SCENE 10
“The World Beyond American Reach”
Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
It sure is cold. And the worst parts of me just want to die. Life is thankless, and I am aware that it is also very cruel to most of my human people. That all makes me want to fight, but I’m sure I’ll just make myself into a new statistic. The train rattles by on the above ground track next to the room I’m renting. It doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. It sounds like living in poverty next to plenty. I worked 80 hours this week. I still can’t manage to sleep.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.” I would have them put that on my tombstone if I believed they would ever find my body or figure out how to make me die.
I lean towards Hooligan in depicting myself, lower your expectations. I will not live up to your expectations for me and my agency, me and my powers. I am an easily broken man running from capitalist modernity into dreams, poems and the world beyond American reach.
Reads Maria Silverrtova:
It was the cold night of Purim in the Hebrew year 5777. Super Futuristic. The full moon was huge and it was brick as shit, it was Friday, everyone was drunk. But that had nothing to do with their silly drunk festival called Purim. The coldness goes right though his sheets, through his comforter, the space heater doesn’t start up right away. It’s a fire trap in here with all the subdivided dry walls. But its brik, as the brothers say, no matter how many layers I put over him. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. He knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade tonight, but I was conserving my finances. Hording up my comfortable sleeps on his big Queen sized mattress made in Brooklyn that he’d lashed now three times to roof of my civic and trafficked about the borough. Moving rooms in safe houses. Working everyday towards my next operation. Nothing is given to you in the movement. You have to earn or take initiate. That can appear attractive to women, sometimes, for a bit. But he’s basically broke.
The safe house wasn’t so bad. It has high ceilings. The train is obnoxious and the neighborhood used to be a war zone. It’s still dirty. There’s still robberies every day. But the rent was a square $800, which was reasonable. Things were gentrifying here in Bed Stuy- Bushwick area. Still looked and felt like the ghetto Adonaev worked the 37 Bravo unit in. It still looked like the dark place Rahula died in. That was their first American Martyr, shot himself twice in the head. But now there were white hipsters and cafes. It was a cute place except a couple little things. Like the no drinking rule which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer slash painter greatly.
Her name was Brit Tully and we did time together in the camps a few years back. She never admitted to being such but this is what my associate Alan Medvinsky told Adon, and he knew about such things. Brit was a metal worker, glass worker and an introvert. Her square job was retail in a fancy SoHo denim outlet. We co-habituated the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house. It was Brit Tully in the small middle room, with my room to the right and Handler Hicks to the left. A fucking nut. We had all these hippy rules none of us followed and we both kind of hated him, he was a shifty fuck.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small time publisher and writer Handler Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed. And somewhat muscular and vigorous looking from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good!” He is s total nut who fixates on 9/11 conspiracy theories and has all the tendencies of being a junky off junk. His little boy, when custody allowed as always there every other weekend looking feeble. Looking malnourished and unhappy to be there, yet chipper. Handlers is an endless passive aggressive pain in the ass, but Brit and Sebastian Adonaev needed a house for cash and paper trail and you get what you pay for in this city.
Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
Handler took me in when the safe house just before it got too, hot. Right before I skipped town to Baltimore to get my assignment from the local committee. A safe house falls apart for two main reasons; too much traffic or drama among spies. This place Brooklyn is infested these days with whores, with criminal scum, with sedition and with spies. It’s a good staging area for working in the City with no papers.
Natasha Salzano, which was just her passport name was a cold cunt. Natalia Khiterova, which was her name in Russia had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused student Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night.
A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And, frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a good fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house; whoever is on the lease is the boss.
So Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a Masters in International Communications, but who knew.
She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the land lord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was really quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came actually really, really nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything is gonna be fine!”
And I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill me over $735, well, that’s life. I’d kill someone over no less than 5,000 and depends what they’d done to deserve it.
Handler Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figure head of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews.
Moving on, it was so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two year winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. I had invested in a long heavy Soviet grey coat, and layers of thermal underwear as well as an Ushanka. The furry hat everyone knows and loves.
Reads Maria Silverrtova:
I shudder partly naked in his bed. Why have I done this? I am not sure. No one is allowed to receive a Russian pitty fucking, but that’s what I sort of gave him. Obscenity to fuck a dead man. But I suppose my kind will pitty fuck an artist. Anyway there he was about to deploy again and never even got to wear his tough, beige winter coat I bought him second hand at the Lady’s Village Cultural Society near the family Dacha in East Hampton. It’s a lovely family Dacha I’m told, the family has money but you wouldn’t know it the way he lives. It looks like something Adelina wears, but a little less yellow. He hasn’t heard from her in over a year, Adelina Blazhennaya. She visited his father for dentistry and maybe it was November on my way to meet David Smith in D.C. for a palaver and she called me or he called her advice about the negotiations. He pulled his dented white Honda Civic into a truck stop and she was so sweet and precise. I wasn’t there, he just talks about himself a lot.
“Do not let them talk you out of your intellectual property making token gesture of collaboration, this is business not a movement. You have to be A LOT less Communist.”
Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
And really I never heard from her again. Like someone with a better, more giving dick inside her or maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with ever me. I have three love letters she wrote me and I carry them around in the black leather party envelope I was issued in Haiti. I try quite hard to break that silence of hers. To get friendship or something more or less than that. No dice ever. Legally speaking, I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment. I’m rambling about nothing useful. My existential first world concerns to my lap top, I’m comparing gear I need to procure. Bags and boots and devices. I’ll expropriate them with a fabricated credit card. About 2,000 worth of kit. Maybe I’ll even get a new lap top. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Havana to Qamishly, well it would be a damn good haul.
Handlers is out first every night. He sometimes reads in the living room, we wait it out in our rooms. Brit and I are pure night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock. I’d been waking up at 445 am all summer and fall to drive to the ambulance base in the Rockaways. Now I’d wake up at 1 to 2pm go bed at 5am to 6am. I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big long wooden table Handler built. It’s shoddy work like the bunk beds he builds. He’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. But he’s chicken shit. It’s a pretty ok this safe house. Even if we can’t drink here. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great though. Never emotional and always objective, she’s going back to Berlin soon, her case work never comes up and isn’t polite conversation.
We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013. Now the year is 2017. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, something about noting. Well anyway many years later like six months ago I found it and when Handler subdivided the loft into three room I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with mulatress Erin Moore who is dark humored and funny and can cook her ass off. But, frankly Handler sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.
Actually I plan to drug Handlers and burn him alive in his home the night after I leave the states. That’s not because he gets under my skin. It’s because he is working for the Iranians and that’s what Brit and I were paid to do. Burn him alive.
Paid by who you ask? Fuck off then. We are brutal for its own sake. The man is a traitor to all people. Except in Iran they like his seditious theories.
The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is super hero in their own mind. And you don’t pick up a blonde bimbo hipster in a bar and bring her back there to savagely fuck her in every hole in her body with a belt around her neck. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are shady fucking gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me have something to hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a number of factors.
But, Brit was supposedly German intelligence, Handler a well-known brilliant crack pot being paid by the Iranians to enlarge the American propaganda base of Press TV. Also the undisputed leader of a 16 year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth. Most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W. Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Handler, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, or pretending to be reading behind the chirpy banter was a killer. And, an Iranian propaganda asset. And I was going to dope him up with benzo sedatives and literally cook him alive.
I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a total tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, the fucker was so precocious. I don’t mean to talk so much shit, I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
I am not a great person all of the time. I fucked that little hipster like a Ukrainian by the hour. Her face to the wooden floor and my cock up her ass. For something a lot like rape she took it seven or eight times before I murdered Handlers and jumped country.
Handler Hicks is a zealot, I respect him only for that. And about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a lesser hero of this story I’m about to tell. But, I will admit that I didn’t mind the idea of killing him. He was annoying and also human trash. Because the truth is Iran doesn’t have any shortage of agents in this city, and his theories on 9/11 aren’t that well received anywhere. And he’s big faggot dork; so why did a two person hit team get sent to cook him?
Well, that’s because loose lips sink ships and traitors get put in the ground.
I am one to think every other high powered person living in the darkness is mental, a whore, a killer or a spy. It’s mostly true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy. But, I am a paramedic and it took me awhile to reconcile that; helping and saving sometimes, murdering and torturing other times. But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.
So this small plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens Border and it’s gonna fly me low down the coast to Cuba. And pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate with rum and pussy after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.
And then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropole to meet my new attaché and confidant Ms. Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with for about six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. Thanks to the internet. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhniy Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really need, and we’re gonna be working on a few things. Getting some paper work and concepts in order before I fly to Erbil, Iraq then infiltrate Syria to reach the Rojava Revolution sometime in the fall. But before I leave my city for a while, perhaps forever. Handler Hicks will die!
Polina is a cozy, coy little red head doll. Died of course. She’s overly attentive to my interests and actually reads my work which is flattering since, honestly most Russian women take all my money and suck on my dick, try and rearrange my wardrobe and ride me for housing and good meals. That’s cheap, but no totally off. Polina is looking at editing my shortest book, which means she’s manipulating me for someone. She has a little kid, she lives in the fifth biggest Russian city Nizhniy Novgorod, looks provincial and bleak.
I’ve never been to the Russian Federation. It won’t be hostile, well it might me a little.
A translation of book about Haiti into Russian, a joint collaboration called ‘Endless Walk’ which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven year old son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love. Or I’ll use her and she’ll use me, and when it stops working we can part as nothing.
But mostly my heart is cold, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is talented singer, a painter and really too much and artist for Russia’s third biggest city she should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She make her pittances as graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is gibberish for fucking nothing. She lives with her kid, her brother and her parents in what looks worse than an American housing project.
And I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhniy, which according to my research survived the Mongol hoard invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.
And then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhniy fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Roj Eli Zalla my colleague and fellow card carrying D/U associate to arrive a week later so we get to Sulymanyia, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava Federation. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time, I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance. $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two year little exile in Boston.
I’ve been to Russia in past life which I hope to see again in my present and future. I spend most of time in the Russian quarter on the Brooklyn coast. I like everything about them. I can go deep or very, very shallow on it. I have read several dozen pieces of Russian literature and deeply admire the effort of the Soviet Union, I was blowing coke of a Bulgarian prostitute’s tits the morning after my 33 birthday. I liked it a lot, but it felt also disgusting and cheap and I couldn’t bring myself to fuck her, so I paid and left. I guess Malcolm Joyles one of our security chiefs who stayed up all night with us, I can’t confirm but I think her passed out there at the Harlem brothel, woke up and fucked her.
So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my key board, and, Handler was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little note book to Adelina, send them to her, no response. Svetlana her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Elena was there with her watching me type.
Sveta said she had a man now, and was happy. I hope she’s happy and motherfucker isn’t twice her age. It might seem like I have all these lovers laying around, or like I’m a cold confused whore mongering whatever I am; but no. That’s not true. Generally I have a free life partner, she bares me and the movement for a year or two, and she tries to save or fix or improve me; get me out of the movement and into medical school; then ultimately breaks it off when I do some time. I’ve spent 2 ½ years of my life inside.
I’m not a cheat, I don’t beat women up except when they like it bed. Which seems like a lot, leading me to question my own sweetness. I pay for everything. I dress pretty well, I’m smart and an artist. I’m a decorated hero paramedic. I’ve written 8 books. I’m just a little bit crazy. And I’m a communist. And I do think those things are fine in Russian Federation, no cause for alarm like here. I did bring not one but two pairs of hand cuffs to put Polina in, which is kinky but also tasteless.
Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messaged me. His wife had just died, would be cremated in the morning.
You have to understand this man is tank. A big Russian-Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, may or may not be a Mason, has killed man with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in.
After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Polina Mazaeva and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.
“Yulia is dead,” he wrote.
A horrible feeling, feeling someone who is very strong buckle, being in the shadow of their horrible feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“No, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael. I know how much you loved her.”
“Yup. I just came from New Jersey. She will cremated tomorrow.”
“I remember it was two summers ago. Yulia and I were on the phone and I was so manic and we were talking about her illustrating my book.”
“Well. That won’t happen.”
“Not in this life, no.”
“Agree.”
“In the world to come maybe she will be willing. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to get some rest. Good night buddy.”
I hate it when he calls me “buddy” but his chick is dead.
“Good night.”
“I’m leaving the States on April 12th for Adelina’s birthday. I’m sure you prefer to suffer in silence, but if you want to hang out. I’ll drive out your way. She loved you so much.”
“We will see how I feel in the morning. Where are you going this time?” he asks me.
“Cuba. Then Russia. Iraq and then Syria. I’ll leave the night after Passover.”
“Be careful. You were just luck last time.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got more men and training now. A good team. A real fine outfit.”
“Only reason you’re still alive.”
“I’ll try and get to see you more than the one year usual. I do not only feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own mask of a face.”
And he didn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precepted and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Daria, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the black list I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again.
I felt this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly had nothing to live for and not fearing god or devils; his self-destruction was frankly inevitable.
You have to always be ready for suicide watch dealing with out kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos; whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen.
Michael is hard. And maybe he killed so many people he has to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be the one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I get into. He called me Chechen once, because he could read into me and see many of my past lives.
I felt so sad, like I hadn’t been sad in so long and I thought about Adelina. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?
Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot crazy. We both love Russian woman. And he’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.
“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s an endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
Don’t leave me alone.
Late night later on I joined Brit on the roof for a smoke.
We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was.
Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime days some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. And it was real nice out for mid-March it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.
“They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.
She was so dark and introverted and cynical, as well as a lesbian. We only went out together a hand full of times, but we smoked on the roof together a lot and both hated the passive aggressive Handlers.
Brit would always say she’d leave for a lover in German soon, I always said I’d leave for revolution in Syria. We were both suffering in the Brooklyn ghetto, in the loft of Handler Hicks the conspiracy theorist and Iranian puppet. Who we had been paid to rub out of circulation. But, you can’t just kill a man and get away with it in the United States. You have to be realistic about that. We weren’t really gonna light him on fire, nobody really paid us to kill him and neither of us were really intelligence agents. We were just living in poverty of conscience and material poverty deep in the Brooklyn ghetto.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 