination.

 

“Into the soup?” asks Enrique from Monterrey in Mexican Spanish.

 

And Sasho nods. Let the dead keep eating the dead, like they do out in the colonies. James White and James Brown sit with their drinks in near silence. Tanya counts money. Martina counts money with a smoke in her mouth for some reason naked as they day she was born. Justin Toomey sits on the bar next to Sasho. Wondering how many days the Tavern has left.

Scene 5

Scene Five

Crown Heights

 

 

The room was jam-packed. People sitting on the floor, on the tables, people out in the hall. Many of the apartment blocks on Schenectady Ave have concrete inner court yards, have multiple means to get in and out without keys, lot of places to run and evade the police. The followers of the Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Chabad Movement congregate near Kingston Avenue and the large Afro-Caribbean community stays more toward Utica; but for the most part the blacks and Jews 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’s 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 neon lighting grid in the basement flickered its blinding light. Suddenly there was a hush. Three men dressed in black pushed forward through the mob. 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 make music or athletics for the whites. But lately for the struggling Jamaican and Haitian lower classes there were the words of Mickhi Dbrisk.

“You know what the trouble is these days?” he began.

“We work. We starve. We fight amongst ourselves. We embrace another civilizations God and we sing to hymns to white man on a cross. We work more, we hustle more, we get sucked into criminality, negativity and vice. They lock up one in 8 of our 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 power structure. My name is Mickhi Brisk and I am here to tell you brothers and sisters not just how it is, but how it could be.”

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

“The white man says we need schoolin’. But not a single one of our schools is well funded or intact. So we try go to college, but the majority of the colleges where actual opportunity is found are not open to us.”

“The white man says get jobs. So we 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.”

“The white man says you ain’t a slave! That you can get some, equal opportunity, but as we all know. They on some shit. We are willingly patriating in a bondage system that get more work out of us than slavery did!”

“Now, I ain’t some redundant brother. Here me now. Do not. Do not I repeat blame the whites fo’ yo’ problems. The white man doesn’t want to hear it, can’t hear it, so it won’t do no good fo’ the community. Ya see, lots of brothas out there will tell you that blame needs to be cast everywhere but here.  They say “BUY BLACK”. They say “BECOME MUSLIM”. They tell you “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” Hell I say it to, our lives matter. But itz the language behind the diction that’s important.” The whites kill us in the streets. They humiliate us and strip our rights in the court rooms. They lock up whole generations and take away our votes. The time for resistance was before they took us out of Africa, but the solution is not confrontation and protest. We must focus on control of our own development and intuitions! Like out Jewish brothers and sisters right upstairs do.

 

The youth began to leave.

“Hold the fuck up,” said Mickhi Dbrisk.

“You wanna go play gangsta, you’ll end up in a coffin. You wanna be a man. Hold the fuck up. Let’s drop this criminal shit today and we’ll teach you how to find with mathematics, with science with economics and with strategy.”

 

A few people, mostly young hoods walk out, but the masses were becoming enthralled.

 

“I come before you with a simple message. We as a community have suffered the injustice of being begotten by slaves into a modified slavery. We can’t hold onto that, but we must not ever forget it. We, the descendants of black African people are no better or worse than the white people. Bear in mind, when I say white people, I’m not talking color of skin. I mean the establishment. The man. There are many types of people and situations and circumstances dictate the state of current affairs. But learn to think about class not just race. So many out there will fight and die for their race or their religion. What I say is fuck your race? White people are slaves too. Yellow people, Brown people, Muslims and even the Jews are all bound slaves on in this world system. We need allies for our liberation, but do not hear my words and think we plan to start a plantation razing race war.”

 

There is a 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 won ship not burn the ship and drown together. What oppresses one man oppresses everyman, 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 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 bull shit!” He pauses. “I am here to say, Let’s get free together.”

If anyone had the audacity to speak up now it was young Tina Shabazz.

“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 retorted.

“Like my grandpa did?”

She would often claim Malcolm was her grandpa. 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.

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

“What fucking community Mickhi? Harlem’s now half white, in five to ten years Bed Stuy will be too.”

“Not if we unite and resist,” 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 loseies and the next big score. How you gonna rally um them? How you gonna wake up all the good striving Christians and Separatist Muslims? What does Uhuru and your Jew 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.”

“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 Dbrisk. “RARARA. Uhuru Movement! All power to the people!” the same horseshit grandpa shouted.”

“As you will be Tina. As you will be.”

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 have room for Bloods and Crips, and we have room for strivers, bourgeoisie niggas 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 in the 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 whites, the Muslims, the Jews and even the Irish,” 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 and autonomy and human rights. If you ain’t running’ wit it run from it.”

 

“Well nigga, how do me an’ my squad get in,” asks a tough young thug on the wall?” who one his government papers was written down as Joshua Hunter.

 

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

Scene 4

Scene Four

Caribbean Sea

 

 

For many years there has been a persistent conspiracy theory about boats and planes going missing in the North Caribbean within an area called the Bermuda Triangle. While a range of legends both mysterious and scientific have been laid out in varying circles, to date no real valid objective theory has been substantiated.

It is towards this Triangle from an approach between Dominican Republic and the U.S. Colony Puerto Rico that the submersible will make its determined approach toward the eastern coast of the United States after dropping its precious cargo in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

The black freighter is nearly two Manhattan city blocks long. One of the largest submersibles constructed in the period of the Pax Americana between Cold War One and Two, loosely 1989 to 2001. No one is sure what the Chinese have developed since then, but surely large, deadly impressive Chinese things. The Black Mermaid, the new name of this submarine since its purchase/capture, is hidden by virtually all conventional forms of technological detection by the depths it can descend. Because of its reactor, air recycling purifiers, heavy stores of food and fresh water it can remain undetected indefinitely able to deliver a payload of intercontinental ballistic missiles, that no one of the rebel alliance ever intends to use. Via hope, you feign intention.

The ship is rumored to have only five functional warheads. But, that is five more than anyone needs to reduce major cities to ashes. More importantly than missiles is that right now this ship is hosting about half of the rebel government in exile of Israel, Palestine and Kurdistan. Some forty co-chairs, political heads and their immediate families. Most of those families are somewhat smaller now, many lives reduced by the hasty exodus after the battle of Madeira. Waves of killing machines had just one month before surprised the hidden rebel bases. Except for the Kurds which have families larger than most of the crew of the ship. All members of those families could fire Kalashnikovs, but everyone lost someone. It amounts to just under two thousand high value persons they were moving from Sakhalin to Trinidad & Tobago. Very important persons. Before the strike team is loosed off the Eastern American coast most of the rebel government will be brought to the relative safety of Port of Spain, Trinidad.

 

Yulia Romanova, Adelina, Kudzai and Oleg the Bear have been confined democratically and by an armed Ethiopian Israeli sentry to a small bunk room on a lower deck. The size of the vessel is sprawling. No one trusts the three Russians. There is a Spartan, wood plated and red rust room with two bunk beds for each gender and a small common room for playing cards and drinking. They are coldly and politely given three meals a day in this room since they were taken on board in Sakhalin; a Russian island north of Japan.

 

Oleg the Bear is imposing while remaining intellectual.

 

“No, I’ve never read a thing, he’s written; though I’m told I’m depicted as some real shtarker. A brutal tough guy who loves taking women’s clothes off with my hands and camera. We met in some other life, but he doesn’t remember. When we met again he’ll look to me as some another older brother he never had.  I will only just encourage him to write,” states Oleg the Bear and all nod in agreement. Yulia Romanova, a tall Slavic pixy shaped conventionally like a Barbie modal doesn’t even enjoy reading. In Russian or Angliski. Hasn’t read a book since she was forced to attend High school. She has dark brown hair and doesn’t appear very crucial to the operation. But, she is actually the bomb maker. She’s not paid to look pretty, but she is. She’s not paid to fuck men on demand, which she won’t. She isn’t a subject matter expert on American affairs. But, she can build and place satchel bombs in expensive hand bags, simple enough, the extent of her patriotism.

 

On the monstrous underwater vessel called the Black Mermaid; traveling propelled by its nuclear reactor towards the United States; the extraction and intervention squad sits for black bread, herring, tea and Compot, sweet berry punch and some Russian Standard Vodka.

 

The Chinese had finished a canal across quietly Socialist Nicaragua that was three times the size of the US controlled one in Panama. But, for some reason very few people in the USA even knew the thing was operational. It was through this cognitively non-existent mega water way the Black Mermaid nuclear submarine had passed with prior authorization on its run into American waters after it’s off load of high level rebel leadership in Trinidad.

 

There were all these people that no one trusted the Russians to be around. Not to meet and not to see. They were taken in hoods from a safe house in Sakhalin, de-hooded in this very bunk room and the only person they had even ever met was this nameless Ethiopian sentry in a grey uniform holding an Uzi. Adelina had been taken to her own room just up the hall and was visited twice by the infamous Emma Solomon. But, none of the others in the unit had left the room. Which was vaguely confining but no one was particularly claustrophobic. Oleg and Yulia mostly played cards. Kudzai mostly read the Jesus books, or engaged in quiet mediation. The only time the four of them talked was during daily meals. Thankfully no one was a smoker.

 

 

Kudzai is very muscular from years of hiking, swimming and combat. Big in all four ways that matter. His biochemist brain, his black noble soul, his empathetic heart and his Shona warrior hands. Oleg Medved, otherwise known as Oleg the Bear is perhaps physically larger without being obese, but they are big in different ways. Oleg is simply physically imposing, but his brain, heart and hands; they are smaller. He’s the unit’s intelligence officer, so all hope he is as clever as he appears to be. Kudzai is a holder of a Trinidadian passport. He is dark as night. Black even for the eyes of white men that turn many shades of not Caucasian into racist enemy others. Kudzai stands nearly six feet tall. He is by far the most trusted person in the unit that was being briefed just one hour before deployment, as he is a member of the revolutionary army while these three Russians are all under contract.

 

Kudzai and Oleg are both witty conversationalists and do their best to engage the two women they will be working with. Kudzai is here primarily to protect Adelina, since the other two Russians Oleg and Yulia are expendable. He will break the back of any person who might lay their hands on the candidates Emma and Adelina. He has taken a blood oath to protect the chosen; his main task on this mission will be to protect Ms. Adelina while she attempts to enter the dreams of Sebastian Adon, and keep him from unleashing his fighters in ways that might trigger a bloody, bloody bloodbath and catastrophe. In fact, their unit, now in massive black nuclear submarine once owned by the State of Israel is hurtling toward the international maritime border.

 

They will let most of these very important passengers off in Port of Spain, but this unit will remain below decks until they get to American waters.

 

Oleg Medved will be quick to tell you that “Oleg the Bear” is certainly not the nice Ukrainian Jewish or later Israeli name his mother gave him. But, it will be his name for now.

He is very likable. Gregarious in the right word. He goes nowhere without a camera and takes a lot of pictures some arty, some naughty, some of assets to note all of them quite professional. He even has a good one of Ms. Adelina giggling on the first time they met; which was a few weeks ago in Sakhalin, that cold vile place.

 

Oleg is the Communications Officer for their little squad, which is nice way of saying the intelligence man. It is his responsibility to work with his partner Ms. Yulia Romanova, to whom he sometimes calls “his muse”. They knew each other from before. Yulia alongside being a slender and sensuous dark brundinite she was very good at building little bombs. And also good for social engineering.

 

“Every artist ultimately dreams of fucking their muse,” Oleg said over dinner one night in the lower depths cabin.

 

“Don’t dream too hard. I have a boyfriend,” Yulia replied.

 

If it was the duty of Adelina Blazhennaya to enter the mind of Sebastian Adon and take control of the resistance apparatus working towards a vast national uprising set for an upcoming hidden date; no longer hidden to the National Security Agency and also the Department of Homeland Security’s secret police forces. It was the duty of Kudzai to use his training to help her enter that glorious but treacherous rebel of mind of Adon’s. See what was actually happening in America Babylon. See if the resistance was really able to pull this off. Then it was Oleg Medved’s job to teach the resistance how to use the special new tools of technology and magic developed in the Sharashka in Hong Kong. Or, if things were quite fubar and infiltrated; they would just mop up anyone who might be able to identify Solomon or any of the other candidates.

 

“What’s a candidate?” Yulia asks finally.

 

“People descended from the bloodlines of the seven original prophets,” Kudzai replies.

 

“Does that mean?” Yulia exclaims pointing at Adelina.

 

“Yes, she’s related to Jesus or somebody, pass the potatoes,” mutters Oleg.

 

“That’s not substantiated,” Adelina replies.

 

“She’s descended from either Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed or some hidden line they haven’t figured out yet,” Kudzai interjects, “both Adelina and certainly Commander Solomon are both candidates.

 

“Interesting,’ smirks Oleg who doesn’t believe in any of the God delusions, “pass the Vodka please.”

 

These were upside down cake times, you didn’t know what to believe as the world kept unraveling. Were Adelina really a powerful sorcerous shaman and considered a candidate since birth; well hopefully that meant this would go more smoothly. If not, well she looked too hippy to pull her weight as death squad member. Which is what was going to happen to Sebastian and the rest of the American rebel leaders if this thing was compromised. So basically Adelina and Kudzai as believers were here to make the uprising work. Oleg and Yulia were here to liquidate the American’s if things had gotten fucked up. Life was to have balance even in insurgency and murder.

 

Adelina was to lead quietly the unit and ensure the outcome of prophesy foretold in a little book called the New Social Gospel revealed by some magnimonious higher power to Emma Solomon in the year 2001. Which was the same year that she was captured by the secret police, tortured repeatedly, brutally raped, then crucified and left to die in the Negev Desert.

 

What politicians said on the international circus stage were hardly what their populations connected via the inter-web were ready to agree to, not a single year longer.

 

December 21^st, 2012 was to be the year according to the Mayan calendar that a great shift would occur in Humanity. Well that was not the exact date of the American uprising. But those great spiritual cosmic forces were being factored in. It had taken over twenty years to coordinate a military insurrection in the belly of the empire.

 

Oleg and Yulia had worked together before. Adelina and Kudzai had just met and the unit was assembled about a week ago. They were all now confined in this cabin and to break the ice over vodka, Oleg the Bear got them playing a famous game of gradual interrogation called “Three Thing to Know about me.”

 

“Let me tell you three some things about me,” Oleg said to them. They were drinking vodka and eating black bread with caviar and herring, onions and salted tomatoes, goose paty, salo and strange orange vegetable that only grows below the soil of Russia.

 

“I am not a creature that will live vicariously!” he declared in English out of respect for Kudzai who spoke no Russian.

 

“I am not any kind of believer like you two in some vast invisible forces that I cannot measure hold and see. I am not here there therefore as a fact of faith in your Comrade Solomon. I am here because I have money and orders and a contract to be here. And that is simple enough.”

He continues, “I was told to come and evaluate these Americans. See if they are finally coming to the table of struggle. The story of their uprising most precisely is interesting to the person who pays me. I was told to set up these communication lines so Americans can join the global revolution underway for over two hundred years. I was told to help murder every single one of them that might have gone over to the enemy.”

 

“You have no enemies’ friend, you are only here for money!” Kudzai proclaims, “What does it really matter if Sebastian is hero, a hooligan or a traitor to us all. You will be paid the same amount.”

“I am actually paid more to not kill anyone,” Oleg replies.

“Yes, it’s clearly in the contract we get less the more people who die,” Yulia says.

“Why are you really here,” Kudzai questions, “Doesn’t the enemy have a bigger bank account?”

“Listen. We do professional work. That’s what we’re being paid for,” Yulia declares.

“What are you all here for, really? If you don’t believe in miracles and prophesy,” Kudzai says, calmly without any accusation in his tone.

 

“I am here too to enjoy myself, make money and take some pictures!” Oleg declares, “All the most reputable of foreign analysts, journalists, pundit and economists have declared an American uprising as literally impossible. Like you’d have to be working with God and Magic! Which you all seem to think you are. That nation on the mount would sooner watch sports than tune into see the world burning. This is just a fact! As long as they keep the flights to Europe running, as long as they have their beer, football and porn, hookers for those who can afford them then they will be the grinning bastards, the opulent retards, their cities blue grounds for the world elite to harvest more women and treasure!”

Then Oleg continues, “I’m going as a highly paid adventure tourist. I will take a million pictures; I will leave behind more than I take away. Save me your magic! This is a revolution that will be wiped from the history books in treachery and gore. They will all be killed. The only question is, will they be killed from incompetence that comes with their privilege, or because their top leadership was infiltrated long ago” declares Oleg Medved.

 

“Have you any faith in the prophesy?” Yulia sarcastically asks him in Russian.

 

Yulia was prim. Oleg had never known her to loyal to her boyfriend patron back in somewhere, but Oleg had come to see women as accessories for men, adjuncts and muse for the doing of big things or even just fun sweaty thrusting things. What he noticed since the Romanoff Bratva took over his other contract was that he had more time to pursue his art. Money absolutely brought options.

 

Oleg had a long running morally ambiguous relationship with Yulia founded on the principle that her partner back in Russia was not her boyfriend or her husband, just some patron paying for a flat in Moscow and an Amex. The world was burning. They made money wherever they could. These were times of fun and games with papers and loyalties. They took a lot of pictures together; he of her and she and he from his hip. His burly part beard and broad shoulders were quite the opposite of her elegant spindle form, her fake but convincing to touch tits, her black brown hair falling back and forth over shoulders as she let him capture her.

 

“No faith at all in anything, or anyone, certainly not the fat Americans,” Oleg declares.

 

Yulia feigns a small, false pout. Then immediately grins. While her beauty was not a question, her eyes lacked what the parapsychologists called the Old Soul depth of Comrade Blazhennaya.

 

“And you little Mosquito,” exclaimed Yulia referring to the American translation of Blazhennaya’s fictionist passport name, “Do you really believe? Do you really think you’re some chosen child of God?”

 

Adelina makes no motion to respond.

 

The conversation goes back to three things to know about each other. In the cultural context of Russia and Ukraine Oleg & Yulia make a lot of toasts and knock down their shots in celebration of the supposedly impossible; the hopeful success of their mission. Kudzai and Adelina stick to tea and water. But, then Yulia provokes the subject again. Emboldened by the drink.

 

“But really Mosquito! Do you believe in this blatnoy? Or are you being well paid too?”

 

Before Adelina answers Yulia Romanova’s inquiry, her face grimaces with a hard and quiet smile. Now into the thirteenth shot of Russian Standard Vodka Yulia has never seen such a sinister grin. Oleg was drunk but wholly functional. Yulia was probably able to drive a car or mix some chemicals into an improvised explosive device, but now though she was seeing things.

Drunk was the only way to even take in or put up with this rhetoric. The theories of mostly nonviolent resistance to oligarchy, codified by Emma Solomon, Avinadav DeBuitléir and of course; Comrade Sebastian Adon. The likelihood of death in taking this assignment.

 

Drunk Yulia now jerked to attention and carried out a most dramatic reading!

 

 

Adelina’s eyes began glowing a brown into eerie green on gray. Yulia jumped in her seat, then Adelina’s eyes went grey on grey and Oleg arched his back contorting into a Bhutto type posture, spasmodically twitching and frozen. Grinning obscenely. Oleg too lurched out of his seat but then by the force of her mind and found himself saluting her.

 

And now, Emma Solomon in husky, but authoritative voice of a warrior queen spoke out the mouths of Adelina and Kudzai perfectly synchronized, and that was then Yulia and Oleg realized that neither the Romanoff Bratva nor the Israeli resistance forces were in charge of this mission at all.

 

The pair then both exclaimed possessed in the voice of Solomon, lips moving in unison:

 

 

“Welcome to the world to come. Open your eyes wide. By the time we are done here there will be no more safety for those men in high towers. Perched atop the mountains d in their gilded bunkers. No faction will be left standing. We were all born serfs or various types of half casted slave, but our unborn children have been assured their emancipation via deeds to come.”

 

 

 

Everyone dropped back into their seats postictal from possession, post coitus almost with no warm fluids. Oleg simply kept grinning refusing inside himself to believe. They had drugged him, it was simple as that. Kudzai smiled too, but it was the smile of happy belief. Yulia looked truly scared, emotions breaking through her year’s crafted control of countenance. And Adelina Blazhennaya in all her petit and unassuming compact grace then uttered, “Trust that among the Americans are many who have cried out over what happened in the killing fields and their sprawling slum cities and prison camps. They have more going on than dancing, fornicating and erection of taller towers and bigger, brighter stadiums. Have a little fucking hope,” she tells them.

 

“Don’t overestimate the prophesy or underestimate the cowboy libertarianism of the American resistance,” Adelina tells them, and pours them their next round of slightly poisoned shots.

 

“America, fuck yeah,” exclaims Oleg the Bear.

 

Scene 3

Scene Three

Upper West Side

 

         Located about seven miles north west from the District Financial is the Upper West Side; an affluent cluster of well-kept mostly spacious and well furnished apartment homes with door men running from 79th street to around 96th street between Central Park and the Hudson River. The entire island of Manhattan, excluding some small clusters of housing projects, section 8 and rent controlled units is the domain of the country’s elite, upper middle classes and new rich financial class. Sports players, movie actors and celebrities live their too.

Though undisputedly the wealthiest people, people who own property live on the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Central Park. This gentrification of the city which always had been took its purest form in the mid 1990’s when the economy was booming, the police forces were tripled, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and robber barons consolidated wealth alongside globalization and the demise of the Soviet Union.

By the time of the Great Recession in 2008, the only working class people living in Manhattan were clusters of petit-bourgeois professionals who bought things or secured rent controlled units in the 1980’s. The New York Times, the paper of record suggested that by 2012 there were over 57,000 individuals with net worth above 37 million apiece and greater living in the City. More concentrated wealth than London and only slightly behind Moscow.

Sebastian’s father is a dentist, he owns a small practice on Staten Island mostly treating cops, firemen and Sanitation worker families. The loft they own in the coop at the North end of the district financial is mostly paid off. Sebastian had never lived in it until about 5 months ago. He grew up in a rent controlled apartment in Waterside Plaza. He ran away from home at age 14, was locked up in a youth offender faculty by age 15, became a communist by age 16 and was living abroad for most of 17 and 18; then he came home and lived with his best friend Nikholai Rosetree Trickovitch for a period before chasing rooms for rent in all boroughs besides Staten Island where the rent was less than $500 a room, or a couch or on a floor mat.

 

There is no person on earth who better understands Sebastian then his best friend, his loyal droog, his comrade, partner and companion. They are so alike in both genes, upbringing and disposition they can anticipate each other.

 

The train ride on the 2 Red line from the Financial District historically preserved printshop Sebastian’s family lives in; to the 96th street and Broadway train station is about a twenty minute ride. Nikholai rarely goes downtown. Nikholai has long memory, he remembers most of the thirteen years contiguous friendship. It has had a lot of ups, downs and misadventures. But Sebastian brings a world of drama and intrigue to Nikholai’s life, which could have otherwise been uneventful. And Nikholai brings Sebastian qualities he utterly lacks; self analysis, dispassionate reasoning grounded in fact and most importantly; restraint.

 

Introverted Nikholai is happy in his solitude, while Sebastian can never enjoy being alone. The two men have come to need each other, but it is mostly Sebastian who is always in trouble and Nikholai who devises the maneuvers to the next to crisis.

 

They look out over privilege itself. Seventeen stories up, the rooftop deck of the Trickovitch Family Penthouse looks North and West over the Hudson River, the Upper East Side, and also the George Washington Bridge. There are not one but two private garden terraces. So much light and so much air, all somehow under nine hundred American dollars. Much to the chagrin of the Satmars who own the building, the House Trickovitch is completely rent controlled.

Most other families in the building were bought or were forced out. The whole building worth tens of millions, the unit they occupy could be sold for 5 million outright.

Sebastian Adon is wearing his favorite cap and looking somewhere between manic and marmalade, caught somewhere in between possessed with some inner zeal, and at timed calm, cool and collected. His eyes are strange and happy as though he wishes to recite a poem. Or give  a speech, which he frequently does at dinners, on trains and in public parks. He isn’t totally of this time, which is logical having immersed his thoughts in the past to make something better for the future. Although he does not ever smile except behind closed doors he is by all accounts charismatic. On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblesse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner in conspiracy Nikholai Trikhovitch.

Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trickovitch since the early 1981. That was not such a heyday for New York City as some newly arrived ‘hip’ individuals have come to believe. By the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down, there was trash everywhere you could get raped at knife point in an ally. You could get stabbed to death in a public place with dozens of people watching. That was the old New York.

 

Located on 95th and Riverside, it is now one of the most luxurious and safest of safe houses. Which is to say a lot of small talks happen here on sensitive things. It is rent controlled and guarded by Albanians. They are highly warlike these Albanians. Good at moving people and things, also safeguarding things for others. Nobody wants to fuck with the Russians, because they send Albanians.

 

The place has wall to wall books and a rather large aquarium filled with amphibious turtles. The building has gone coop, and they are the last remaining holdout sitting on a highly choice property paying $1,200 American a month for it adjusting for utilities and service fees. A good number of Jewish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully. For the Trickovitch family employs and are related to Jewish lawyers as well. It was once a little more of zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs. Now it is a sad, empty place for plotting with Nikholai’s fraternal twin brothers living in other cities and his parents more frequently at their upstate farm than here, often now for week at a time. The apartment has functioning landline.

 

Sebastian rarely calls by mobile when he intends to visit. He calls from a subway payphone to the land line and then just shows up. Nikholai was the very first young person they knew with a bulky mobile phone as early as 1998. Nowadays both men don’t carry them very regularly. Both men use quarters, both men have throw away $10 phones. They both have Sky Pagers, but neither are doctors.

Nikholai, it is rumored is paralyzed with some dark inner depression, some sickness inside him which makes him overly analytical. For a time he was married and playing house in Midwood, Brooklyn deep in the shtetl. Midwood is a place about one hour by train from 42nd Street, Time Square city center. One of the earliest New York settlements in the 16th century, now firmly in one of the largest eleven Jewish Quarters of the greater New York area. Nikolai’s father grew up there, as did Sebastian’s as did the populist secretly centrist politician Bernard Sanders currently running for the Presidential Primaries. Midwood is New York City’s most staunchly propertied Modern Orthodox Jewish district. Along with Crown Heights, Borough Park and Williamsburg which are the more black hat ultra-orthodox neighborhoods dominated by particular Rabbinic sects that find the entire gentile world profane and unholy. These four neighborhoods are surrounded and slightly intermixed with a sprawling array of Afro-Caribbean and African American ghettos and slums. The districts to toward the Southern Coast are Russian and Italian respectively, but most of the Italians left for New Jersey, Long Island and Staten Island in the 80’s. The Chinese quarter of Brooklyn is based in Sunset Park, but the epicenter of the colonization is over in Flushing, Queens. The unofficial population of Brooklyn is around 3-4 million persons, over a million not officially or legally supposed to be there.

Nikholai and his now wife, Krissy, moved to District Midwood as it was close to Brooklyn College where they were then going to school. They both had grown up in Manhattan. They lived a happy, secluded and hyper sexual life for more than half a decade out of sight and out of mind.

Then some years later, Krissy completely vanished, and Nikholai returned to the security of parent’s Upper West Side penthouse barely leaving now except for jaunts, benders, mild malingering whoring and occasionally a revolutionary plot, when he must to keep up appearances of being a trusted inner circle man. His connection to so called poltical activism is not academic or experienced, mostly were he to admit it, he has been sucked into the revolutionary vortex by association; enabling increasingly bold incarnations of Sebastian Adon’s little otriad; their irregular detachment for mutual aid and freedom fighting.

 

“The most striking thing about her is the murder in her eyes which beg a man closer with the promise of bliss then deny him everything,” mutters Sebastian. He’s always talking about and obsessing about, eyes.  Nikholai knows the code though.

 

Sebastian speaks of “her eyes” so he appears less crudely animalistic speaking of breasts and other luscious appendages. Behind this charade of romance, knowing Sebastian for so long, since teenage times; Nikholai knows the projected poet, from the lusty rake and barely tamed savage. The periodic excursions into serial monogamy are punctuated with inserting his penis artfully around town.

Nikholai isn’t himself tonight, he’s not even putting on a show of host and entertainer.

 

Looking out towards the George Washington Bridge, Nikholai thinks of suicide, fleetingly.  Sebastian observes the same Fort Washington district rising as the highest point on the island of Manhattan. There is no suicide in Sebastian, it is removed from his very way of being. He periodically began mentioning to his close confidants, “If you ever here I killed myself, it’s a lie, I don’t have it in me, they finally did it.” But, you don’t kill white people in America, it as to look like something else.

 

Who are ‘they’, well the story just sort of started.

 

Sebastian ruminates in butterfly flaps of mental head space. In his wandering mind he sees all the times he’s walked aimlessly around Fort Tryon Park with a particular lost lover. Holding her little cold hands. One partner, in particular, comes to his mind for Fort Washington District; the Russian Jewish quarter perched up in the rafters of New York City. For after her, none of the other previous ones had mattered. Her name was Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Perechenova, he has fought very hard to keep her love alive in some tantric, flickering form. She had left him for the fortieth time, this time breaking off both communication and sex, and ended all correspondence about six sad months prior. No other woman had even crossed his mind, since then. But, then came Daria to kill him. Hardly an improvement really.

 

But, some neurons fire faster than others, and then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination. All previous lessons were lost. Were Futurist New York anything like more medieval times, both Sebastian Adon and Nikholai Trickovitch; are the disgraced sons of Hebrew Dukes. In  layman’s terms, the prodigal children of the Upper Middle Classes of New York Jewish gentry. Both blessed with privilege, education, several serfs and white skin coats, cursed with mental illness and an evolving revolutionary thinking.

 

Nikholai was briefly an unlicensed private detective moon lighting as an accountant, wiggling his way listlessly through college. Helping cheating wives get their proofs of infidelity or parents find their dead kids in Newark, New Jersey. He can get to a lot of things in the dark of the web. He is now moonlighting as a driver for the Red Cross in their vast housing and logistics Ponzi scheme, taking money raised from one catastrophe to band aid, blanket and water supply the next one. They hand out prepaid ATM cards to people who lose their homes to fire or disaster, that’s surely appreciated. He’s cut off a lot of people, he begrudgingly lets Sebastian get him out of the house once or twice a year.

In this year, 2012 he can barely manage to leave this house, but he likes to make short walks into the dusk. He is a mostly functional alcoholic, notwithstanding his inability to hold a job, his failure to get over his disappeared wife, his utter failure to finish university and his paralysis. Haitian Rum Straight. Maker’s Mark Straight. And cartons of Newport cigarettes. Sebastian has never questioned what Nikholai does for work. He does something with the internet, living off his wealthy father and selling pills through Albanians to Columbia University students. The children of the elite are addicted to something called Adderall to study and take their exams. The Ivy League is only nine blocks north. Sebastian stays out of his friends’ money. Almost all of his friends have either clean ambulance money or dirty criminal money, and not much in between. Colluding with angels and devils to make an uprising occur, things like that take allies and real dependable, actually won’t run allies take time.

 

“Go work from somewhere warm droog,” Sebastian always encourages him, but Nikholai is cold and spiritually long dead. The blackness in him sees reality as it is, not how it should be or could be or filtered heavily through the ego. “Get yourself a new woman! A blonde with big inviting tits!”

 

But Nikholai never heeds Sebastian call to pack up for prettier places or faces and Sebastian never listens to Nikholai’s persistent advice to stay away from Russian women or be less of committed Communist.

 

Back in the year 2000 they both joined the Communist Party of America, but got kicked out for throwing a huge underage drinking party in it, also launching a short non-lethal bombing campaign connected to slave labor and garment industry.

 

Nikolai sees the bridge out there in the pretty lit up night and thinks about sweet surrender. Sebastian, though here to talk about Daria and his near death experience, remembers his Yelizaveta, a fond memory of challenging strokes.

 

Yelizaveta who Sebastian met while attending Hunter College lived in a cute two bedroom apartment on Fort Washington Ave in a six story building above Fort Tryon; the tallest point in Manhattan. Officially her mother was a maid at the Benjamin Hotel and her father un-employed on disability. But, that was not in anyway their real jobs or capabilities. For on the outside the family looked like a struggling working poor immigrant story with young Yelizaveta clawing for the Russian American dream via medical school at Stony Brook University. But Sebastian was privy to the truth.

 

“In Russia we were Jews. Outside of Russia, we are finally called Russians. We are treated about the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father, Alexandre. Yelizaveta was Sebastian’s partner and paramour for the past two years. She met him in the student movement days before she left for Medical School in Long Island. They wrote many months of letters then for two years were partners and rigorous lovers. Then things fell apart. While Daria was igniting some new desires and unsung anthems, Nikholai had heard the songs all before. For years with Yelizaveta and a couple more with several women before her. Now Sebastian and Nikholai, born nine days apart were both nearly 30, but once they were both as wild at age 14. They had loved and lost many times, though Nikholai had loved and lost everything when his wife left him and disappeared into thin air. They knew each other’s’ songs.

 

They had all called in chips and put out feelers to find his Krissy. No one likes to hopelessly cling to a failing marriage then have it break apart. People like even less when the person they love becomes a vapor. A ghost. When all the leads dried up there was still this terrible hope she was somewhere she could return from. When they almost had every ambulance and every gangster, every bad man, every snitch and every soundbite looking for Nikholai’s ex-wife. They went together finally to Alexandre Perchevney, the most dangerous man in New York City. The father of Sebastian’s favorite ex. A person who according to the IRS was collecting disability from a small rent stabilized flat in Washington Heights while his wife worked full time cleaning hotel rooms.

But, Alexandre owned properties all over town. Alexandre, born in Ukraine held a growing empire in disguise. His wife, Yelizaveta’s more Magda Marina; someone that looked exactly like her was indeed cleaning rooms. Someone that looked just like her had raised little Yelizaveta; but nothing was what it appeared to be.

 

Alexandre is called Sasho by those that think they know him well. He is a fierce and indomitable man, but also a gregarious buffoon behind the doors of his famous tavern Social Club when no one was looking but those he mostly trusted dancing about with a cigar grinning. Sasho is also quite a mastermind. He found himself with a great deal of money at the end of the 90’s. Always plotting and constantly cashing on his plots. A Ukrainian Jew when he felt like it. A Bulgarian Mobster when he felt like it. The IRS auditor registered him at receiving about $600 a month in disability. The very last man you’d ever want to owe. But Sebastian had owed him several times. But, even Sasho couldn’t find Krissy. Or that’s what he finally said after getting a lot of free work out of them.

 

The family safe houses were still ‘too hot’ to talk about anything heavy. There had been multiple police raids to Sebastian’s loft since 2000. The young men were always plotting too and that plotting got them investigated by multiple police and intelligence services. Sebastian had to flee the country for the year of 2000-2001, he moved between London, Paris, Madrid and eventually Tel Aviv evading allegations of terrorism in New York, largely unfounded. He came back in November of 2001 after the towers fell and moved in for a time with Nikholai’s family. Shortly after they got back to plots, plans, direct actions and trouble. As young men causing trouble should do, they both moved deep into Brooklyn in 2005. But while Brooklyn and the Bronx have many alcoves for sheltering rebels and criminals, they always needed a dangerous protector. So since, their little movement has taken shelter under the roof of a loving lesser Post-Soviet Oligarch. And there was a lot of business relationship now facilitated by this. In 2010 amid a terrible blizzard Sebastian Adon had saved the leg and life of his then girlfriend Yelizaveta Alexandre’s daughter or at the very least fought his way through a snowstorm to rescue her from a broken tibia, lying bleeding and abandoned in JFK airport. That night was so pivotal for it was the first time Sasho owed anyone anything and found out about the secret little thing is daughter had with Sebastian. But then a lot of other things happened. Sasho was shot and nearly died. It was messy, Sebastian killed a few people that night. Yelizaveta loved him even more, her father respected and owned him. But her mother was horrified and worked full time to end the entire relationship. All in just a seven day blizzard.

Sebastian was locked up for a month. Not for the men he killed, but from lack of sleep. Sometimes when the work he did took over and he wandered around town in big circles engaging the universe and lot of other people. An ambulance picked him up near Coney Island.  He never was held very long before the American Civil Liberties Union or family lawyers got things negotiated. They never killed anyone or blew anything up, that’s what the lawyers always repeated over the years.

Most of the work Sebastian and his outfit did was propaganda. Historical lectures, street theatre, speeches and lots of diner salons on topics of subversive relevance. Sebastian’s father was the dentist for a lot of detectives and high ranked cops, that helped some. Sebastian and Nikolai picked up with with Sasho, that helped a lot. A lot of the time some standoff happened and Sebastian took himself hostage. The police hospitalized him a lot more than they put him in the tombs. It was easier to get rid of him that way, since they recognized, those that knew or heard that he was city paramedic and an affiliated person who never put boys in blue in harm’s way for the most part.

Yelizaveta’s mother ordered her to break the whole affair off immediately in the Winter of 2010. So after a year of hiding and sneaking around, breaking up, fucking hard and making up, then breaking up again in circles; the day after his birthday 28, giving him a good hard last ride she decisively ended everything. Sasho was never consulted with or weighed in on the romance between Sebastian and his daughter. He was of course by then aware it was happening, and did nothing. Sebastian never asked permission or asked him to do anything after the final break up. The man being paid to be her disabled father, the double who knew Yelizaveta more than her biological father; well he was the only other person sad about the whole thing.

 

To the brutal and brilliant ‘Bulgarian’ gangster slash businessman, Sebastian Adon amused him. Reminded him of himself as young man before he lost Communism and found a million ways to make money at the tree of life.

 

Not that any of these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Except to paint the portrait of Sebastian as more hopeless romantic puppy than a stone cold killer, which he eventually became after losing enough friends in the years of the underground. He still loves young Yelizaveta the prim, Jappy pre-medical student as ferociously as he ever had. He served her needs and courted her involvement in political projects, and she certainly did quite a lot to assist him. But, her mother wanted her to have nothing to do with a young man so alike to her father, both hear real father and the man hired to play her father.

Nikholai traverses a daily memory road his with his vanished ex-wife. Wonders did she leave him or was she taken away, and by who? Sebastian is regularly and often existentially dying from his beliefs. Women just distract that he is a committed zealot, let him pretend he want’s a ‘normal life’. When his partners reject him and his unstable, if not probably impossible pursuits, he goes harder at them. Which thus magnifies the danger to himself and others. Before this recent anguish over Yelizaveta, there was Hali Vik, the artistic Swedish anarchist to whom he was engaged to mary. There was also the debutante Ukrainian Maria Parsheva. Less passionate, but certainly highly influential were Polish Communist Joanna Kocab and his Sephardic Israeli partner Emma Solomon.

Not that the list of other unlisted, less contemplated lovers and girlfriends were of less importance to his human development, but the women who evolved him were their own league, they all attempted to love Sebastian as he was and better the quality of his life game.

Maria and Yelizaveta were the two other former Soviet lovers Sebastian had taken as his closest partners in the past four years. It would be incorrect to say he dated “Russian Women exclusively”; as later inferred by the Russian photographer and Israeli gangster Oleg Medved. He had merely intimately engaged only just two, one right after the other. And that was enough for him to suspect there was something remarkable about the character of a “Russian woman.” The first, Maria brought such stability and calm to his mind. She made a good home with him in Midwood, she pumped him full of sex. But Sebastian did not love her completely for she did not excite at all intellectually. She would suck on his cock for hours, or take in in umcortible places sooner than talk about the ‘emancipation of the negro’ as she called his work dismissively. She never seemed angry or critical. She removed Sebastian from the stresses of paramedicine and organizing.

“That’s all she seemed good for,” Nikholai once suggested, but he later impressed her on one very particular occasion.

Nikholai remembered redhead Maria as something of a “submissive Soviet Jessica Rabbit,” complete with a cute little mole, slightly husky voice and marked non-fascination with much that wasn’t Soviet in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody mess in 2007. That was the time when Nikholai, Sebastian, Maria and a foxy little Chechen named Angelika had to hold off a murderous mob of sixteen working poor white hooligans from Gerritsen Beach with a briefcase, a prayer, and good Bangladeshi Samaritan. Which got them all over the papers and Sebastian into the ranks of the FDNY.

Sebastian would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justin Thomas described her. This was a real gesture of flattery on Justin’s part by in calling Maria “Betty Shabazz” he was calling Sebastian a white Malcolm X. Or something to that effect. Betty, like Maria in a most ways strong woman who stood behind her larger than life man without involving herself in the political melee. Sebastian and Maria lived together for over a year, they broke up on Block Island. Sebastian had left her on the beach and swam out into the night.

 

Nikholi just thought of Maria a Russian geisha, until he watched her do the train job. At that moment under fire, her realness did come out. Nikh still had no trouble after the break up confiding she was just a Geisha, a stay at home fuck.

 

The second Russian girlfriend Yelizaveta was headstrong and wild and Sebastian could never forget her, no matter how many women he got under. Yelizaveta, a spoiled daughter of a dangerous mobster in a subjective reality, a working poor dreamer in another. Hustling to become a doctor to get her parents out of poverty. No one approved of her at all. Though no one really said so while it seemed to make him happy; everyone later told him ‘Yeli’ was walking all over him.

Nikholai remembers young Yelizaveta emerging into the picture, and Sebastian’s bedroom sometime in early 2009. He remembers her at meetings, and social functions as “a highly mouthy Americanized blonde know it all little bitch who walked all over you privately and publicly and privately yet again. She emptied out your pockets, put wild eyed ideas in your head, and reduced you to bawling tears when she eventually left you over her mother’s total lack of approval.”

But Sebastian never saw it like that, he’d held the relationship long past when it should have ended. He left here with a box of letters and a diamond engagement ring he’d bought from some Rabbi in a bathhouse.

“Your women are never far from the very center of your goriest war stories,” Nick notes.

 

The two comrades Sebastian and Nikolai had been partners in the student movement, in the underground and in the insurgency and its defense committees 2000 when Sebastian got out of the behavior modification camps he’d spent a year in; escaping on Valentine’s Day back to New York from Upstate. The year they did their first job. They both opposed their government’s imperialism as well as the capitalist system generally. Sebastian always put amalgamated ideology to it, but Nikholai just always felt the government was repressive, the blacks totally oppressed and the population brainwashed into fat apathy.  There had been a lot of great and also “highly mediocre women” and a lot of jobs since then. Jobs, being their little word of resistance operations. But not for nothing, since Sebastian Adon entered his “Postsoviet amorous period,” as Nikholai liked to call it, well the jobs had gotten quite a lot more ambitious. The man needed an iron clad muse all assumed. In reality, he simply needed to be loved so that the love he put in the world could find a singular dedication, another soul to whom he could do all his work for.

“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly, love making? The full blown Russianness of her” asks Nikholai. As Sebastian had informed him that Daria was fully Slavic and all his other so-called Russian lovers were variations on Ukrainian Jews.

“Referring back to this new lady being a full blown Slav?”

“Certainly. Slav is only one letter from you being a slave after all. And you and I know full fucking well that it isn’t the female who’s the slave in these Cold War flings. Those women walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”

Sebastian had come to believe that Nikholai harbored some rather base prejudices against ‘the Russians’ but had never determined why. Nikholai had come to believe that Sebastian unable to love himself at all found himself enslaved by a series of at least partly damaged, somewhat dangerous, quasi gold digging immigrant women. Russian and non-Russian alike. Both men had father’s three of four generations removed from pre-Soviet Russia with Jew blood. Both had mothers eight or nine generations American by some distant way of Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and famine. Both men share a political conviction perhaps reflective best of being born Petit Bourgeoisie in the leading city in the last violent flutters of an Empire.

 

Sebastian had not previously thought of how Dasha performed in bed. It was as if he had known that already, being a man. From first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to find a cocktail.

She could clearly fuck a man into pieces.

That wasn’t up for any speculation on his part. But this was not the immediate attraction, the shapely form and the physical curves, the eyes he keeps talking about and the crazy in her. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. There are poems and songs about that. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Postsoviet partners. He felt a sexual pull, animalistic in nature. But this was a different thing. A Deja-vu about loss and longing.

“I bet she is ferocious,” remarks Nikholi.

 

An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop but two days ago.

“I can’t stop thinking about her. She’s made more remarkable not by her sheer dangerousness, but by some feeling I have of having seen her before in another time. I speak not about a blackout in hat Tavern. I must confide in low volume about other lives and other worlds. A pure predator not even posing as a house pet! And the things she confessed to under torture.”

 

“Tortured her did you?”

 

“I did. With my choice words.”

 

“This is your primary instrument of torture tovarish.”

 

Tovarish is former Soviet for, comrade. Nikolai is a Russian-Jewish-Irish-German mutt just like Sebastian. Their New Yorkerness, supersedes all that imagined identity. Neither of their mothers is halachically Jewish, though Sebastian’s mother Barbara had gone through some motions to convert to the watered down Reform version.  So the black hats would, of course, disavow them both as sad losses to the Gentiles. Neither Sebastian nor Nikholai could marry lawfully in Israel neither, but that didn’t bother Nikholai as he had no intention of ever going to that particular colony after hearing many of Sebastian’s accounts. Sebastian and Nick both look enough like “the Russians,” but they speak, and they think like children of the American Upper Middle-class intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals. Nikholai’s father is a neurologist, and Sebastian’s a dentist. Both fathers are committed, Jewish Atheists. Both gentile mothers being American ‘hippie’, openly minded sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to their lower case communism as they’d be denounced as over and over. But, they were not orthodox communists, or working in the local Party organs. The nine of which in New York were marginal anachronisms at best composed of the awkward and the elderly. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much-trampled masses out of empathy not necessity. They were only about as Jewish as their value for education, but sometimes Sebastian was known to make a rude display of it in the form of Holiday parties.

 

They did Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year’s, Hanukkah the eight-day gambling potato pancake party, Passover the Exodus Fest; and Sukkot the eight-day tent party feast. And the rest were all causally omitted. As well as poorly understood.

 

They had met in their freshman year of High School. Sebastian’s home had been robbed, and Nick had shown up with some weapons and an offer to help him get his honor back, his rep. They rarely agreed on anything besides opposition to the government, and the greatness of big firm breasts augmenting rough sex, but they were very similar men in disposition. They both enjoyed the drink and could work each other into nights of sheer ethanol rampage. In City, culture, genes, and habits their cloth was of similar cut. Until the year 2010 though, Sebastian has been married to his interpretations of Communism via Zionist Universalism while Nikholai had been married to Krissy, not needing angry politics at all. But things fall apart. Sebastian returned from his ‘second homeland’ in cuffs and Krissy ran out maybe, then as stated completely vanished. It was perhaps Nikholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied what he had imagined was his occupied homeland or imagined was his destiny that put them back together, left them open to suggestion. This lead to the expeditions into Haiti and the beginning of the armed struggle. Via a machine of networked factions and sympathizers the two had built in tandem over a decade.

 

And let us all be frank that women can give men any number of tremendous suggestions and wield a power that shapes a man’s deeds. Perhaps you could say women, with more love for the world and more investment in its future can direct the violent ego driven nature of men.

 

“She didn’t tell me everything, but enough to conclude she is a victim, a prisoner of sorts. With a dark Post-Soviet past to unravel all of her callous behaviors and the smile she hides behind.”

They had toppled backward together toward the precipice, and in the free fall, he had pulled her with him to collective death only averted because of certain laws of physics. Well, it was impossible to know truly, Yelizaveta the young scientist could have explained it, but she was long gone these days.

Rather than tumble into a pit of death, Sebastian grabbing onto Daria altered the trajectory of the plummet. She had made every effort to follow his deadly, beckoning commands and rather than go through with it honorably he had tried to take her with him.

How Russian American.

“So what the fuck happened on that roof?” Trickovitch asks.

 

“Well toppled and we landed on top of each other half off the edge. Then we just lay there quietly panting. I realized that she had almost just killed me and I had almost just taken her with me toward death.”

“That’s hot. And by hot, I mean real fucking stupid.”

 

“Well, anyway. So hearts were racing and looking down into seventeen stories of death she then grabs my hand and bites down into my right shooter.”

 

Sebastian shows the wound. There were a literal ring of red bite marks around his right index finger.

“I think I know her from before,” Sebastian finally admits overtly.

“Before, eh. Tovarish. You need to take more of your medicine.”

“No, I mean maybe. But this was different. I am not making chemical, electrical mythologies droog; I remember Dasha Andreavna Skorbogatova Maccluskey from before.”

“You’ve always been a sick fuck. It gets worse when you low dose or drop dose, or of course wakefield and don’t go to sleep. And you need not let fourth-dimensional things interfere with the gathering war effort,” Nikholai replies and lights another menthol smoke.

“Well then she calms down, and we do this kind of half swoon, half cuddle, half makes a reevaluation of an enemy. As she did just try and push me off a roof and kill me. Daria tells me that she paid 25,000 dollars to come to America and have an arranged marriage setup. She said she had to work the debt off and the work was highly unpleasant. She asked me if I wanted to take her on a date. She told me she knew the Financial District very well and could tell me who and what to hit.”

Sometimes Nikholai Trickovitch believes his best friend is mad Hebrew profit and a highly inspiring leader. And sometimes Sebastian is draining.

“Don’t project and don’t believe her Russian lies. You always seem to tell a tale always darker than is. The world is evil enough on its comrade story teller. As for her offer to help? Why? What’s in it for her? I think you should ask where this woman came from, question why she ended up meeting you at this very stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. What are you holding? What do you have in the bank? The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation. She tried to kill you.”

 

 

“She told and made most illicit references to what she did to come here. Perhaps she wants out of who holds her paperwork. Or maybe something else,” Sebastian suggests.

“I’m not sure she did anything but prove you’re easier to kill than the rumors suggest, you’d both been drinking and we all know just about anything can come out of a Russian woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie,” Nikholai replies.

“Just about anything can become true or untrue, dangerous or stunning. A top or a bottom. But given the entirety of the encounter, it seemed Daria was alluding to her imprisonments and debts. Whatever their current state might be.”

“But are they even true? All women lie, and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were storytelling as art or advanced parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You make every single woman around you’re your damsel in distress from Capitalism! You’ve done so time and again. I’ve been here for it all. Remember your truest, most equal partner Hali Vik, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in this endless succession, you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”

 

“Nikholi, you’re making something out of prejudices. I had just two partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was only Maria, and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple of short stands in the Stans in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun. My hand gave me greater pleasure,” smirks Sebastian.

“Hali Vik was the kind of woman you need to find again, steal her back from that Italian hipster musician she dates or something, you’ve done such things frequently. Not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you, and they’ll never join this cause,” says Nikolai, “Just like Maria and Yeli, Daria will reject your ideology, reject your lifestyle and leave you the very minute you become hard to deal with; which you are! Incredibly hard to deal with,” says Nikholi.

Nikholai Trickovitch is referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well-suited partner for Sebastian Adon. All of his friends, comrades, and co-officers never went so far as to say “Maria Parsheva is a Russian Geisha,” or “Yelizaveta Perechenova is a condescending, high maintenance Jewish American princess,” but they all said it when the two women broke off the relationships. Sebastian’s mother was vaguely prejudiced by now of anyone who even spoke Russian.

Hali Vik, Irish Swedish wild rebel Hali Vik was not a natural fit either though. Her big tits and flirtatious demeanor caused a lot of fights. Sebastian remembers momentarily the time Hali cut her risks, and he had to get up to Massachusetts and find her doped up in a roadside motel. He also remembers the Lowell Job, when they burned down half the Meth Labs in the city and engaged in a running gun fight with the Cambodian street gangs. Which had been a messy over exertion of well-intentioned violence because Hali Vik, had gotten herself in a lot of trouble, but Sebastian may well have made up stories in his head too?

Part of Sebastian’s condition was that everything was always happening at once in total recall. If he did not take a medicinal salt to lock into the present, he gets overwhelmed by the intensity of everything.

Well anyway, Hali was ‘safe in Italy’ or maybe Texas now, and while there may have been a little bit of torture, murder, barbarism, and war utilized to get her there, well nobody was dead and buried in Lowell that didn’t deserve somewhat to be dead, burned and buried in Lowell.

Nikolai and Sebastian being best friends talked a lot about their women. But there was one woman that Nikholai new precious little about and that was Emma Solomon, but he was correct that Hali Vik the only American was, in fact, the only person he might well have married in a normative sense of what that word means. For in the State of Israel, Sebastian was in paperwork at least still quite married to Emma Solomon. But bigamy of paperwork is not the same as bigamy taken to the firing mechanisms of the inner heart. Was it these four women that had made Sebastian believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and Emma was dead. Or didn’t exist in the same space that everyone else had.

 

Yelizaveta in a completely separate way. Because she had worked on his body very thoroughly. And he had been employed heavy on hers. They were together for only three months when the storm hit; someone broke her leg, someone tried to kill her dangerous father and Sebastian fixed it all. Then he was imprisoned. There had many lovers, not an inappropriate amount but a good amount still. Sebastian had well ripped the heart out of their young Polish comrade Joanna who loved him as no other woman had or perhaps could but to whom he felt youthful nothing. But that was a decade ago. Sometimes, he felt like all his pain with loving women that couldn’t love him, in the same way, was due to what he did to Joanna.

Nikolai had been married to a Syrian Italian Puerto Rican model for seven years named Krissyiana, or Krissy for cute. She had wanted very little besides children, and she was an agoraphobe; she didn’t leave their Midwood, Brooklyn apartment very many times in the ten years they lived together. The product of near ceaseless sexual harassment and advances on the street, she preferred the life of a managed housewife. Her father was rather wealthy and also in the Central Intelligence Agency. The parents disowned her for cohabitating with a Jew. Though he wasn’t very Jewish at all and didn’t even have a Jewish mother, or a Bar Mitzvah. They married early at age 18 and lived together in District Midwood until their late twenties. Adon rarely saw his best man then, but Nikolai was happy playing house, he was domestic in his soul.

Eventually it ended, he wouldn’t bear her kids. She didn’t want one she wanted 3 or 4. And he didn’t know if his life wanted to look like that. The money wasn’t great at his job, and she was even a little more homebound than he was which seemed extreme. They bargained and fucked, bargained and cried. Then, they divorced and then she completely disappeared, into smoke. As if her father had managed that; which maybe he had. The very last time they saw each other to sign the divorce papers she gave him a parting fuck. He poured olive oil on his cock and put it deep in her ass for as long as he could think to. It was the kind of rough good bye sex from movies, which passionate, angry people have in real life. It was the kind of sex Yelizaveta, and Sebastian had for a year since they broke up about once a week for a year. Nikholai doesn’t like to equate his last encounter with Krissy as sodomy with Italian olive oil. It was a lot more than that. She had completely rejected him and then cut him off.

Nikholi has been fucking and drank his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where. Self-destruction or the arms of a wealthy man, who only knew? In all likelihood, her father probably just gave her a trust fund and sent her abroad somewhere. But dark minds make up the worst possible scenarios about everything. After Krissy, every single woman Nick was with looked like a lumpy mommy. Nothing to write home about any single one of them. Women that emasculated him even further.

 

Then Nick put out the past with his cigarette.

 

“I am only suggesting slowness and loads of needed caution is required are you to obsess, I repeat the word obsess! Further about another woman you meet by the brink of your crazy pursuit of wild partly damaged women. Joanna was great to you, but you never felt anything and that destroyed her and perhaps forever cursed you if you believe in the dealings of love. Hali Vik was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to you to being unadulterated happy for a brief fuck of time. But let’s not forget just how much we had to burn down and knock around over that little lady, and that you may have saved her life, but she well near killed you. Maria Parsheva was a loyal little Russian geisha, but between various factors that we need not rehash, that too was doomed. Though, on the train, what a little gangster she was! Perhaps you did faster more far reaching organizing so moved as you were by Ms. Yelizaveta Perechenova, but you have such a way of making women into these wild muses and then yourself into tragic fucking art. And to be frank, Yelizaveta completely emptied your bank account. She also humiliated you on a weekly basis by refusing to give the relationship any stability after you got out of prison. All the women you take as your serious partners, well none of them have fathers and all of them of dark pasts. Except for Joanna who you destroyed. Poor noble woman. Which was rather sad because none of them loved you as fearlessly as she. She was the only one who followed you into the camps remember, into Palestine. He was a quality woman. But, you were bored and cheated on her left and right!”

Yelizaveta has a most brilliant and scary father. Bulgarian by nationality. Ukrainian Jew by blood. But he was highly bipolar. About as high functioning Bipolar as a major criminal/ business man can get. When he arrived in America in the 1990’s the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. Until Sasho had every single paramedic working north of 168th street killed. Had New York Presbyterian Hospital burned down? Made Washington Heights once again since the 1980’s an entirely unsafe place to live. So, it went to reason “that the daughter of a bipolar man carried away by ambulance men should perhaps not marry a bipolar ambulance man.”

 

That’s what Sebastian’s condition was also called, Bipolar 1, invented medicine for deviant minds. That thing did not really exist. It was simply one more way the Western governments colluded to chemically neuter powerful people.

Firm and logical now, but not in 2009. After Sebastian secured Yelizaveta during the blizzard and brought her to a hospital for treatment. After Sebastian, Nikholai and some of their men thwarted and Italian mob attack on Alexandre. After Sebastian was taken by the secret police for a month and disappeared into torture land. Well, despite the conflicting recent record of heroism, Yelizaveta’s mother Tanya Marina forbid Yeli and Sebastian to see each other, and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end. But, Yelizaveta was a little crazy too and loved Sebastian. So for a year, it was on again off again, rough and deep, hard and passionate, presents, secret rendezvous and lots of art, poems, dinners, flowers and a lot of time in the sheets as well as in showers, tubs and the floor.

“Dasha is a continent on to herself. I ask you not compare and contrast my various past uses of love and longing. I can’t even truly say that I know her well enough to speak anything like love to her. I only felt like I was in the presence of, a long lost friend.”

He almost said, ‘murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then actually mock him. As everyone had and would that he suggested something like that too.

“A damn construct man! Do not mistake your fucking black Israelite training for reality or it will consume you, again,” that’s what Nick would yell at him in simulations.

“You love dangerously and often inappropriately. You don’t let go at all. Just remember that Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory to you being killed by another man, group of men really over a woman. I suspect that is something you are secretly craving in some reminiscence of an older life.”

“Well, maybe she hasn’t got a man, per say. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past at all; maybe it’s just a mind game. I’m very hard to kill as you know. Dasha has already tried.”

 

“You might have easily both died. And truly this time for nothing!”

 

“She claimed to Rafael Ernesto she remembers nothing about that night at all.”

 

“A black out as a reconciliation for your improvised murder? Prosto, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered it!”

“A blackout woman always thinly hides a dark past in my experience.”

 

“I fail to see what, at all, is attractive about her willingness to murder you!”

 

“This isn’t lust. Or love. This is something surreal brother. Something I haven’t felt in before in the same way. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under three years, but I’ve never seen her before. She never pays, always leaves alone. Drinks like she needs to part the Red Sea via her consumption. I’ve never seen her at the club before, I’m there all the time as you know. I have no idea how I could have missed a busty, wild thing like her.”

 

“That my friend is only called a trap. She is not what you or we need right now. She is nothing but big tits with bad trouble.”

Sebastian would perhaps not have noticed her because for the past year and a half he had weaned himself off that den of Bulgarian sin and former Soviet misery by convincing himself no woman on earth could be as angelic and pure as his Yelizaveta, his last and most imperfect love.

“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” continues Nikholai getting yet another cigarette fired up, up off the first, “It’s far worse that you’re a real romantic. You usher in the 18th century for the coldest of former Soviet hearts. Some of these poor girls have to learn how to protect themselves from whether you’re sure you’re serious or not. More precisely you need to protect yourself from your projections of love and the cowboy like the way you shoot cupid’s arrows off in your artistic yet unpredictable shifting of moods.”

 

“I’m deadly serious with this one, and will not weigh its risks against the others. You are lecturing me about my love life as if I were proclaiming a new love. I am speaking about something else now. I am remembering things that were, shall we say deleted. Mediated away. Washed down with salt! I am telling you not that I plan to try and bed Daria Maccluskey. Of course, I will try, that is what men do. I’m trying to tell you that with all the sleep, salt and training in the world; I know that woman from before.”

 

“All of them. You say things like this about all of them. It’s either a blessing or a terrible curse you love early and often love as you do. I suspect a curse upon your well-being. You seem to enjoy these unstable, untenable trysts as if pursuing the romantic ideal of poorly constructed epics might necessitate your energies to live a more basic life. Not that anything you do is basic, but I suspect you’d always be happier as a wandering bard than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”

“I have no idea anymore; I just feel something in the molecules, my friend. I am telling you that what we have been planning might well hinge on this person. I haven’t written a magnificent poem in many years. If quite a little good art was made under Yelizaveta, it was because she asked for it and returned it and sucked it out of me on her knees. They are all entirely different loves. One loves the struggle because one always thinks it noble, or heroic and the cause just and the suffering of our people, all people immense. One loves a woman because she emboldens him. Makes him a real man by showing love as something justifying of our human condition.”

 

“Different Sebastian’s have said differing things on the matter over this decade mind you. You must look yourself in the mirror more often or more deeply. For one thing, you’re too lean for my liking and you hair is too short it means you aren’t eating. That is always a giveaway that you are about to do something reckless. Police and imprisonment tend to follow an old friend.”

 

“You’re being a real Jewish mother now. More praying is perhaps in order?”

 

“I certainly don’t care what you pray to this week, but you do need to eat more, drink less and certainly not be chasing around a woman you hardly know, who happens to show up now. Three weeks from the job. The biggest job ever. And for the love of god: You just got over Ms. Yelizaveta and were beginning to sleep around more casually, so please just don’t get drunk on any more roof tops. Just be cautious of what a wild woman you are dealing with. And please, whatever you do, just don’t tell her you love her until you can pronounce her last name. And have done the homework on the skeletons in her closet. This is a Russian fucking woman after all. They play no games, not with one damn thing. We could sort of vouch for Maria and Yeli, but who is this bitch? Seriously, who the fuck is Daria Maccluskey?”

Nikolai then asks Sebastian quite specifically, “What happened up on that roof?”

 

Sebastian blows out his smoke.

 

“I died and was immediately reborn, like the last few thousand times,” quietly responds Adon puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. We died in a very inglorious real way. Stupidly and drunk. But, miraculously we then awoke panting in the alley way, holding each other’s near death hand. This all happened in the blink of an eye. Then we got up, and I dusted her off, and we walked out as if nothing happened. She gave me her number, and I put her in a cab.”

“And you think you see the soul of your dead wife in her, is that the story?”

 

“Nikholai please do not judge me. If I’m so fucking crazy why is anyone following me into this war?”

“Because we’re all a little crazy. You’re just very persistent,” Nikholai replies.

 

But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him for too long because he too knows what it is like to bear forced separation from the one you love. He too is gifted with a long memory and knows what Sebastian first lost that brought him to the revolutionary road. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adon is not because Sebastian is at least partly sleeping, still taking the last load of salt drugs they put him on, while Nikholai is completely awake.

Scene 2

Scene Two

Off the coast of Nicaragua

 

 

Far below the waves of the black, blue Caribbean, a vast underwater leviathan of a craft named the Black Mermaid hulks its way gradually toward the surface. The vessel is forty kilometers off the Eastern coast of Nicaragua, sloshing and bashing the waters. It cascades aggressively. All of these things happen in depths of the sea and black of the night as its crew makes way toward New Shoreham; a tiny settlement on Block Island. An enclave off the shores of Galilee Rhode Island in the United States of America. Which for this aging Soviet era refurbished Akula nuclear submarine, is about a fortnight away.

Says Kudzai, a Shona Warrior, biochemist and alleged member of the Trinidadian Special Forces, “A quite stupid name for a town overtaken by the mere name of its own island,” and he knows about such things being a Trinidadian. Knows about proud yet isolated things from being born in Zimbabwe. Kudzai- which certainly isn’t his real name is inherently skilled in both second guessing postcolonial island nation nomenclature and storming small seaside towns.

Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya with her soft auburn hair tied behind her head has just graduated from a prestigious Sharashka in Seattle, Washington. This particular Bureau of Experimental Design funded by covert Chinese direct investment. Therefore into her recent studies were incorporated elite techniques for parapsychology, the studies of human manipulation and magic. The Chinese colonization of the Americas began in the 18th century but has accelerated in the 21st century as the Pax-American wanes. These artful deceptive trade secrets cultivated over 4,500 years of Middle Kingdom. Adelina was born in Tank City, the closed Soviet City of Chelyabinsk. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, she fled like millions of others. Some fled, and some were ordered to pretend to escape. To hide amongst the exodus. Take jobs they didn’t want and were over qualified. Like the engineers driving taxis or fine art students stripping. Doctors were working secretly in Brooklyn basements. To wait for the right time to be patriotic. Hold on, just soldier on a bit longer, despite the degradation of being treated like a gangster or whore in the land of the imperialist enemy. To ready themselves strategically to participate in the supposedly imminent counter offensive anticipated by the organs of the inner Party, which was to take a new name called United Russia. Then something in the plan for resurgent Russian resistance went very wrong. Over ¼ of the union was lost forever. The former intelligence services gradually took over the state, got drunk on the spoils of that and handed it to the new oligarchs or became them. The vast underground abroad took the hints; they lost morale and purpose. They became self-interested and cynical in a way unknown in any previous human experience on record.

They grew up abroad feeling used but for no real use. Former Soviets and Post Soviets of all shades and convictions left their motherland in raid and ruins. They saw the values, the dark but high minded ideals they grew up with utterly betrayed. Adelina was one of the ones who left young and waited ten years for nothing to be reborn. The U.S.S.R. made Chelyabinsk a secret, closed city. There were nuclear reactors and silos there. Past the mountains, in the mountains to keep building the tanks and stage a nuclear war. If the West had ever overrun the East as it nearly did in 1943, this was the fallback location. Along with Yekaterinburg. Her whole city was a tank and steel factory. Her entire town has a slow cancer. From three reactor incidents similar to Chernobyl, but secret and therefore not dealt with appropriately. Her whole city has a slow cancer now. Her brother has a heroin addiction. She sends money back when she can.

At the University of Washington where she enrolled in the late 1990’s she studied Slavic Linguistics by day and parapsychology by night. As well as approaches to shamanism for those aspects of the Mezzo-Americans that are in the writings of Carlos Castaneda. She’s got developed fourth-dimensional powers and uses them seamlessly. In early life, they were scary and unpredictable. With training, she got stronger and more focused. After the fall of the U.S.S.R., she used them with beliefs and also pressured patriotism. These days for the money.

 

Adelina had arrived like many Post Soviet young women in the United States on J-1 visa in the early 90’s. Assigned by the Federal government to a below minimum wage job in some disinteresting local in Oregon, she made a new American friend and escaped that bondage into another type. She married a handsome American cop at age 19 and received a green card. He married her, supported her bachelor’s degree in linguistics. He paid for everything, as was the 1990’s terms of Russian immigration by mail or by sea. But like many of the Russian American unions of this period, there were shall we cultural barriers. Things became hostile, if not somewhat emotionally abusive. He never beat her, but he did begin to cheat.  Shortly after Adelina’s graduation, she took steps to divorce him and move east. Patrick was his name, and he was neither ugly nor fat nor particularly stupid, but he, of course, had an American mentality unsuited for dating Russian women long term. Unless of course, he provided a lot more than he could as a cop. To his credit, he did learn some Russian and did, in fact, travel with her back to Chelyabinsk in the West Urals to ask her father for her hand in marriage, unnecessary, but charmingly American. But, in the end, he did not ever evolve in his mind to meet her more than immediate needs. Then, sexually things began to stagnate. Finally, she took the instance of her America paperwork husband’s constant infidelities, if not also aggressive homosexual tendencies, to promptly divorce him, pack and leave. Green card in hand, English perfected without an accent she left Patrick and moved to Philadelphia where she found her next patron in Andre, a Ukrainian American construction contractor.

 

That honeymoon ended about a year later. Andre got her pregnant against her wishes. She aborted the baby. Then Andre choked her on the bathroom floor, gave her a black eye, threw her laptop out the window and put her on the street. She headed immediately to Russian Boston, never in her life had wanted to end up in Russian New York.

 

She’s now doing her make-up, red lips on child like features. She is very agile looking, big brown eyes and light cedar brown hair. She hasn’t aged in a decade. She looks through the mirror into the eyes of Emma Solomon, her employer and commanding officer watching her from the rusty portal door.

“The greatest trouble with Russian men is that they are animals, though quite good at being men in all other regards were we all measured by our fuck and our fight, our bite and our valor. The greatest trouble with Americans is that while good at being gentle, in many regards they fail at being men for they are quick to make and break promises,” reads Emma Solomon from a book with black leather binding she has picked up off the metal nightstand entitled, American Refugee.

 

“I have never read his writing deeply, only between the lines, but I hear from others that he makes some pretty sweeping cultural generalizations throughout his various novels. Many of which are harder to Americans than is fair and certainly reflect that he did indeed grow up here and not somewhere else,” Adelina says while painting her face for war.

 

“And I don’t think you can lump them and us into simple gender roles, mentalities and generalizations,” Adelina adds.

 

“I’ve read them all,” says Emma Solomon, “he’s trouble to read after all, and they get bleaker as the serial progresses. The poems I cannot stand I have no idea how that little traitor whore got so many poems.”

 

“I’ve never read his poems either.”

 

But, Adelina would indeed soon read poems made just for her soon. This was Sebastian’s device, his means of being even more dishonest about his goals in this life to the women surrounding him. And Adelina did know that already from reading his Kaba files. Adelina could see the future in her dreams as well as her coffee. Clearly and concisely. Congruent and in parallel time space- not some foggy Hollywood acid flashback. She’s never physically met Sebastian, but in reading about him had come to know him part way. Her powers of future site painted the rest of the picture about her mark.

“You’re missing nothing. Think hypersexual Communist Dr. Seuss with a slight swagger of Mayakovsky,” Emma says.

“Well, I think highly of his contributions to the resistance. I could give a damn about his artistic abilities if you want to know the truth.”

“I didn’t marry him for art,” Emma says.

“Husband? Is that true he’s your husband?”

“Well a long story is a long story, but suffice to say a need for documents was once involved, on his part.”

 

“No one marries for love anymore, just for Golden tickets,” Adelina replies.

 

“Ah. Well that doesn’t concern me either.”

 

“You’re a magnificent creature dear Comrade Blazhennaya; your work will not be so hard. We have to identify a chain of small cells his cadre has built up and down the Eastern coast. I will see to that, but you have a sensitive task. You must make him love you and trust you. Mostly with a mobile phone and radio, but you’ll have to engage him in a variety of emotions, and positions. He will probably try and put himself inside you several times- lovingly and also uncomfortably.”

 

“I know my job, tovarish.”

 

“My husband, our target has a lot of potential to kill a lot of people. And get a lot of people killed.”

 

“So I’ve read. A sort of profound contradiction for someone trained in medicine no?”

 

“His healing is like is like is writing and poems, just a hat. A mask and a means to an end,” Emma replies. She places the book back on the night stand.

 

“The Oligarchy knows the general date for their uprising. I mean how could they not? There is a camera in every bedroom and a listening device in every pocket.  Numerous operators were compromised due to sloppy work on the American end, not his fault, but it’s locked down tight as a drum over there.”

 

“Tight as a drum?” asks Adelina, though trained as a linguist and a parapsychologist she sometimes misses the vernacular which comes out of hip hop and American movies.

“It means solid and completely under control. It’s been that way since they deported and exiled the Wobblies back in 1914. They hunted out the Communists in the 1950’s. They tightened it again after Weather Underground and the Panthers in late 1968. Everything was in place, then after 11 September, the hard cage came down. What was left of the resistance movement has evaded the American State Security apparatus for one hundred years. Everything is going according to plan. But it’s frankly the worst place on earth for a revolution.”

 

“Well, no one I talk trust thinks it will work out well,” Adelina responds, “They have fluoride in the water supply. They have nanobots and chips in the general public. They made it fun and cool to film everything and report on each other via Social Media.”

 

“Well men plan, but women can prophesize,” says Emma with a smile. She has a warm trust inducing smile that goes well with her charisma and disarming ability to lead and listen.

 

“The dry run last year was mopped up in under three months,” Adelina, “Russian intelligence is spreading the story that the American security apparatus coordinated the occupations so they could flush out everyone into the open and biometrics everyone. But, I know that’s not true.”

 

“It’s all according to plan,” Emma replies.

 

“Or, according to prophesy?” asks Adelina who can converse with the higher power when she feels she must, but trusts completely in the Baraka, the divine charisma of Emma Maya Soraya Solomon. Commander Solomon. The hidden candidate for Messiah of their generation. Known in Jewish cults as the Tzadikk Ha Dror.

 

Emma nods and flexes in her dark green uniform and then places her left hand on Adelina’s shoulder.

 

“Little darling, we’re gonna take a lot more than New York City.”

 

“What’s in New York that’s so important anyway?” asks Adelina.

 

“The end of the world or the world to come.”

 

Adelina looks at her bulky satellite watch made by an Israeli company called SAM; Superior Alien Military. In seven days’ time, Adelina and her hastily although systematically assembled unit will be launch from this briny abyss via a hermetically sealed fast boat. In that electric coffin motor boat they will then land on Block Island and be taken to the aged but hippy Hygeia Hotel; given some new identities and “Strategically Americanized in the greater Boston area.”

 

“I would like to examine something that the Prophet Muhammed wrote, and Avinadav read to Sebastian in the summer of 2001. Before my capture and crucifixion, before the infamous martyr operation which killed so many at the Millennium Theatre,” says Emma taking out a green leather bound manuscript from the shelf in Adelina’s little metal cabin.

 

“It is called Sura 81, Al-Balad, the City,” she explains.

 

Emma reads, “I do call to witness this City. And thou art a free person of this City. And the mystic ties of the parent to child. We have created man into toil and struggle. Think he, that none hath power over him? He may say boastfully; Wealth have I squandered in abundance! Think he that none watch him? Have We not made for him a pair of eyes? And a tongue, and a pair of lips? And shown him the two highways? But he hath made no haste on the path that is steep. And what will explain to thee the path that is steep? It is freeing the slaves; the giving of food to the hungry in a day of privation. To aid the orphan with no claims of relationship. Or to stand for the indigent down in the dust. Then will he be of those who believe, and enjoin patience, constancy, and self-restraint, and enjoin deeds of kindness and compassion. Such are the Companions of the Right Hand. But those who reject Our Signs, they are the unhappy Companions of the Left Hand. On them will be Fire vaulted over all round.”

 

“That’s a very different kind of poem, Adelina says, “I’ve never been a student of anyone’s religion though. I’m not afraid of anything you know,” states Adelina to Emma.

 

“I know you’re not, my fearless one. That’s why you were selected to keep Sebastian Adon under control. His mind is now in a dark and treacherous place. He’s been in the field for too many lives. He’s losing his mind; lashing out at demons all around him without any guidance or realization of the consequences. They have taken him out of objective reality to torture him yet again. They hate him and refuse ever to end his pain.”

 

“He loves you very, very much,” Adelina closes her eyes to see.

 

“He loves a person that was here on this earth a very long time ago, and he sees her in in the spirit of candidates. He will love you too, and it’s not dishonest love, but he knew me for only nine months when they got us. He’s using this love, this shattered memory to keep himself from dying. He just isn’t in the world of man anymore. He’s living every single human tragedy all at once, and it’s propelling him a down murderous road.”

 

“I will not fail you, Commander Solomon,” Adelina says, “He always has loved me and always will though he hasn’t met me yet.”

 

“I know my little sister,” she smiles, “And when it gets crazy in American Babylon, which it will, you can rely on the rest of your unit. Oleg the Bear, Yuliana Romanova, and Mr. McIntosh are, well suffice to say we don’t use anything but the best players when we’re this close to being forced off the edge of the game.”

 

“We’ve never been this close to the edge before,” Adelina replies, “We’re trying not to lose, our, heads.”

 

Emma winks, Adelina nods. Then both of these powerful women go back to being calm, cool and collective. The black mermaid stays its course.

 

Scene 1

Scene One

New York City

 

 

Blast the damn heat, for my brow drips. For in New York it gets so hot in the late of August, a swelter box, most people of any means flee to their dachas in Strong Island.

 

Dawn is now rising, breaking and expanding on the garden roof of an ancient print house that’s been—at some time in the past hundred years— converted to a seventeen story cooperative. 140 Nassau Street, District Financial. On the 17th story roof deck, Sebastian Vasyli Adon, our antagonistic protagonist, tells old danger tales over a bottle of illegally imported Basque white wine.  A fake gold watch dangles off his wrist as he enunciated his wild story with his hands, even though it is known that he is only one-half a Yid. Covering his dark brown hair, cut short for summer, is a brown scally cap.

 

Behold the faces of off duty urban partisans and gypsies who refuse the gift of sleep!

 

Slim and enthusiastic Europeans Mary Lia Monteleone and Victoria Christiana Lynch Contreras snap off photos and clink glasses bantering on care free flirtations and intoxications.

 

Mary Lia takes off all her clothing for various colors of money.   “I’m a dancer,” she tells her parents back in the Cayman Islands by way of Italy and France. In another life she’ll hopefully take up photography, which “pays a little less but has more dignity” she claims.

 

Rafael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, a baby-faced Peruvian revolutionist with flowing black hair, with an increasing volume of white and grey streaks, is the husband of Victoria. He sits with his dear friend Sebastian and a ravishingly beautiful Russian dvotchka named Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova and attempts a boozy mediation as the two do increasingly evil eye each other viciously across a low wooden table. The stare down, which has endured now for the past hour between Sebastian and Daria is punctuated by accusations of impropriety.

 

Daria has big beautiful crazy person eyes the color of the Caspian Sea. She has an unnerving look, a cross between a size up and seductive stare, a dismissive dart of her eyes to cut men down. She is a stunning high octane mix of wild blonde partisan with her azure silver eyes darting between warfare and wanting; and the bright eyed curiosity of a child in a large affluent glass and steel playground. She is wrapped tightly in a light brown leather jacket.

 

Sebastian’s eyes are always sad. An auburn hazel slowly becoming green with the progressing sleep deprivation that is something of a lifestyle for him. Ernesto is their introducer and is a frivolous womanizing artist tamed as of lately by his government marriage to Victoria. Because liquor is so loose at the Mehanata Social Club, people sometimes have to introduced and reintroduced several times in different states of mental chemistry.

 

Sebastian is a dark brunette normally clad in a tattered brown leather jacket and pleather scally cap that none of his lovers ever want him to wear. Tonight he is in a white linen suit, hair done Dominican with products in his hair. It’s not his usual look. Normally he looks like a handsome grown up paperboy, but tonight a Latino drug dealer.

 

The reason he is dressed like that is because prior to his arrival at the Mehanata Social Club about seven hours prior he had been at an all-inclusive White Party, a river cruise of wild Latin salsa-based gallivanting around Manhattan.

 

Daria for reasons more than bust and beauty is capable, knows Ernesto well, of putting out some siren call to which many men have smashed their ships. She quite literally humors no man for any more than one dance. Belligerencies that pour from her mouth when intoxicated, well, they cause fights. She captures much attention anytime she steps in the room and onto a dance floor. Her style is quite Post-soviet in its cut and colors. There is well composed sashay to her movements to and from the bar all night.

 

An affectionate, overly familiar rendering of the Russian name Daria is Dasha, and this is what Sebastian has been calling her all night, which is perhaps a little too friendly amid those who have just met. They had been introduced months earlier, but both had been too drunk to remember. Despite both being regulars at Mehanata for years, the two had never crossed paths before. She is never cold on the outside, but this morning she’s provoked and behaving badly to the host.

 

Sebastian said “don’t smoke in my father’s house,” so she went and smoked in his father’s house, because that was her way. So he yanked the fucking smoke from her pouty lips and threatened to throw her into a cab back to Brighton Beach. Then he “classlessly” handed her forty bucks for that cab, even though it’s really a sixty to seventy dollar ride, and more if you tip. Which is against all Russian cultural context, to tip a chornay driver or take a man’s money and walk out and get your own cab.

 

She debased him best she could as a “useless man living off his parent’s wealth.”

And said “never in my life have I been so offended by the callous, pompous behavior of an American dog such as you!”

 

“Less than a dog!” she had proclaimed. And the other late night-early morning Social Club regulars sort of stood about in silence, out of annoyance and also out of inebriation. But, Daria took her time. Intermittently insulting Sebastian. And Ernesto tried to calm her down and Maxim Bender, a Muscovite got annoyed and left on his own. Sebastian, to show he wasn’t a pushover to this bombshell, star lit scarlet that no one probably ever said no to, he feigned outrage about the cigarette which barely mattered, just showed total disrespect. Who the fuck did this bitch think, she was. That rolled about his head.

 

“I’m gonna call you a cab,” he said. And then she knew she’d won anyway.

 

He did all that, also because he’d been drinking a lot. And he’s not always the gentleman that he presumes himself to be. Letting any person show such appalling disrespect was late night cheapening. Yet, because she was pretty stunning and pouty and her heels took too long for her to fasten, in effort of perestroika he asked her to stay and then they all ended up on the roof to catch the sunrise.

 

 

Then the dawn break on Mary Lia, Victoria, Daria, Sebastian and Ernesto. And sometime just after that a dangerously insensitive story gets told. And Dasha is again beyond appalled. Sebastian removes his cap and says,

 

“The job, and operation; call it whatever you want; involves calling on high end prostitutes whose numbers one acquires in the association of men of your former Soviet back ground, mostly at the Banya or restaurants Wall Street guys hang out.”

 

Banya is Russian for bathhouse. In the past few years Sebastian has been bathing with Russians regularly. He loves the way music sounds in Russian. Though he knows under three dozen phrases and cannot even barely read Cyrillic.

 

Dasha watches his words take form. Her eyes just peer right into you, and they are not always as happy as the completely convincing smile she plasters on so regularly for photos. That is acquired art in itself. Either they are blue or they are grey or they are silver when sleep deprived, but they are not the eyes of a spectator.

 

“So shortly after they arrive and give you some fictitious cover, you take a coat and as they walk in and settle on a price that will involve no touching at all. Then, you tell them that they’re being filmed and recorded, but that you’re not a cop, or whoever else dangerous, you’re not there to entrap them. You tell them you’re an abolitionist.”

 

Puff, puff passes along this ill-conceived venture.

 

“You tell them to call down to the pimp’s driver, and say your John is layered out.

 

“Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto.

 

“Then you make tea, like advanced civilizations do. You tell them a story, a personal tale about why you are not a dog or a pig, and how you came to hate this line of work because you had loved someone forced into it. You convince them to take and perhaps disseminate to other persons a number to arrest traffickers and pimps, also to get trafficked and victimized people the resources they need to escape. They get half the job cash for nothing but a number and a way out. They get a number on a card, you ask them to put it in their phone. Eventually, the poor soul either will pass the number or report it directly to the pimps, but you force a violent hand and spread the knowledge that there is in fact a networked way to escape slavery. It’s cheaper and more effective than lobbying or political routes, we must go directly to the slaves and assure them there is safe way out. The next stage then is to get volunteers into brothels to feign cardiac arrest and call ambulances and firemen in as reinforcements. It basically has be understood as major disruptive campaign against all elements of the sex trade. ”

 

Daria’s jaw drops.

 

“They would kill you just for that,” Dasha spits out, “for bullshit man! For a lot less than bull shit. A number! I spit on your American number. On your insulting low grade bullshit that changes nothing. You will die, they will kill those dear to you, and nothing at all will be fixed about anything, not one woman will get out” retorts Dasha.

 

She’s not a debutante, not a true New Russian here to hunt. She has all the regality of being born Slavic, but perhaps outside the great dividing highway that ring roads that loop Moscow separating the have everything’s’ from the have nothings or have only little something’s. Being born so radiantly beautiful and tough and Russian after the supposed triumph of American Capitalism has left her charming, but more capable of fighting. Daria is far from Russia with love, rootless and floating in glittery fairy tales that don’t expel the hardships of her new country adopted via an arranged marriage for papers.

 

“I am not afraid to die for a thing I believe in sweetness, I am not afraid to try and save only one life at the cost of all my American privileges” he flatly retorts in half-cocked rhetoric.

 

“He has such American beliefs!” She mocks.

 

Ernesto always has applauded his radical specifications and foreign adventures over the past three years he’s known Sebastian. He’s done his initial trench time, agrees Ernesto. Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Haiti, the worst assignments in Europe too and the street battles to occupy the District last fall that went so bloody poorly playing out in split skulls and tear gas all over national television.

 

“I guess you’ve never had to work for anything completely or work to keep something you fought hard for, so you give away most easily. Your life seems so easily offered, to take if you ask me,” Daria snaps at his bait.

 

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

 

A few too many baton cracks in the Gulliver. A few too many months adding up to several years inside uncomfortable facilities. Sebastian’s given lots of militant speeches but never done any violent actions with his hands. He’s piloted an ambulance for the Fire Department for four years in all the city’s worst districts. He has traversed the Levant organizing against the occupation, the American occupation of Israel and the Israeli Oligarchy’s occupation of Palestine. He’s told people of their human rights over and over, until not over, and over again. He delivered a baby once, helped do it many more times.

 

Dasha could care less.

 

She is appalled by the rude cigarette yank and further appalled by his cynical bourgeoisie story about call girls passing itself off as utterly vain and stupidly incompetent activism. She only stayed because she doesn’t have a home that’s enjoyable to return to at this hour; an hour away in the Russian ghetto of Brighton.

 

She offers to kill him. He obliges her. Thinks she’s mostly bluffing.

 

“I’ll kill this over privileged American hypocrite,” she thinks. A civic duty to her new country and old country too. Mostly, she maintains a mighty level of the not giving of a shit. She’s also on an off day. She only remembers every other night out when she drinks. The rest of them a blur black haze punctuated with irregular black and blue marks.

 

“From falling down stairs,” she claims to her keeper.

If she kills him, the tragedy, as far as a memory, will belong to no one. Maybe there’s some demon in her. Maybe she’s just blacked out a few hours ago and won’t remember any of this.

 

Ernesto implores her to be more, “Suave, Suave”. To be more calm and “Tranquillo.”

 

The infamous Peruvian revolutionist is now a New York low key digital disk jockey at the Social Club and cannot modulate Sebastian’s posturing and Dasha’s swaggerous, murderous taunting. Now, they’re waving invisible pistols at each other’s’ faces like wild Cold Warriors.

 

Ernesto then urges Victoria and Mary Lia to intercede on some level of Feminine Mystique but they are long drunk too, now taking lots and lots of pictures of the Sunrise hitting all these steel and glass towers. And, the two young women have seen “Dasha” make a properly rude scene before. They’ve seen her throw drinks in men’s faces and punch men in the face. They detach from this drama for art; when men, “get smart”.

 

“When men get smart with me I cut them apart,” Daria lives by that.

 

The job of any and all men as far as she is concerned is to amuse or please her by makings sure her drink is never empty. That life is a series of taken care of attractions, to make her life easier. If one is well formed and handsome and he does enough work then, well, you know. Sebastian has failed on all fronts in his utterly crass, self-serving arrogance.

 

“So you’re gonna kill me or just threaten on about it?” says Sebastian secretly hoping she might actually kill him, there’s a sickness in his soul you know. He hasn’t felt so alive in a moment anyway since the last girl ripped his heart out with a dagger in a long game of masochistic sex coupled with co-dependent longing. That’s a thing.

 

There was nothing healthy about his love life ever, which was a fact.

 

Even the use of the word “love” bids a kind of shame inside him for perpetually having to beg back affections from those he’d thought he’d die for. A year ago his previous paramour Yelizaveta finally cut him off. The struggle took its heavy toll over the years boxing with monsters and holding such hopes for humanity, always repeatedly underwhelmed by human actions. His Icarus sky walled expectations! His place in the chain of command remains so unclear. Only “the existential problems of an overly privileged first world revolutionist”, as Yelizaveta used to declaim. His last six months have been an abyss of medical studies on how to beat back death with drugs and electricity, and small talk.

 

Something like that.

 

A veritable blur of broken dreams to lay down his irrational struggle and pursue medicine, choose life over vain pretenses as a prelude to inglorious martyrdom. His life has taken a turn for the worst now several times “believing in things”. “Being a hopelessly real romantic.”

 

His studies are now more specific.

 

He is enrolled in a one-year paramedic upgrade program. He had thought to jump country, apply for work abroad. He was ordered to hold the post in the city and just keep working on recovering his mind. Lt. Moshe Klein, the orthodox Jewish lieutenant on the grave yard shift of Station 31 Cumberland outpost, a sympathizer of the resistance arranged his hasty enrollment in the paramedic academy of Methodist Hospital on Kings Highway.

 

Or perhaps better focused on saving the individual life here and there. Not the world in its totality, for that, is what so well-meaning associates accused him of trying. Shouldering a burden not placed or asked of him. No one ever asked that of him or expected that he delivers on it. Just be happy, they urged him, just work on what’s right in front of you.

 

His weekends soak in vodka or with wine, sometimes one poured in the other. And the boozing keeps his eyes closed to certain things. And now he’s drunk now again. Acting poorly in the company of a bellicose Russian woman, yet again. Drawing bellicosity out of people well known for poker faced reserve and dispassion.

 

Kill me for the sake of it, he hopes. It’s what the world would surely not mind all too much. Though he knows he’d have a modestly well-attended funeral; it’s evil drunken, self-destructive thinking. From a fallen man who has locked up and been hit in the head a few too many times.

 

“So you’re gonna kill me or just threaten on about it?”

 

“Absofuckinglutely,” she replies.

 

 

 

Before drunken Ernesto who is now very, very sloshed, and also very, very tired can react. After spinning his music from a lap top all night can talk them down. Sebastian and Daria are climbing up a ladder. Up to the 18th story deck near the gear room elevator tower. It’s the highest accessible point. An easterly, elevated deck off that 17th story roof with a deep and deadly edge of plummet to death with the Blue glass Gehry Building towering above and looking down. A million cubicles of an upper-class aquarium. Like a Sorcerer’s tower of steel rising above the East river. Were anyone it awake now, left over from a coke party; they could see the two protagonists now sparring.

 

A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

 

They’re now actually boxing. Daria is properly in a Brighton boxing school. She strikes at him hard and then even harder. “Die you fucking Amerikanski, you damn wasted one,” she thinks.

 

Ernesto, Lia, and Victoria who are always so very stylish, now have stopped their art making over white wine and look up with some very now real possible concern. Not a plane or a mob on a train could have killed him so far. Not jealous those ex-boyfriends, vanquished competing lovers from trysts and lusty engagements he’s partaken in, nor spy agencies, nor police forces with much bigger better-threatening fish to fry had gotten this close. A beautiful woman might get close enough this morning, all by accident.

 

“You don’t want to live here forever?” she taunts him. Their scrappy boxing and taunting have them perilously near the ledge and the edge of the fire pit.

 

The roof deck is a glamorous lit up garden at dawn. The ledge is just feet from the fight, and so is this big pit, for old buildings have deep internal fire ventilation caverns. A trip into the sweet hereafter where one might fall dead on to the front porch of New York’s highest high rise residential where the rent is now 40,000 American a month in the month before. The pit is just a dead drop, it’s a Fire code ordinance for building in late 18th century, a ventilation shaft for the 19 real story print house now a new richer-intelligentsia. A queer, liberal, Jew coop on the financial district’s northern most edge at the mouth of the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall Park.

 

Daria is striking out at him, and he is just taking her hits. And then, then it finally comes.

 

“Hit me to kill me! Just knock me into that fucking pit and make an inglorious end to it all,” he swagger demands in a bellow.

 

The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is just a side story in his mind. A tandem episode to his tragedy. She cocks back and doesn’t blue eyed blink. “Kill me,” he beckons and then. She finally tries to kill him.

 

Daria hits him with one swift, hard jab, and he tumbles backward. He crumbles awkwardly toppling into the abyss.

 

As he plummets, he instinctively grabs out and yanks her back with him in a tumble off the ledge of the roof, falling now together toward certain death in the alley way eighteen stories below.

 

 

A Listing of our Primary & Lesser Characters

ACT I: That Night

2012-2013ce

 

Set in Mostly in New York City

 

Starring:

 

Sebastian Vasyli Adonaev, a paramedic adventurer. †

Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova, a courtesan from Penza. †

Mickhi Dbrisk, righteous Jamaican gangster.

Watson Entwissle, Mullato Haitian paramedic.

Nikholai Rosetree Trickovitch, a private detective. †

Siegfried Kenly Sassoon, Cuban Actor & barman.

Sasho Alexandre Dmitrievich Perechevney; the Great Bulgarian Oligarch.

Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Perechevnova, his daughter a physician and marine biologist.

Tanya Magda Dimcheva Perechenova; Sasho’s wife and Matron of the Mehanata Social Club.

Slavi Dmitrievich Perchevney, Bulgarian enforcer & Sasho’s adopted younger brother.

James White & Irish; retired cop & Bratva enforcer †

James Behemoth Brown Pérezes; Shapeshifting Latino-Bratva enforcer

Justin Toomey O’Azzello, Mehanata General Manger, a former air force pilot. †

Mary Lia Monteleone, a friendly French stripper.

Adelina Blazhennaya, Sorcerous of Chelyabinsk.

Oleg Leondovich Medved, Ukrainian-Israeli photographer and pimp.

Kudzai David Darious Chikwamba, Shona warrior and biochemist. †

Georgie Rabanca; Romanian computer engineer.

Yulia Romanova, Russian propagandist and arms enthusiast.

Dmitry Khulushin Koch, Financial Analyst, lesser Oligarch.

Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras; Peruvian disk jockey & retired guerrilla leader. †

Victoria Christina Contreras Lynch; Artistic wife of Rafael. †

Tanya T-Bird Tall Flame Luv, healer and a Maagi for the Resistance.

Maya Soraya Emma Solomon, the Tzadikk ha Dror.

Mara Fitzduff, Irish commander of the Resistance in Brooklyn.

Maxim Oztap; happy hoodlum from Moscow’s suburbs.

Avner Mikhail Kreminizer; Lithuanian Israeli interrogator. †

 

 

 

ACT ONE

  That Night

Set mostly in New York City, 2012ce

Prelude

Prelude

Moscow, 2019

It is not our intention that we should compose such an indictment of the Oligarchy that our reader throws down the manuscript and declares him or herself a revolutionist, for cruel experiences of this world and living in it breed more revolutionaries daily then our pens can expend on poetic syllables.

Instead, we wished to put to paper an ethical argument that condemns our oppressors, clearly states their means of oppressive control and thus allows the reader to take what actions thou wilt to participate in the abolition of our collective slavery. We posit like others before us that the system in which we live is exploitative to all within; top and below. We declare that the World System and the Oligarchic Collectives that operate it are but agents of a vast killing machine; sentencing us all to toil ceaselessly; suffer long and die early while they glut themselves on ill acquired wealth.

With that indictment we ask the reader a Talmudic question posed by Rabbi Moishe Klein a lieutenant in the resistance army;

“A sane person in an insane world is what?’

And there by a conscious person in a sleeping world has what duty? And furthermore, if the readers will not be moved by the humble words of this theorist narrator, be moved then by atrocities that are carried out daily paid for in the taxes levied from the sweat of your work and the blood of your fellow humans.

We remind you as have others before me; it is not a mere revolution we are fighting. It is the battle for the survival of our species and is still an open question of who will win, for this is an ancient war began long before us and will end long after we are gone. But, far more specifically by what conduct, what actions are appropriate in the face of such a holocaust to ensure that there is still a just and equitable world for our children and grandchildren to inherit.

The victory of the resistance movement is a question of consciousness. The victory of the Oligarchy is a death sentence for all.

My name is Sebastian Vasyli Adon. I do believe some of that to still be the name I was born with, but now I have multiple names. In the dead of winter, seven years into the Great Revolt; I was captured along with my gun slinging Haitian partner Watson Entwissle after a firefight in the icy heart of Moscow. We were taken three parts-alive by the Russian Federal Security Bureau and then turned over to their inner most secret police for a most highly spirited interrogation.

They ripped out poor Watson’s eyes; then broke most of my ribs as then beat us both for many days and soon I was pissing out blood!

I will begin by saying that no matter what great changes or revisions may occur in the depiction of my narration that the world changed forever in a particular way on the 1st of January 2012. Of course, in the constellation of dates there cannot be one discovered moment of alteration total; but instead linkages of great historical movements; migrations toward our human evolution out of darkness and barbarity and inequality; into our natural way.

How does one chart such movements; such milestones when they are but realized memes? Realized intuitions that came to that pass as world events based on total boldness.

I have not the arrogance to claim a high rank in the revolution, but I will say I was there when it began again in my era. I do not have the audacity to argue that my role was of some significant aspect for I was but always a staff sergeant in the vast chain of command were the ranks of revolutionary war to be applied to the ranks of those who are fighting for peace. I will have you the conscientious readers to know that I am a poet. Yes, a poet; once who delights in making words tell stories; who if left to my own devices would have been happy as a small farmer and passionate lover of my wife and the word; had not the violence swept upon my lands.

Did you know that when the Oligarchy cannot conquer a rebellion, they conquer its narrative? Did you know that the truth is not ever truly known except by those who saw a thing with their own eyes? How did it begin? Who was the leadership? What were the demands! These are oligarch questions because the small man or woman; the humble ones; those who submit themselves to a higher power and therefore love life; the children of the believers; we do not beg a political context for the world; one is thrust upon us.

Later on when they asked, or should I say interrogated me with beatings, drugs, and electricity why I joined the Great Revolt I laughed and screamed and also cried. Such is torture. How did I become one its so-called leaders, they asked me many times. The demanded I declare the moment when I embraced my zealous beliefs and by what life event wedded my totality to this cause. They pestered me with these questions though throughout their fun and brutal games, But, I had played no large or mighty part except as a member of a small medical detachment putting our meager resources to good use.

They, they being the agents of the Oligarchy referred me to a poem published in one of the newspapers of the underground press I had submitted. It was only once piece of the evidence against me, but they claimed my role larger than I ever knew it to be.

I can say that I understand the world differently because my memory is longer; because I read books about the past. Because I enjoy reading and because as a poet, a sensitive soul I delight in writing down my base human ideas and sharing them; making common cause with other suffering souls. Dreaming of the day no woman or man will live as they currently do. I have no ability to reconcile myself to a so-called good life while these atrocities, yes they indeed atrocities persist.

The tortures went on for many months. They would beat us many times and make us many offers. I have no price after what was taken from me. It was fortunate the resistance wiped away my mind so I could betray only myself. Also, Watson Entwissle is a Haitian and therefore impossible to break. They say we killed an important man in Moscow.

“We’ve killed many of your men, and we will kill many, many poor,” that’s what Watson told them.

They always beat me roped to the ceiling or on the floor of a cell. The cell was frankly quite clean. I’ve been in many cells and really the one the Russians put us in was premium. They then referred me back to these poems. I’ve never seen such an interest in my poems before. The poems they claimed were proof of my highest-level rebel involvement.

They threaten our families.

“You can’t get to our families,” Watson told them.

They threaten our friends.

“You killed most of our friends,” I replied.

The uprising had not at that time sufficiently spread to the Russian Federation or the People’s Republic of China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Koreas, or England proper. Only in government organized terrorist attacks or the periodic assassinations we orchestrated. It was raging almost everywhere else. The ground wars between the rebel armies and their proxies were raging in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

They really did a number on is Russia. But, I remembered nothing, well almost nothing well. I did remember several things, in bursts and flashes. Throughout the brutal interrogations that in a way sustained me through their inflicted brutality. Were these things real or imagined, implanted or devised I have no idea for I know neither science nor high-level Majik?

I am aware that there is a secret sleeper organization called the Z.O.B. that is at war with those in total power called the Oligarchy that controls the world system core. I know because I was there as a courier, an orator and gun runner when the Israelites formed it in Tel Aviv.

I know that no one knows what those three letters stand for nor are they originally in English. I am aware that agents of that same Oligarchy raped and brutally murdered my wife while pregnant with my child. They later burned my whole city. They killed my family and my friends, my friends of friends and even former lovers and then there were no ideas or beliefs I needed to learn then to fuel my un-ending resistance after these hideous events. There after I then breathed in the smoke monster. I drank only the blood of enemies, and I nourished an unfathomable hate.

Finally, I do know that an uprising began in 1791 in a place called Haiti and that it continues reverberating to this very day despite major quarantine and most disastrous setbacks. I know that on January 1st, 1959; that the same revolution spread to the nation of Cuba and has been entrenched there since. On that besieged island nation illiteracy has been irradiated. Their people live longer and in some degrees with more dignity than in the empire called the United American States. They say things come in threes. Who says that? Well, I forget. All things do though, for on 1st January 2012 that long quarantined revolt fought on the fringes of the developing world erupted on the streets of Port-Au-Prince and spread like wild fire worldwide, yet again. After what I lost and what I suffered, what those I loved most suffered. I joined it unflinchingly.

I know that I am entitled to certain protections under the Geneva Accords I will not receive as a uniformed combat Pararescueman. Clad in my rebel blue. Shield 2952 of the 99th Airborne Division from the Breuklyn Soviet, the new epicenter of the latest phase of our latest and most glorious uprising in the Americas.

They then beat me for many more weeks. They ripped out my finger nails. They drugged me into nightmarish worlds of horrible, grisly torture. Made me revisit all my losses, all my defeats and degradations. They called me “terrorist” as though it were my very name. They demanded I tell them “who are my true leadership”, “where is Emma Solomon?” “Where is Avinadav DeBuitléir?” They have nothing to gain because I know nothing but what I have already confided in you.

I am a just a worthless American exile. A writer and a poet who makes silly rhyming poems to bed young women. I’ve contributed nothing another million young women and men won’t put down beside me on the table of the war.

You murdered my entire family; I periodically think inside myself.

Therefore, I joined the rebel alliance as uniformed Pararescueman 2952 of the 99th Airborne Division, also known as the Fighting 99th. It was we who helped retake Port Au Prince briefly in 2009 from the Brazilian and Argentine occupation. It was we who took back Jerusalem in 66, 112, and again in 1210ce. It was we who refused to surrender when all was taken away.

And such was the only thing still etched in my mind under vast torture. Periodically I wondered if I could hear Watson screaming. But, it is against the code of the Haitian gentleman to break under torture, and I doubted, therefore, the screaming was coming from him.

In another life. Before knowledge of their atrocities sent me out to first to Palestine. Then later to study in Cuba. Then to Haiti, Iraq, and Syria where I saw with my own eyes the fullness of genocide the Oligarchy was capable. Before I had read my Orwell, my Marx, my Zinn, of course, my Emmanuel Wallerstein. And then my Chomsky; peppered in with my beloved musings of tortured Mayakovsky, my Bell Hooks, my Emma Goldman, some Rist too. Or the intellectual excellence of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Luxembourg and so many, many others. Those doomed idealists and wandering rebel scribes. They all suffered grave mental illness to dared to theorize on our long promised coming emancipation. Those progressive privileged seculars! Those unrepentant exile part Jews many. Perhaps I was inclined to read more from my own tribe.

So many books and not even enough life times!

Blessed was I learn to value of reading. A lost, proud, and dangerous art, the gateway to all sedition. It taught me a secret code to see the world in ideas, possibilities and hope.

Once I was a young man; filled with hope and promise. When the towers of the empire fell I was living on a kibbutz in the land of American occupied Israel writing small poems. I was laying out my very first novel I was working the land I thought was mine. I was laying sprinkler drip lines. I was picking tomatoes and cucumbers. Drinking cola in the heat of Middle Eastern summer after work. I was having flirtatious and sweaty affairs. I was learning to make small art and being very much in love.

They refer me to some poem that supposedly appeared in something called the “Banshee News Service” several months ago. Of course, I deny anything they claim I am party too. “Banshee, isn’t that a ghost,” I ask. And a truncheon strikes my jaw.

All I see now is her smile. The smile of the only woman I will forever love. Beaming at me as we lay in the sands by the boardwalk. There was so much hope that day we met that we could both leave this grim foreign city together and a bleak serf’s life.

Who or what, how now, why is my Dasha?

Dorogaia, my dear one, I have failed you again most terribly. Where are you now! What have I again done to me and to you!! Or what new thing have I allowed to happen by own powerless frail human hands!!!

After reading me this trifle wearing both a hideous and vaguely comical mask. One my many interrogators then smashed my face with a truncheon again. And such was the only evidence they ever presented me with. A stupid, ugly non-rhyming poem. A ridiculous, minuscule Partizan Song.

Written in Gematria, the Secret Ivory Code, ah ha; you’d have to know what that is your ugly one souled masked pigs! You’ve never met a Jew like me. Trained so well to steal, and heal and kill.

In another life, I wrote a boat load of stupid little poems no one ever read except her. Interestingly enough, or perhaps commonly my mind retreats into itself to escape the shame and torture. Also the unending pain of my total human sympathy. I should state comrade, my untouchable solidarity. My empathy as though each human misery was happening to my own flesh, and my own blood.

My memories it seems are crafted devices, walls of data to waylay my opponents and thus shelter my closest surviving friends and associates. What for are then these ridiculous poems? I call them but a masochistic hobby horse. But, they were all written just for her alone. The only woman who looked into my soul, and I into hers and we knew in that first meeting that we had always been together no matter how many lives we’d been torn apart. The poems, tough in English only, softer in Russian; they are my only way to put in words what she made me feel every minute of every   Though they are not all without some talented intent, they serve me no good, not once or ever.

I wrote them all to four particular Russian women, but they were all a reflection of the first love, the only love that could ever matter on the level of the soul. The one they took from me in November of 2001.

“Love early and love often!” she once told me. There are so many kinds of love, so many gradients. Each magnifies the hero in me; each allowed me to survive the long years in the underground.

I did feel something for nearly everyone I ever kissed, mostly everyone, but after the loss of the first I didn’t ever love myself so could never be anyone’s proper companion. Just a ghost. Just a handsome smiling corpse to exchange art, and flesh and fluids.

It cannot ever be said or assumed that any of the four subsequent loves, incredible women all were properly loved. I loved each with equal rigor. As a dead man and a zealot, we all did our best. My lovers all tried to breathe life into a corpse. Our poetry, paintings, songs and sex art itself were manifestations of those attempts. They are not equal loves, and they were not all backed up with the same stuff. The same total longing. The same level of doing my deeds after my words.

It should be clear that while I slept in and beside these four women over a period of some eight years; I did only love one actually in a shall we say, humane way. And only she loved me back in that same way. Everything in life takes time.

Now, in flashbacks, they’re yelling something loud in Russian! I pretend as though I do not speak it not at all, not one word. But how could I not for all and every of my strangest tragic loves taught me my greatest lessons in that language.

They are demanding all these pieces of myself I cannot even hope to deliver. These interrogators and also those four famous women. Though I took more than I probably gave, I did okay for a dead man.

It seems they are less interested in the recently murdered guard colonel. They claim we killed a national icon! My Haitian partner Watson and I may have played the part of highway men to gun down dispatch. For a paramedic, in recent years we’ve killed more than a few.

It needed doing.

The torturers are less interested in our baser affiliations. It seems that the firm arm of the Russian Oligarchy is most concerned with the end of summer liaison that happened many years prior with a young buxom émigré from the city of Penza whose name was Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova who for some time I called Dasha. Or Dashutka, to be even more sweet, always against her liking or better judgment. She always preferred me more brutal, daring and infamous. Not sad, not sobbing, not inflamed in the tragedy of the world. Do not ask me to quantify my loves and my longings for I cannot.

I think that I’ve lost a lot of blood.

I will not accept, that even now they have the upper hand. Shall I dare say, cannot, tell these torturers what names I have invented. Or, under what puzzling circumstances came upon me when I shed the privileges of my imagined identity. I used my whiteness against the enemy. That is the basis of all my high crime. I abandoned my lesser American aristocracy to make new friends in the Black and Russian quarters. I learned the healing trades of Cubans. I fought for the Muslims. I placed myself hopefully in the arms of sweet humanity. Because of that original transgression, I have made so many new friends. As well as eternal enemies.

Fire on the Mountain
How the great revolt began in four ACTS

Adler S Walt
Dedicated to: Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova
First Edition Completed January 1st, 2017
Edited by Daniella Bonder Summer 2017

Prologue
Prologue
Brooklyn Soviet

Sometimes, old friend, I cry from own weakness. I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it untrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!

And then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.

I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had to no council to turn to. But, I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too. I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well planned evil.

And the responsibilities that were impressed on me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, and organized demonstrations, built unions, operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long term prison, and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.

And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.

“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart ultimately sends him,” Daria once declared.

So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Dasha Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.

I have been imprisoned twenty times. My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and also tortured. The deaths of McGaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden and violent and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good for anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.

I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others. Dasha mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I have not the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man and I am seduced sometimes by wanting more good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, no one asked you to struggle!!

Friends, they torture me once a year. They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away over and over and over again. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who know that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.

I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I’m talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.

I’m thankful for the resistance. I’m thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. Thankful for Commander Reed in Mosul, Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife, I hope this is the year we go pro.

She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the grey uniform I wear now.

I raise glass to the East, for there somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, “Long live the resistance, God protect the blood line of the prophets and the Meshiach and the Mahdi. God keep us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and lead astray.”

For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers. This is just a love song.

 

Scene 4
Scene Four
Caribbean Sea

For many years there has been a persistent conspiracy theory about boats and planes going missing in the North Caribbean within an area called the Bermuda Triangle. While a range of legends both mysterious and scientific have been laid out in varying circles, to date no real valid objective theory has been substantiated.
It is towards this Triangle from an approach between Dominican Republic and the U.S. Colony Puerto Rico that the submersible will make its determined approach toward the eastern coast of the United States after dropping its precious cargo in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
The black freighter is nearly two Manhattan city blocks long. One of the largest submersibles constructed in the period of the Pax Americana between Cold War One and Two, loosely 1989 to 2001. No one is sure what the Chinese have developed since then, but surely large, deadly impressive Chinese things. The Black Mermaid, the new name of this submarine since its purchase/capture, is hidden by virtually all conventional forms of technological detection by the depths it can descend. Because of its reactor, air recycling purifiers, heavy stores of food and fresh water it can remain undetected indefinitely able to deliver a payload of intercontinental ballistic missiles, that no one of the rebel alliance ever intends to use. Via hope, you feign intention.
The ship is rumored to have only five functional warheads. But, that is five more than anyone needs to reduce major cities to ashes. More importantly than missiles is that right now this ship is hosting about half of the rebel government in exile of Israel, Palestine and Kurdistan. Some forty co-chairs, political heads and their immediate families. Most of those families are somewhat smaller now, many lives reduced by the hasty exodus after the battle of Madeira. Waves of killing machines had just one month before surprised the hidden rebel bases. Except for the Kurds which have families larger than most of the crew of the ship. All members of those families could fire Kalashnikovs, but everyone lost someone. It amounts to just under two thousand high value persons they were moving from Sakhalin to Trinidad & Tobago. Very important persons. Before the strike team is loosed off the Eastern American coast most of the rebel government will be brought to the relative safety of Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Yulia Romanova, Adelina, Kudzai and Oleg the Bear have been confined democratically and by an armed Ethiopian Israeli sentry to a small bunk room on a lower deck. The size of the vessel is sprawling. No one trusts the three Russians. There is a Spartan, wood plated and red rust room with two bunk beds for each gender and a small common room for playing cards and drinking. They are coldly and politely given three meals a day in this room since they were taken on board in Sakhalin; a Russian island north of Japan.

Oleg the Bear is imposing while remaining intellectual.

“No, I’ve never read a thing, he’s written; though I’m told I’m depicted as some real shtarker. A brutal tough guy who loves taking women’s clothes off with my hands and camera. We met in some other life, but he doesn’t remember. When we met again he’ll look to me as some another older brother he never had. I will only just encourage him to write,” states Oleg the Bear and all nod in agreement. Yulia Romanova, a tall Slavic pixy shaped conventionally like a Barbie modal doesn’t even enjoy reading. In Russian or Angliski. Hasn’t read a book since she was forced to attend High school. She has dark brown hair and doesn’t appear very crucial to the operation. But, she is actually the bomb maker. She’s not paid to look pretty, but she is. She’s not paid to fuck men on demand, which she won’t. She isn’t a subject matter expert on American affairs. But, she can build and place satchel bombs in expensive hand bags, simple enough, the extent of her patriotism.

On the monstrous underwater vessel called the Black Mermaid; traveling propelled by its nuclear reactor towards the United States; the extraction and intervention squad sits for black bread, herring, tea and Compot, sweet berry punch and some Russian Standard Vodka.

The Chinese had finished a canal across quietly Socialist Nicaragua that was three times the size of the US controlled one in Panama. But, for some reason very few people in the USA even knew the thing was operational. It was through this cognitively non-existent mega water way the Black Mermaid nuclear submarine had passed with prior authorization on its run into American waters after it’s off load of high level rebel leadership in Trinidad.

There were all these people that no one trusted the Russians to be around. Not to meet and not to see. They were taken in hoods from a safe house in Sakhalin, de-hooded in this very bunk room and the only person they had even ever met was this nameless Ethiopian sentry in a grey uniform holding an Uzi. Adelina had been taken to her own room just up the hall and was visited twice by the infamous Emma Solomon. But, none of the others in the unit had left the room. Which was vaguely confining but no one was particularly claustrophobic. Oleg and Yulia mostly played cards. Kudzai mostly read the Jesus books, or engaged in quiet mediation. The only time the four of them talked was during daily meals. Thankfully no one was a smoker.

Kudzai is very muscular from years of hiking, swimming and combat. Big in all four ways that matter. His biochemist brain, his black noble soul, his empathetic heart and his Shona warrior hands. Oleg Medved, otherwise known as Oleg the Bear is perhaps physically larger without being obese, but they are big in different ways. Oleg is simply physically imposing, but his brain, heart and hands; they are smaller. He’s the unit’s intelligence officer, so all hope he is as clever as he appears to be. Kudzai is a holder of a Trinidadian passport. He is dark as night. Black even for the eyes of white men that turn many shades of not Caucasian into racist enemy others. Kudzai stands nearly six feet tall. He is by far the most trusted person in the unit that was being briefed just one hour before deployment, as he is a member of the revolutionary army while these three Russians are all under contract.

Kudzai and Oleg are both witty conversationalists and do their best to engage the two women they will be working with. Kudzai is here primarily to protect Adelina, since the other two Russians Oleg and Yulia are expendable. He will break the back of any person who might lay their hands on the candidates Emma and Adelina. He has taken a blood oath to protect the chosen; his main task on this mission will be to protect Ms. Adelina while she attempts to enter the dreams of Sebastian Adon, and keep him from unleashing his fighters in ways that might trigger a bloody, bloody bloodbath and catastrophe. In fact, their unit, now in massive black nuclear submarine once owned by the State of Israel is hurtling toward the international maritime border.

They will let most of these very important passengers off in Port of Spain, but this unit will remain below decks until they get to American waters.

Oleg Medved will be quick to tell you that “Oleg the Bear” is certainly not the nice Ukrainian Jewish or later Israeli name his mother gave him. But, it will be his name for now.
He is very likable. Gregarious in the right word. He goes nowhere without a camera and takes a lot of pictures some arty, some naughty, some of assets to note all of them quite professional. He even has a good one of Ms. Adelina giggling on the first time they met; which was a few weeks ago in Sakhalin, that cold vile place.

Oleg is the Communications Officer for their little squad, which is nice way of saying the intelligence man. It is his responsibility to work with his partner Ms. Yulia Romanova, to whom he sometimes calls “his muse”. They knew each other from before. Yulia alongside being a slender and sensuous dark brundinite she was very good at building little bombs. And also good for social engineering.

“Every artist ultimately dreams of fucking their muse,” Oleg said over dinner one night in the lower depths cabin.

“Don’t dream too hard. I have a boyfriend,” Yulia replied.

If it was the duty of Adelina Blazhennaya to enter the mind of Sebastian Adon and take control of the resistance apparatus working towards a vast national uprising set for an upcoming hidden date; no longer hidden to the National Security Agency and also the Department of Homeland Security’s secret police forces. It was the duty of Kudzai to use his training to help her enter that glorious but treacherous rebel of mind of Adon’s. See what was actually happening in America Babylon. See if the resistance was really able to pull this off. Then it was Oleg Medved’s job to teach the resistance how to use the special new tools of technology and magic developed in the Sharashka in Hong Kong. Or, if things were quite fubar and infiltrated; they would just mop up anyone who might be able to identify Solomon or any of the other candidates.

“What’s a candidate?” Yulia asks finally.

“People descended from the bloodlines of the seven original prophets,” Kudzai replies.

“Does that mean?” Yulia exclaims pointing at Adelina.

“Yes, she’s related to Jesus or somebody, pass the potatoes,” mutters Oleg.

“That’s not substantiated,” Adelina replies.

“She’s descended from either Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed or some hidden line they haven’t figured out yet,” Kudzai interjects, “both Adelina and certainly Commander Solomon are both candidates.

“Interesting,’ smirks Oleg who doesn’t believe in any of the God delusions, “pass the Vodka please.”

These were upside down cake times, you didn’t know what to believe as the world kept unraveling. Were Adelina really a powerful sorcerous shaman and considered a candidate since birth; well hopefully that meant this would go more smoothly. If not, well she looked too hippy to pull her weight as death squad member. Which is what was going to happen to Sebastian and the rest of the American rebel leaders if this thing was compromised. So basically Adelina and Kudzai as believers were here to make the uprising work. Oleg and Yulia were here to liquidate the American’s if things had gotten fucked up. Life was to have balance even in insurgency and murder.

Adelina was to lead quietly the unit and ensure the outcome of prophesy foretold in a little book called the New Social Gospel revealed by some magnimonious higher power to Emma Solomon in the year 2001. Which was the same year that she was captured by the secret police, tortured repeatedly, brutally raped, then crucified and left to die in the Negev Desert.

What politicians said on the international circus stage were hardly what their populations connected via the inter-web were ready to agree to, not a single year longer.

December 21st, 2012 was to be the year according to the Mayan calendar that a great shift would occur in Humanity. Well that was not the exact date of the American uprising. But those great spiritual cosmic forces were being factored in. It had taken over twenty years to coordinate a military insurrection in the belly of the empire.

Oleg and Yulia had worked together before. Adelina and Kudzai had just met and the unit was assembled about a week ago. They were all now confined in this cabin and to break the ice over vodka, Oleg the Bear got them playing a famous game of gradual interrogation called “Three Thing to Know about me.”

“Let me tell you three some things about me,” Oleg said to them. They were drinking vodka and eating black bread with caviar and herring, onions and salted tomatoes, goose paty, salo and strange orange vegetable that only grows below the soil of Russia.

“I am not a creature that will live vicariously!” he declared in English out of respect for Kudzai who spoke no Russian.

“I am not any kind of believer like you two in some vast invisible forces that I cannot measure hold and see. I am not here there therefore as a fact of faith in your Comrade Solomon. I am here because I have money and orders and a contract to be here. And that is simple enough.”
He continues, “I was told to come and evaluate these Americans. See if they are finally coming to the table of struggle. The story of their uprising most precisely is interesting to the person who pays me. I was told to set up these communication lines so Americans can join the global revolution underway for over two hundred years. I was told to help murder every single one of them that might have gone over to the enemy.”

“You have no enemies’ friend, you are only here for money!” Kudzai proclaims, “What does it really matter if Sebastian is hero, a hooligan or a traitor to us all. You will be paid the same amount.”
“I am actually paid more to not kill anyone,” Oleg replies.
“Yes, it’s clearly in the contract we get less the more people who die,” Yulia says.
“Why are you really here,” Kudzai questions, “Doesn’t the enemy have a bigger bank account?”
“Listen. We do professional work. That’s what we’re being paid for,” Yulia declares.
“What are you all here for, really? If you don’t believe in miracles and prophesy,” Kudzai says, calmly without any accusation in his tone.

“I am here too to enjoy myself, make money and take some pictures!” Oleg declares, “All the most reputable of foreign analysts, journalists, pundit and economists have declared an American uprising as literally impossible. Like you’d have to be working with God and Magic! Which you all seem to think you are. That nation on the mount would sooner watch sports than tune into see the world burning. This is just a fact! As long as they keep the flights to Europe running, as long as they have their beer, football and porn, hookers for those who can afford them then they will be the grinning bastards, the opulent retards, their cities blue grounds for the world elite to harvest more women and treasure!”
Then Oleg continues, “I’m going as a highly paid adventure tourist. I will take a million pictures; I will leave behind more than I take away. Save me your magic! This is a revolution that will be wiped from the history books in treachery and gore. They will all be killed. The only question is, will they be killed from incompetence that comes with their privilege, or because their top leadership was infiltrated long ago” declares Oleg Medved.

“Have you any faith in the prophesy?” Yulia sarcastically asks him in Russian.

Yulia was prim. Oleg had never known her to loyal to her boyfriend patron back in somewhere, but Oleg had come to see women as accessories for men, adjuncts and muse for the doing of big things or even just fun sweaty thrusting things. What he noticed since the Romanoff Bratva took over his other contract was that he had more time to pursue his art. Money absolutely brought options.

Oleg had a long running morally ambiguous relationship with Yulia founded on the principle that her partner back in Russia was not her boyfriend or her husband, just some patron paying for a flat in Moscow and an Amex. The world was burning. They made money wherever they could. These were times of fun and games with papers and loyalties. They took a lot of pictures together; he of her and she and he from his hip. His burly part beard and broad shoulders were quite the opposite of her elegant spindle form, her fake but convincing to touch tits, her black brown hair falling back and forth over shoulders as she let him capture her.

“No faith at all in anything, or anyone, certainly not the fat Americans,” Oleg declares.

Yulia feigns a small, false pout. Then immediately grins. While her beauty was not a question, her eyes lacked what the parapsychologists called the Old Soul depth of Comrade Blazhennaya.

“And you little Mosquito,” exclaimed Yulia referring to the American translation of Blazhennaya’s fictionist passport name, “Do you really believe? Do you really think you’re some chosen child of God?”

Adelina makes no motion to respond.

The conversation goes back to three things to know about each other. In the cultural context of Russia and Ukraine Oleg & Yulia make a lot of toasts and knock down their shots in celebration of the supposedly impossible; the hopeful success of their mission. Kudzai and Adelina stick to tea and water. But, then Yulia provokes the subject again. Emboldened by the drink.

“But really Mosquito! Do you believe in this blatnoy? Or are you being well paid too?”

Before Adelina answers Yulia Romanova’s inquiry, her face grimaces with a hard and quiet smile. Now into the thirteenth shot of Russian Standard Vodka Yulia has never seen such a sinister grin. Oleg was drunk but wholly functional. Yulia was probably able to drive a car or mix some chemicals into an improvised explosive device, but now though she was seeing things.
Drunk was the only way to even take in or put up with this rhetoric. The theories of mostly nonviolent resistance to oligarchy, codified by Emma Solomon, Avinadav DeBuitléir and of course; Comrade Sebastian Adon. The likelihood of death in taking this assignment.
Drunk Yulia now jerked to attention and carried out a most dramatic reading!

Adelina’s eyes began glowing a brown into eerie green on gray. Yulia jumped in her seat, then Adelina’s eyes went grey on grey and Oleg arched his back contorting into a Bhutto type posture, spasmodically twitching and frozen. Grinning obscenely. Oleg too lurched out of his seat but then by the force of her mind and found himself saluting her.

And now, Emma Solomon in husky, but authoritative voice of a warrior queen spoke out the mouths of Adelina and Kudzai perfectly synchronized, and that was then Yulia and Oleg realized that neither the Romanoff Bratva nor the Israeli resistance forces were in charge of this mission at all.

The pair then both exclaimed possessed in the voice of Solomon, lips moving in unison:

“Welcome to the world to come. Open your eyes wide. By the time we are done here there will be no more safety for those men in high towers. Perched atop the mountains d in their gilded bunkers. No faction will be left standing. We were all born serfs or various types of half casted slave, but our unborn children have been assured their emancipation via deeds to come.”

Everyone dropped back into their seats postictal from possession, post coitus almost with no warm fluids. Oleg simply kept grinning refusing inside himself to believe. They had drugged him, it was simple as that. Kudzai smiled too, but it was the smile of happy belief. Yulia looked truly scared, emotions breaking through her year’s crafted control of countenance. And Adelina Blazhennaya in all her petit and unassuming compact grace then uttered, “Trust that among the Americans are many who have cried out over what happened in the killing fields and their sprawling slum cities and prison camps. They have more going on than dancing, fornicating and erection of taller towers and bigger, brighter stadiums. Have a little fucking hope,” she tells them.

“Don’t overestimate the prophesy or underestimate the cowboy libertarianism of the American resistance,” Adelina tells them, and pours them their next round of slightly poisoned shots.

“America, fuck yeah,” exclaims Oleg the Bear.

Scene 3
Scene Three
Upper West Side

Located about seven miles north west from the District Financial is the Upper West Side; an affluent cluster of well-kept mostly spacious and well furnished apartment homes with door men running from 79th street to around 96th street between Central Park and the Hudson River. The entire island of Manhattan, excluding some small clusters of housing projects, section 8 and rent controlled units is the domain of the country’s elite, upper middle classes and new rich financial class. Sports players, movie actors and celebrities live their too.
Though undisputedly the wealthiest people, people who own property live on the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Central Park. This gentrification of the city which always had been took its purest form in the mid 1990’s when the economy was booming, the police forces were tripled, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and robber barons consolidated wealth alongside globalization and the demise of the Soviet Union.
By the time of the Great Recession in 2008, the only working class people living in Manhattan were clusters of petit-bourgeois professionals who bought things or secured rent controlled units in the 1980’s. The New York Times, the paper of record suggested that by 2012 there were over 57,000 individuals with net worth above 37 million apiece and greater living in the City. More concentrated wealth than London and only slightly behind Moscow.
Sebastian’s father is a dentist, he owns a small practice on Staten Island mostly treating cops, firemen and Sanitation worker families. The loft they own in the coop at the North end of the district financial is mostly paid off. Sebastian had never lived in it until about 5 months ago. He grew up in a rent controlled apartment in Waterside Plaza. He ran away from home at age 14, was locked up in a youth offender faculty by age 15, became a communist by age 16 and was living abroad for most of 17 and 18; then he came home and lived with his best friend Nikholai Rosetree Trickovitch for a period before chasing rooms for rent in all boroughs besides Staten Island where the rent was less than $500 a room, or a couch or on a floor mat.

There is no person on earth who better understands Sebastian then his best friend, his loyal droog, his comrade, partner and companion. They are so alike in both genes, upbringing and disposition they can anticipate each other.

The train ride on the 2 Red line from the Financial District historically preserved printshop Sebastian’s family lives in; to the 96th street and Broadway train station is about a twenty minute ride. Nikholai rarely goes downtown. Nikholai has long memory, he remembers most of the thirteen years contiguous friendship. It has had a lot of ups, downs and misadventures. But Sebastian brings a world of drama and intrigue to Nikholai’s life, which could have otherwise been uneventful. And Nikholai brings Sebastian qualities he utterly lacks; self analysis, dispassionate reasoning grounded in fact and most importantly; restraint.

Introverted Nikholai is happy in his solitude, while Sebastian can never enjoy being alone. The two men have come to need each other, but it is mostly Sebastian who is always in trouble and Nikholai who devises the maneuvers to the next to crisis.

They look out over privilege itself. Seventeen stories up, the rooftop deck of the Trickovitch Family Penthouse looks North and West over the Hudson River, the Upper East Side, and also the George Washington Bridge. There are not one but two private garden terraces. So much light and so much air, all somehow under nine hundred American dollars. Much to the chagrin of the Satmars who own the building, the House Trickovitch is completely rent controlled.
Most other families in the building were bought or were forced out. The whole building worth tens of millions, the unit they occupy could be sold for 5 million outright.
Sebastian Adon is wearing his favorite cap and looking somewhere between manic and marmalade, caught somewhere in between possessed with some inner zeal, and at timed calm, cool and collected. His eyes are strange and happy as though he wishes to recite a poem. Or give a speech, which he frequently does at dinners, on trains and in public parks. He isn’t totally of this time, which is logical having immersed his thoughts in the past to make something better for the future. Although he does not ever smile except behind closed doors he is by all accounts charismatic. On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblesse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner in conspiracy Nikholai Trikhovitch.
Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trickovitch since the early 1981. That was not such a heyday for New York City as some newly arrived ‘hip’ individuals have come to believe. By the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down, there was trash everywhere you could get raped at knife point in an ally. You could get stabbed to death in a public place with dozens of people watching. That was the old New York.

Located on 95th and Riverside, it is now one of the most luxurious and safest of safe houses. Which is to say a lot of small talks happen here on sensitive things. It is rent controlled and guarded by Albanians. They are highly warlike these Albanians. Good at moving people and things, also safeguarding things for others. Nobody wants to fuck with the Russians, because they send Albanians.

The place has wall to wall books and a rather large aquarium filled with amphibious turtles. The building has gone coop, and they are the last remaining holdout sitting on a highly choice property paying $1,200 American a month for it adjusting for utilities and service fees. A good number of Jewish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully. For the Trickovitch family employs and are related to Jewish lawyers as well. It was once a little more of zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs. Now it is a sad, empty place for plotting with Nikholai’s fraternal twin brothers living in other cities and his parents more frequently at their upstate farm than here, often now for week at a time. The apartment has functioning landline.

Sebastian rarely calls by mobile when he intends to visit. He calls from a subway payphone to the land line and then just shows up. Nikholai was the very first young person they knew with a bulky mobile phone as early as 1998. Nowadays both men don’t carry them very regularly. Both men use quarters, both men have throw away $10 phones. They both have Sky Pagers, but neither are doctors.
Nikholai, it is rumored is paralyzed with some dark inner depression, some sickness inside him which makes him overly analytical. For a time he was married and playing house in Midwood, Brooklyn deep in the shtetl. Midwood is a place about one hour by train from 42nd Street, Time Square city center. One of the earliest New York settlements in the 16th century, now firmly in one of the largest eleven Jewish Quarters of the greater New York area. Nikolai’s father grew up there, as did Sebastian’s as did the populist secretly centrist politician Bernard Sanders currently running for the Presidential Primaries. Midwood is New York City’s most staunchly propertied Modern Orthodox Jewish district. Along with Crown Heights, Borough Park and Williamsburg which are the more black hat ultra-orthodox neighborhoods dominated by particular Rabbinic sects that find the entire gentile world profane and unholy. These four neighborhoods are surrounded and slightly intermixed with a sprawling array of Afro-Caribbean and African American ghettos and slums. The districts to toward the Southern Coast are Russian and Italian respectively, but most of the Italians left for New Jersey, Long Island and Staten Island in the 80’s. The Chinese quarter of Brooklyn is based in Sunset Park, but the epicenter of the colonization is over in Flushing, Queens. The unofficial population of Brooklyn is around 3-4 million persons, over a million not officially or legally supposed to be there.
Nikholai and his now wife, Krissy, moved to District Midwood as it was close to Brooklyn College where they were then going to school. They both had grown up in Manhattan. They lived a happy, secluded and hyper sexual life for more than half a decade out of sight and out of mind.
Then some years later, Krissy completely vanished, and Nikholai returned to the security of parent’s Upper West Side penthouse barely leaving now except for jaunts, benders, mild malingering whoring and occasionally a revolutionary plot, when he must to keep up appearances of being a trusted inner circle man. His connection to so called poltical activism is not academic or experienced, mostly were he to admit it, he has been sucked into the revolutionary vortex by association; enabling increasingly bold incarnations of Sebastian Adon’s little otriad; their irregular detachment for mutual aid and freedom fighting.

“The most striking thing about her is the murder in her eyes which beg a man closer with the promise of bliss then deny him everything,” mutters Sebastian. He’s always talking about and obsessing about, eyes. Nikholai knows the code though.

Sebastian speaks of “her eyes” so he appears less crudely animalistic speaking of breasts and other luscious appendages. Behind this charade of romance, knowing Sebastian for so long, since teenage times; Nikholai knows the projected poet, from the lusty rake and barely tamed savage. The periodic excursions into serial monogamy are punctuated with inserting his penis artfully around town.
Nikholai isn’t himself tonight, he’s not even putting on a show of host and entertainer.

Looking out towards the George Washington Bridge, Nikholai thinks of suicide, fleetingly. Sebastian observes the same Fort Washington district rising as the highest point on the island of Manhattan. There is no suicide in Sebastian, it is removed from his very way of being. He periodically began mentioning to his close confidants, “If you ever here I killed myself, it’s a lie, I don’t have it in me, they finally did it.” But, you don’t kill white people in America, it as to look like something else.

Who are ‘they’, well the story just sort of started.

Sebastian ruminates in butterfly flaps of mental head space. In his wandering mind he sees all the times he’s walked aimlessly around Fort Tryon Park with a particular lost lover. Holding her little cold hands. One partner, in particular, comes to his mind for Fort Washington District; the Russian Jewish quarter perched up in the rafters of New York City. For after her, none of the other previous ones had mattered. Her name was Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Perechenova, he has fought very hard to keep her love alive in some tantric, flickering form. She had left him for the fortieth time, this time breaking off both communication and sex, and ended all correspondence about six sad months prior. No other woman had even crossed his mind, since then. But, then came Daria to kill him. Hardly an improvement really.

But, some neurons fire faster than others, and then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination. All previous lessons were lost. Were Futurist New York anything like more medieval times, both Sebastian Adon and Nikholai Trickovitch; are the disgraced sons of Hebrew Dukes. In layman’s terms, the prodigal children of the Upper Middle Classes of New York Jewish gentry. Both blessed with privilege, education, several serfs and white skin coats, cursed with mental illness and an evolving revolutionary thinking.

Nikholai was briefly an unlicensed private detective moon lighting as an accountant, wiggling his way listlessly through college. Helping cheating wives get their proofs of infidelity or parents find their dead kids in Newark, New Jersey. He can get to a lot of things in the dark of the web. He is now moonlighting as a driver for the Red Cross in their vast housing and logistics Ponzi scheme, taking money raised from one catastrophe to band aid, blanket and water supply the next one. They hand out prepaid ATM cards to people who lose their homes to fire or disaster, that’s surely appreciated. He’s cut off a lot of people, he begrudgingly lets Sebastian get him out of the house once or twice a year.
In this year, 2012 he can barely manage to leave this house, but he likes to make short walks into the dusk. He is a mostly functional alcoholic, notwithstanding his inability to hold a job, his failure to get over his disappeared wife, his utter failure to finish university and his paralysis. Haitian Rum Straight. Maker’s Mark Straight. And cartons of Newport cigarettes. Sebastian has never questioned what Nikholai does for work. He does something with the internet, living off his wealthy father and selling pills through Albanians to Columbia University students. The children of the elite are addicted to something called Adderall to study and take their exams. The Ivy League is only nine blocks north. Sebastian stays out of his friends’ money. Almost all of his friends have either clean ambulance money or dirty criminal money, and not much in between. Colluding with angels and devils to make an uprising occur, things like that take allies and real dependable, actually won’t run allies take time.

“Go work from somewhere warm droog,” Sebastian always encourages him, but Nikholai is cold and spiritually long dead. The blackness in him sees reality as it is, not how it should be or could be or filtered heavily through the ego. “Get yourself a new woman! A blonde with big inviting tits!”

But Nikholai never heeds Sebastian call to pack up for prettier places or faces and Sebastian never listens to Nikholai’s persistent advice to stay away from Russian women or be less of committed Communist.

Back in the year 2000 they both joined the Communist Party of America, but got kicked out for throwing a huge underage drinking party in it, also launching a short non-lethal bombing campaign connected to slave labor and garment industry.

Nikolai sees the bridge out there in the pretty lit up night and thinks about sweet surrender. Sebastian, though here to talk about Daria and his near death experience, remembers his Yelizaveta, a fond memory of challenging strokes.

Yelizaveta who Sebastian met while attending Hunter College lived in a cute two bedroom apartment on Fort Washington Ave in a six story building above Fort Tryon; the tallest point in Manhattan. Officially her mother was a maid at the Benjamin Hotel and her father un-employed on disability. But, that was not in anyway their real jobs or capabilities. For on the outside the family looked like a struggling working poor immigrant story with young Yelizaveta clawing for the Russian American dream via medical school at Stony Brook University. But Sebastian was privy to the truth.

“In Russia we were Jews. Outside of Russia, we are finally called Russians. We are treated about the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father, Alexandre. Yelizaveta was Sebastian’s partner and paramour for the past two years. She met him in the student movement days before she left for Medical School in Long Island. They wrote many months of letters then for two years were partners and rigorous lovers. Then things fell apart. While Daria was igniting some new desires and unsung anthems, Nikholai had heard the songs all before. For years with Yelizaveta and a couple more with several women before her. Now Sebastian and Nikholai, born nine days apart were both nearly 30, but once they were both as wild at age 14. They had loved and lost many times, though Nikholai had loved and lost everything when his wife left him and disappeared into thin air. They knew each other’s’ songs.

They had all called in chips and put out feelers to find his Krissy. No one likes to hopelessly cling to a failing marriage then have it break apart. People like even less when the person they love becomes a vapor. A ghost. When all the leads dried up there was still this terrible hope she was somewhere she could return from. When they almost had every ambulance and every gangster, every bad man, every snitch and every soundbite looking for Nikholai’s ex-wife. They went together finally to Alexandre Perchevney, the most dangerous man in New York City. The father of Sebastian’s favorite ex. A person who according to the IRS was collecting disability from a small rent stabilized flat in Washington Heights while his wife worked full time cleaning hotel rooms.
But, Alexandre owned properties all over town. Alexandre, born in Ukraine held a growing empire in disguise. His wife, Yelizaveta’s more Magda Marina; someone that looked exactly like her was indeed cleaning rooms. Someone that looked just like her had raised little Yelizaveta; but nothing was what it appeared to be.

Alexandre is called Sasho by those that think they know him well. He is a fierce and indomitable man, but also a gregarious buffoon behind the doors of his famous tavern Social Club when no one was looking but those he mostly trusted dancing about with a cigar grinning. Sasho is also quite a mastermind. He found himself with a great deal of money at the end of the 90’s. Always plotting and constantly cashing on his plots. A Ukrainian Jew when he felt like it. A Bulgarian Mobster when he felt like it. The IRS auditor registered him at receiving about $600 a month in disability. The very last man you’d ever want to owe. But Sebastian had owed him several times. But, even Sasho couldn’t find Krissy. Or that’s what he finally said after getting a lot of free work out of them.

The family safe houses were still ‘too hot’ to talk about anything heavy. There had been multiple police raids to Sebastian’s loft since 2000. The young men were always plotting too and that plotting got them investigated by multiple police and intelligence services. Sebastian had to flee the country for the year of 2000-2001, he moved between London, Paris, Madrid and eventually Tel Aviv evading allegations of terrorism in New York, largely unfounded. He came back in November of 2001 after the towers fell and moved in for a time with Nikholai’s family. Shortly after they got back to plots, plans, direct actions and trouble. As young men causing trouble should do, they both moved deep into Brooklyn in 2005. But while Brooklyn and the Bronx have many alcoves for sheltering rebels and criminals, they always needed a dangerous protector. So since, their little movement has taken shelter under the roof of a loving lesser Post-Soviet Oligarch. And there was a lot of business relationship now facilitated by this. In 2010 amid a terrible blizzard Sebastian Adon had saved the leg and life of his then girlfriend Yelizaveta Alexandre’s daughter or at the very least fought his way through a snowstorm to rescue her from a broken tibia, lying bleeding and abandoned in JFK airport. That night was so pivotal for it was the first time Sasho owed anyone anything and found out about the secret little thing is daughter had with Sebastian. But then a lot of other things happened. Sasho was shot and nearly died. It was messy, Sebastian killed a few people that night. Yelizaveta loved him even more, her father respected and owned him. But her mother was horrified and worked full time to end the entire relationship. All in just a seven day blizzard.
Sebastian was locked up for a month. Not for the men he killed, but from lack of sleep. Sometimes when the work he did took over and he wandered around town in big circles engaging the universe and lot of other people. An ambulance picked him up near Coney Island. He never was held very long before the American Civil Liberties Union or family lawyers got things negotiated. They never killed anyone or blew anything up, that’s what the lawyers always repeated over the years.
Most of the work Sebastian and his outfit did was propaganda. Historical lectures, street theatre, speeches and lots of diner salons on topics of subversive relevance. Sebastian’s father was the dentist for a lot of detectives and high ranked cops, that helped some. Sebastian and Nikolai picked up with with Sasho, that helped a lot. A lot of the time some standoff happened and Sebastian took himself hostage. The police hospitalized him a lot more than they put him in the tombs. It was easier to get rid of him that way, since they recognized, those that knew or heard that he was city paramedic and an affiliated person who never put boys in blue in harm’s way for the most part.
Yelizaveta’s mother ordered her to break the whole affair off immediately in the Winter of 2010. So after a year of hiding and sneaking around, breaking up, fucking hard and making up, then breaking up again in circles; the day after his birthday 28, giving him a good hard last ride she decisively ended everything. Sasho was never consulted with or weighed in on the romance between Sebastian and his daughter. He was of course by then aware it was happening, and did nothing. Sebastian never asked permission or asked him to do anything after the final break up. The man being paid to be her disabled father, the double who knew Yelizaveta more than her biological father; well he was the only other person sad about the whole thing.

To the brutal and brilliant ‘Bulgarian’ gangster slash businessman, Sebastian Adon amused him. Reminded him of himself as young man before he lost Communism and found a million ways to make money at the tree of life.

Not that any of these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Except to paint the portrait of Sebastian as more hopeless romantic puppy than a stone cold killer, which he eventually became after losing enough friends in the years of the underground. He still loves young Yelizaveta the prim, Jappy pre-medical student as ferociously as he ever had. He served her needs and courted her involvement in political projects, and she certainly did quite a lot to assist him. But, her mother wanted her to have nothing to do with a young man so alike to her father, both hear real father and the man hired to play her father.
Nikholai traverses a daily memory road his with his vanished ex-wife. Wonders did she leave him or was she taken away, and by who? Sebastian is regularly and often existentially dying from his beliefs. Women just distract that he is a committed zealot, let him pretend he want’s a ‘normal life’. When his partners reject him and his unstable, if not probably impossible pursuits, he goes harder at them. Which thus magnifies the danger to himself and others. Before this recent anguish over Yelizaveta, there was Hali Vik, the artistic Swedish anarchist to whom he was engaged to mary. There was also the debutante Ukrainian Maria Parsheva. Less passionate, but certainly highly influential were Polish Communist Joanna Kocab and his Sephardic Israeli partner Emma Solomon.
Not that the list of other unlisted, less contemplated lovers and girlfriends were of less importance to his human development, but the women who evolved him were their own league, they all attempted to love Sebastian as he was and better the quality of his life game.
Maria and Yelizaveta were the two other former Soviet lovers Sebastian had taken as his closest partners in the past four years. It would be incorrect to say he dated “Russian Women exclusively”; as later inferred by the Russian photographer and Israeli gangster Oleg Medved. He had merely intimately engaged only just two, one right after the other. And that was enough for him to suspect there was something remarkable about the character of a “Russian woman.” The first, Maria brought such stability and calm to his mind. She made a good home with him in Midwood, she pumped him full of sex. But Sebastian did not love her completely for she did not excite at all intellectually. She would suck on his cock for hours, or take in in umcortible places sooner than talk about the ‘emancipation of the negro’ as she called his work dismissively. She never seemed angry or critical. She removed Sebastian from the stresses of paramedicine and organizing.
“That’s all she seemed good for,” Nikholai once suggested, but he later impressed her on one very particular occasion.
Nikholai remembered redhead Maria as something of a “submissive Soviet Jessica Rabbit,” complete with a cute little mole, slightly husky voice and marked non-fascination with much that wasn’t Soviet in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody mess in 2007. That was the time when Nikholai, Sebastian, Maria and a foxy little Chechen named Angelika had to hold off a murderous mob of sixteen working poor white hooligans from Gerritsen Beach with a briefcase, a prayer, and good Bangladeshi Samaritan. Which got them all over the papers and Sebastian into the ranks of the FDNY.
Sebastian would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justin Thomas described her. This was a real gesture of flattery on Justin’s part by in calling Maria “Betty Shabazz” he was calling Sebastian a white Malcolm X. Or something to that effect. Betty, like Maria in a most ways strong woman who stood behind her larger than life man without involving herself in the political melee. Sebastian and Maria lived together for over a year, they broke up on Block Island. Sebastian had left her on the beach and swam out into the night.

Nikholi just thought of Maria a Russian geisha, until he watched her do the train job. At that moment under fire, her realness did come out. Nikh still had no trouble after the break up confiding she was just a Geisha, a stay at home fuck.

The second Russian girlfriend Yelizaveta was headstrong and wild and Sebastian could never forget her, no matter how many women he got under. Yelizaveta, a spoiled daughter of a dangerous mobster in a subjective reality, a working poor dreamer in another. Hustling to become a doctor to get her parents out of poverty. No one approved of her at all. Though no one really said so while it seemed to make him happy; everyone later told him ‘Yeli’ was walking all over him.
Nikholai remembers young Yelizaveta emerging into the picture, and Sebastian’s bedroom sometime in early 2009. He remembers her at meetings, and social functions as “a highly mouthy Americanized blonde know it all little bitch who walked all over you privately and publicly and privately yet again. She emptied out your pockets, put wild eyed ideas in your head, and reduced you to bawling tears when she eventually left you over her mother’s total lack of approval.”
But Sebastian never saw it like that, he’d held the relationship long past when it should have ended. He left here with a box of letters and a diamond engagement ring he’d bought from some Rabbi in a bathhouse.
“Your women are never far from the very center of your goriest war stories,” Nick notes.

The two comrades Sebastian and Nikolai had been partners in the student movement, in the underground and in the insurgency and its defense committees 2000 when Sebastian got out of the behavior modification camps he’d spent a year in; escaping on Valentine’s Day back to New York from Upstate. The year they did their first job. They both opposed their government’s imperialism as well as the capitalist system generally. Sebastian always put amalgamated ideology to it, but Nikholai just always felt the government was repressive, the blacks totally oppressed and the population brainwashed into fat apathy. There had been a lot of great and also “highly mediocre women” and a lot of jobs since then. Jobs, being their little word of resistance operations. But not for nothing, since Sebastian Adon entered his “Postsoviet amorous period,” as Nikholai liked to call it, well the jobs had gotten quite a lot more ambitious. The man needed an iron clad muse all assumed. In reality, he simply needed to be loved so that the love he put in the world could find a singular dedication, another soul to whom he could do all his work for.
“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly, love making? The full blown Russianness of her” asks Nikholai. As Sebastian had informed him that Daria was fully Slavic and all his other so-called Russian lovers were variations on Ukrainian Jews.
“Referring back to this new lady being a full blown Slav?”
“Certainly. Slav is only one letter from you being a slave after all. And you and I know full fucking well that it isn’t the female who’s the slave in these Cold War flings. Those women walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”
Sebastian had come to believe that Nikholai harbored some rather base prejudices against ‘the Russians’ but had never determined why. Nikholai had come to believe that Sebastian unable to love himself at all found himself enslaved by a series of at least partly damaged, somewhat dangerous, quasi gold digging immigrant women. Russian and non-Russian alike. Both men had father’s three of four generations removed from pre-Soviet Russia with Jew blood. Both had mothers eight or nine generations American by some distant way of Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and famine. Both men share a political conviction perhaps reflective best of being born Petit Bourgeoisie in the leading city in the last violent flutters of an Empire.

Sebastian had not previously thought of how Dasha performed in bed. It was as if he had known that already, being a man. From first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to find a cocktail.
She could clearly fuck a man into pieces.
That wasn’t up for any speculation on his part. But this was not the immediate attraction, the shapely form and the physical curves, the eyes he keeps talking about and the crazy in her. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. There are poems and songs about that. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Postsoviet partners. He felt a sexual pull, animalistic in nature. But this was a different thing. A Deja-vu about loss and longing.
“I bet she is ferocious,” remarks Nikholi.

An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop but two days ago.
“I can’t stop thinking about her. She’s made more remarkable not by her sheer dangerousness, but by some feeling I have of having seen her before in another time. I speak not about a blackout in hat Tavern. I must confide in low volume about other lives and other worlds. A pure predator not even posing as a house pet! And the things she confessed to under torture.”

“Tortured her did you?”

“I did. With my choice words.”

“This is your primary instrument of torture tovarish.”

Tovarish is former Soviet for, comrade. Nikolai is a Russian-Jewish-Irish-German mutt just like Sebastian. Their New Yorkerness, supersedes all that imagined identity. Neither of their mothers is halachically Jewish, though Sebastian’s mother Barbara had gone through some motions to convert to the watered down Reform version. So the black hats would, of course, disavow them both as sad losses to the Gentiles. Neither Sebastian nor Nikholai could marry lawfully in Israel neither, but that didn’t bother Nikholai as he had no intention of ever going to that particular colony after hearing many of Sebastian’s accounts. Sebastian and Nick both look enough like “the Russians,” but they speak, and they think like children of the American Upper Middle-class intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals. Nikholai’s father is a neurologist, and Sebastian’s a dentist. Both fathers are committed, Jewish Atheists. Both gentile mothers being American ‘hippie’, openly minded sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to their lower case communism as they’d be denounced as over and over. But, they were not orthodox communists, or working in the local Party organs. The nine of which in New York were marginal anachronisms at best composed of the awkward and the elderly. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much-trampled masses out of empathy not necessity. They were only about as Jewish as their value for education, but sometimes Sebastian was known to make a rude display of it in the form of Holiday parties.

They did Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year’s, Hanukkah the eight-day gambling potato pancake party, Passover the Exodus Fest; and Sukkot the eight-day tent party feast. And the rest were all causally omitted. As well as poorly understood.

They had met in their freshman year of High School. Sebastian’s home had been robbed, and Nick had shown up with some weapons and an offer to help him get his honor back, his rep. They rarely agreed on anything besides opposition to the government, and the greatness of big firm breasts augmenting rough sex, but they were very similar men in disposition. They both enjoyed the drink and could work each other into nights of sheer ethanol rampage. In City, culture, genes, and habits their cloth was of similar cut. Until the year 2010 though, Sebastian has been married to his interpretations of Communism via Zionist Universalism while Nikholai had been married to Krissy, not needing angry politics at all. But things fall apart. Sebastian returned from his ‘second homeland’ in cuffs and Krissy ran out maybe, then as stated completely vanished. It was perhaps Nikholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied what he had imagined was his occupied homeland or imagined was his destiny that put them back together, left them open to suggestion. This lead to the expeditions into Haiti and the beginning of the armed struggle. Via a machine of networked factions and sympathizers the two had built in tandem over a decade.

And let us all be frank that women can give men any number of tremendous suggestions and wield a power that shapes a man’s deeds. Perhaps you could say women, with more love for the world and more investment in its future can direct the violent ego driven nature of men.

“She didn’t tell me everything, but enough to conclude she is a victim, a prisoner of sorts. With a dark Post-Soviet past to unravel all of her callous behaviors and the smile she hides behind.”
They had toppled backward together toward the precipice, and in the free fall, he had pulled her with him to collective death only averted because of certain laws of physics. Well, it was impossible to know truly, Yelizaveta the young scientist could have explained it, but she was long gone these days.
Rather than tumble into a pit of death, Sebastian grabbing onto Daria altered the trajectory of the plummet. She had made every effort to follow his deadly, beckoning commands and rather than go through with it honorably he had tried to take her with him.
How Russian American.
“So what the fuck happened on that roof?” Trickovitch asks.

“Well toppled and we landed on top of each other half off the edge. Then we just lay there quietly panting. I realized that she had almost just killed me and I had almost just taken her with me toward death.”
“That’s hot. And by hot, I mean real fucking stupid.”

“Well, anyway. So hearts were racing and looking down into seventeen stories of death she then grabs my hand and bites down into my right shooter.”

Sebastian shows the wound. There were a literal ring of red bite marks around his right index finger.
“I think I know her from before,” Sebastian finally admits overtly.
“Before, eh. Tovarish. You need to take more of your medicine.”
“No, I mean maybe. But this was different. I am not making chemical, electrical mythologies droog; I remember Dasha Andreavna Skorbogatova Maccluskey from before.”
“You’ve always been a sick fuck. It gets worse when you low dose or drop dose, or of course wakefield and don’t go to sleep. And you need not let fourth-dimensional things interfere with the gathering war effort,” Nikholai replies and lights another menthol smoke.
“Well then she calms down, and we do this kind of half swoon, half cuddle, half makes a reevaluation of an enemy. As she did just try and push me off a roof and kill me. Daria tells me that she paid 25,000 dollars to come to America and have an arranged marriage setup. She said she had to work the debt off and the work was highly unpleasant. She asked me if I wanted to take her on a date. She told me she knew the Financial District very well and could tell me who and what to hit.”
Sometimes Nikholai Trickovitch believes his best friend is mad Hebrew profit and a highly inspiring leader. And sometimes Sebastian is draining.
“Don’t project and don’t believe her Russian lies. You always seem to tell a tale always darker than is. The world is evil enough on its comrade story teller. As for her offer to help? Why? What’s in it for her? I think you should ask where this woman came from, question why she ended up meeting you at this very stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. What are you holding? What do you have in the bank? The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation. She tried to kill you.”

“She told and made most illicit references to what she did to come here. Perhaps she wants out of who holds her paperwork. Or maybe something else,” Sebastian suggests.
“I’m not sure she did anything but prove you’re easier to kill than the rumors suggest, you’d both been drinking and we all know just about anything can come out of a Russian woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie,” Nikholai replies.
“Just about anything can become true or untrue, dangerous or stunning. A top or a bottom. But given the entirety of the encounter, it seemed Daria was alluding to her imprisonments and debts. Whatever their current state might be.”
“But are they even true? All women lie, and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were storytelling as art or advanced parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You make every single woman around you’re your damsel in distress from Capitalism! You’ve done so time and again. I’ve been here for it all. Remember your truest, most equal partner Hali Vik, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in this endless succession, you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”

“Nikholi, you’re making something out of prejudices. I had just two partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was only Maria, and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple of short stands in the Stans in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun. My hand gave me greater pleasure,” smirks Sebastian.
“Hali Vik was the kind of woman you need to find again, steal her back from that Italian hipster musician she dates or something, you’ve done such things frequently. Not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you, and they’ll never join this cause,” says Nikolai, “Just like Maria and Yeli, Daria will reject your ideology, reject your lifestyle and leave you the very minute you become hard to deal with; which you are! Incredibly hard to deal with,” says Nikholi.
Nikholai Trickovitch is referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well-suited partner for Sebastian Adon. All of his friends, comrades, and co-officers never went so far as to say “Maria Parsheva is a Russian Geisha,” or “Yelizaveta Perechenova is a condescending, high maintenance Jewish American princess,” but they all said it when the two women broke off the relationships. Sebastian’s mother was vaguely prejudiced by now of anyone who even spoke Russian.
Hali Vik, Irish Swedish wild rebel Hali Vik was not a natural fit either though. Her big tits and flirtatious demeanor caused a lot of fights. Sebastian remembers momentarily the time Hali cut her risks, and he had to get up to Massachusetts and find her doped up in a roadside motel. He also remembers the Lowell Job, when they burned down half the Meth Labs in the city and engaged in a running gun fight with the Cambodian street gangs. Which had been a messy over exertion of well-intentioned violence because Hali Vik, had gotten herself in a lot of trouble, but Sebastian may well have made up stories in his head too?
Part of Sebastian’s condition was that everything was always happening at once in total recall. If he did not take a medicinal salt to lock into the present, he gets overwhelmed by the intensity of everything.
Well anyway, Hali was ‘safe in Italy’ or maybe Texas now, and while there may have been a little bit of torture, murder, barbarism, and war utilized to get her there, well nobody was dead and buried in Lowell that didn’t deserve somewhat to be dead, burned and buried in Lowell.
Nikolai and Sebastian being best friends talked a lot about their women. But there was one woman that Nikholai new precious little about and that was Emma Solomon, but he was correct that Hali Vik the only American was, in fact, the only person he might well have married in a normative sense of what that word means. For in the State of Israel, Sebastian was in paperwork at least still quite married to Emma Solomon. But bigamy of paperwork is not the same as bigamy taken to the firing mechanisms of the inner heart. Was it these four women that had made Sebastian believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and Emma was dead. Or didn’t exist in the same space that everyone else had.

Yelizaveta in a completely separate way. Because she had worked on his body very thoroughly. And he had been employed heavy on hers. They were together for only three months when the storm hit; someone broke her leg, someone tried to kill her dangerous father and Sebastian fixed it all. Then he was imprisoned. There had many lovers, not an inappropriate amount but a good amount still. Sebastian had well ripped the heart out of their young Polish comrade Joanna who loved him as no other woman had or perhaps could but to whom he felt youthful nothing. But that was a decade ago. Sometimes, he felt like all his pain with loving women that couldn’t love him, in the same way, was due to what he did to Joanna.
Nikolai had been married to a Syrian Italian Puerto Rican model for seven years named Krissyiana, or Krissy for cute. She had wanted very little besides children, and she was an agoraphobe; she didn’t leave their Midwood, Brooklyn apartment very many times in the ten years they lived together. The product of near ceaseless sexual harassment and advances on the street, she preferred the life of a managed housewife. Her father was rather wealthy and also in the Central Intelligence Agency. The parents disowned her for cohabitating with a Jew. Though he wasn’t very Jewish at all and didn’t even have a Jewish mother, or a Bar Mitzvah. They married early at age 18 and lived together in District Midwood until their late twenties. Adon rarely saw his best man then, but Nikolai was happy playing house, he was domestic in his soul.
Eventually it ended, he wouldn’t bear her kids. She didn’t want one she wanted 3 or 4. And he didn’t know if his life wanted to look like that. The money wasn’t great at his job, and she was even a little more homebound than he was which seemed extreme. They bargained and fucked, bargained and cried. Then, they divorced and then she completely disappeared, into smoke. As if her father had managed that; which maybe he had. The very last time they saw each other to sign the divorce papers she gave him a parting fuck. He poured olive oil on his cock and put it deep in her ass for as long as he could think to. It was the kind of rough good bye sex from movies, which passionate, angry people have in real life. It was the kind of sex Yelizaveta, and Sebastian had for a year since they broke up about once a week for a year. Nikholai doesn’t like to equate his last encounter with Krissy as sodomy with Italian olive oil. It was a lot more than that. She had completely rejected him and then cut him off.
Nikholi has been fucking and drank his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where. Self-destruction or the arms of a wealthy man, who only knew? In all likelihood, her father probably just gave her a trust fund and sent her abroad somewhere. But dark minds make up the worst possible scenarios about everything. After Krissy, every single woman Nick was with looked like a lumpy mommy. Nothing to write home about any single one of them. Women that emasculated him even further.

Then Nick put out the past with his cigarette.

“I am only suggesting slowness and loads of needed caution is required are you to obsess, I repeat the word obsess! Further about another woman you meet by the brink of your crazy pursuit of wild partly damaged women. Joanna was great to you, but you never felt anything and that destroyed her and perhaps forever cursed you if you believe in the dealings of love. Hali Vik was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to you to being unadulterated happy for a brief fuck of time. But let’s not forget just how much we had to burn down and knock around over that little lady, and that you may have saved her life, but she well near killed you. Maria Parsheva was a loyal little Russian geisha, but between various factors that we need not rehash, that too was doomed. Though, on the train, what a little gangster she was! Perhaps you did faster more far reaching organizing so moved as you were by Ms. Yelizaveta Perechenova, but you have such a way of making women into these wild muses and then yourself into tragic fucking art. And to be frank, Yelizaveta completely emptied your bank account. She also humiliated you on a weekly basis by refusing to give the relationship any stability after you got out of prison. All the women you take as your serious partners, well none of them have fathers and all of them of dark pasts. Except for Joanna who you destroyed. Poor noble woman. Which was rather sad because none of them loved you as fearlessly as she. She was the only one who followed you into the camps remember, into Palestine. He was a quality woman. But, you were bored and cheated on her left and right!”
Yelizaveta has a most brilliant and scary father. Bulgarian by nationality. Ukrainian Jew by blood. But he was highly bipolar. About as high functioning Bipolar as a major criminal/ business man can get. When he arrived in America in the 1990’s the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. Until Sasho had every single paramedic working north of 168th street killed. Had New York Presbyterian Hospital burned down? Made Washington Heights once again since the 1980’s an entirely unsafe place to live. So, it went to reason “that the daughter of a bipolar man carried away by ambulance men should perhaps not marry a bipolar ambulance man.”

That’s what Sebastian’s condition was also called, Bipolar 1, invented medicine for deviant minds. That thing did not really exist. It was simply one more way the Western governments colluded to chemically neuter powerful people.
Firm and logical now, but not in 2009. After Sebastian secured Yelizaveta during the blizzard and brought her to a hospital for treatment. After Sebastian, Nikholai and some of their men thwarted and Italian mob attack on Alexandre. After Sebastian was taken by the secret police for a month and disappeared into torture land. Well, despite the conflicting recent record of heroism, Yelizaveta’s mother Tanya Marina forbid Yeli and Sebastian to see each other, and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end. But, Yelizaveta was a little crazy too and loved Sebastian. So for a year, it was on again off again, rough and deep, hard and passionate, presents, secret rendezvous and lots of art, poems, dinners, flowers and a lot of time in the sheets as well as in showers, tubs and the floor.
“Dasha is a continent on to herself. I ask you not compare and contrast my various past uses of love and longing. I can’t even truly say that I know her well enough to speak anything like love to her. I only felt like I was in the presence of, a long lost friend.”
He almost said, ‘murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then actually mock him. As everyone had and would that he suggested something like that too.
“A damn construct man! Do not mistake your fucking black Israelite training for reality or it will consume you, again,” that’s what Nick would yell at him in simulations.
“You love dangerously and often inappropriately. You don’t let go at all. Just remember that Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory to you being killed by another man, group of men really over a woman. I suspect that is something you are secretly craving in some reminiscence of an older life.”
“Well, maybe she hasn’t got a man, per say. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past at all; maybe it’s just a mind game. I’m very hard to kill as you know. Dasha has already tried.”

“You might have easily both died. And truly this time for nothing!”

“She claimed to Rafael Ernesto she remembers nothing about that night at all.”

“A black out as a reconciliation for your improvised murder? Prosto, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered it!”
“A blackout woman always thinly hides a dark past in my experience.”

“I fail to see what, at all, is attractive about her willingness to murder you!”

“This isn’t lust. Or love. This is something surreal brother. Something I haven’t felt in before in the same way. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under three years, but I’ve never seen her before. She never pays, always leaves alone. Drinks like she needs to part the Red Sea via her consumption. I’ve never seen her at the club before, I’m there all the time as you know. I have no idea how I could have missed a busty, wild thing like her.”

“That my friend is only called a trap. She is not what you or we need right now. She is nothing but big tits with bad trouble.”
Sebastian would perhaps not have noticed her because for the past year and a half he had weaned himself off that den of Bulgarian sin and former Soviet misery by convincing himself no woman on earth could be as angelic and pure as his Yelizaveta, his last and most imperfect love.
“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” continues Nikholai getting yet another cigarette fired up, up off the first, “It’s far worse that you’re a real romantic. You usher in the 18th century for the coldest of former Soviet hearts. Some of these poor girls have to learn how to protect themselves from whether you’re sure you’re serious or not. More precisely you need to protect yourself from your projections of love and the cowboy like the way you shoot cupid’s arrows off in your artistic yet unpredictable shifting of moods.”

“I’m deadly serious with this one, and will not weigh its risks against the others. You are lecturing me about my love life as if I were proclaiming a new love. I am speaking about something else now. I am remembering things that were, shall we say deleted. Mediated away. Washed down with salt! I am telling you not that I plan to try and bed Daria Maccluskey. Of course, I will try, that is what men do. I’m trying to tell you that with all the sleep, salt and training in the world; I know that woman from before.”

“All of them. You say things like this about all of them. It’s either a blessing or a terrible curse you love early and often love as you do. I suspect a curse upon your well-being. You seem to enjoy these unstable, untenable trysts as if pursuing the romantic ideal of poorly constructed epics might necessitate your energies to live a more basic life. Not that anything you do is basic, but I suspect you’d always be happier as a wandering bard than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”
“I have no idea anymore; I just feel something in the molecules, my friend. I am telling you that what we have been planning might well hinge on this person. I haven’t written a magnificent poem in many years. If quite a little good art was made under Yelizaveta, it was because she asked for it and returned it and sucked it out of me on her knees. They are all entirely different loves. One loves the struggle because one always thinks it noble, or heroic and the cause just and the suffering of our people, all people immense. One loves a woman because she emboldens him. Makes him a real man by showing love as something justifying of our human condition.”

“Different Sebastian’s have said differing things on the matter over this decade mind you. You must look yourself in the mirror more often or more deeply. For one thing, you’re too lean for my liking and you hair is too short it means you aren’t eating. That is always a giveaway that you are about to do something reckless. Police and imprisonment tend to follow an old friend.”

“You’re being a real Jewish mother now. More praying is perhaps in order?”

“I certainly don’t care what you pray to this week, but you do need to eat more, drink less and certainly not be chasing around a woman you hardly know, who happens to show up now. Three weeks from the job. The biggest job ever. And for the love of god: You just got over Ms. Yelizaveta and were beginning to sleep around more casually, so please just don’t get drunk on any more roof tops. Just be cautious of what a wild woman you are dealing with. And please, whatever you do, just don’t tell her you love her until you can pronounce her last name. And have done the homework on the skeletons in her closet. This is a Russian fucking woman after all. They play no games, not with one damn thing. We could sort of vouch for Maria and Yeli, but who is this bitch? Seriously, who the fuck is Daria Maccluskey?”
Nikolai then asks Sebastian quite specifically, “What happened up on that roof?”

Sebastian blows out his smoke.

“I died and was immediately reborn, like the last few thousand times,” quietly responds Adon puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. We died in a very inglorious real way. Stupidly and drunk. But, miraculously we then awoke panting in the alley way, holding each other’s near death hand. This all happened in the blink of an eye. Then we got up, and I dusted her off, and we walked out as if nothing happened. She gave me her number, and I put her in a cab.”
“And you think you see the soul of your dead wife in her, is that the story?”

“Nikholai please do not judge me. If I’m so fucking crazy why is anyone following me into this war?”
“Because we’re all a little crazy. You’re just very persistent,” Nikholai replies.

But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him for too long because he too knows what it is like to bear forced separation from the one you love. He too is gifted with a long memory and knows what Sebastian first lost that brought him to the revolutionary road. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adon is not because Sebastian is at least partly sleeping, still taking the last load of salt drugs they put him on, while Nikholai is completely awake.