ACT TWO:   La Lingre

 

Set outside Boston in 2013-2015ce

 

ACT II: La Lingre

(The Lingering Love)

2014-2015ce, AR3

 

Set Outside Boston

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Listing of our Primary & Lesser Characters

 

Introducing;

 

Capt. Watson Entwissle, Mullato Haitian gun slinger †

Ilya Lubov Trubadoroff, Lesser Oligarch of Charlestown

Lt. Irfan Khan, Pakistani military intelligence officer †

 Lt. Saiph Khan, Bangladeshi patriot†

Cpt. Roj Zalla, Kurdish Patriot †

Saadiya Usmani, a Pakhi mystic †

Ricardo Veshanti, a Rastafarian Warrior

Jefferson McIntyre, Guyanese philosopher †

Eric & Joseph Ruhelman, Franco German Bikers †

Ian McMurphy, Fenian ghost hunter of the Dublin Fire Rescue Battalion

Gen Tiputti Capois, Haitian general

Charlotte Kamande, Ugandan princess †

Nicholas Mapfre, film maker †

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prelude

 

 

 

Camp Shrakasa Waltham, 2015ce

 

 

The year is winter 2015ce, the setting, a grim gulag hidden from normal sight in the Eastern coast of the United American States outside the City State of Greater Boston. The snow falls so hard you can’t see the roads anymore, can’t see but ten feet in front of you. We are caught in a thick and deadly, white deluge.

 

Adelina Blazhennaya is lovely and petit, but very striking is her sense of presence, when you are with her you have her largely undivided attention. She is completely disarming, you let your guard slip. Which is dangerous as she is lovely, and you are surely mad. The very way she looks at you lingers long after she is gone.

 

“On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” she quotes to herself from the Little Prince, “one sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

 

                           There is a vast spiritual war going on, invisible for an extended time to most people and she has great soul, and is after a very particular soldier. It is still fashionable for Russian elites to know French. She was born of elite White Russian family, living in Zurek, and that is her passport cover story says, hiding that she is in fact a Grey Russian of a card carrying Red family from the City of Chelyabinsk.

 

Long live the Putinists!

 

She is wearing a blue and mostly white dress and her gold brown hair blows in the summer wind, but is now hidden under a most heavy almost yellow Shirling coat. Her big bright hazel eyes are concealed below some fashionable sun glasses. For she is a perpetually truthful person but has had to lie all day to get through layers of armed men to get at her assignment.

It has taken her half a day traveling from Camp Brighton-Allston to bribe sentries, to take three trains and an omnibus, to flirt most professionally, ensnare the camp guards in false paper works and transfer documents and thus make her way to Shrakasa Waltham, sub-camp Brandeis; the largest Special Engineering Camp built by the Ivories in the Americas, but really one thousands of “special population camps” built for citizens of suspect loyalty after the Great Revolt, a very incomplete revolution that happened four years prior to the events of this yarn.

 

This place that holds the mentally imprisoned and prisoners of this war, mainly Chornay, some Fenian surfs and deranged, crossbred Jeufs with their Christ killing ways and mental deceits.

 

Waiting for her is the “dead man” Sebastian Adon. And he has a feeling of nervousness in his chest. Steel butterflies. The kind of nervous anticipation that does not come from being more than intimidated by a very, very beautiful young woman. It comes also from secretly loving her. Or something about her.

Handsome for a dead man, she thinks. And nothing but fucking trouble, she curses sometimes inside but hardly ever outside.

The State run national television company News Corporation has been running his face and face of his “wife” Emma Solomon for weeks along with sound bites on the “dead terrorist ring leaders of the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis.”

That bloody three day standoff which ended the union called the United States of America definitively breaking sixty four small city states and territories, Soviets, from the rest of the country including the black parts of neighboring Boston.

She looks him and down and he is not exactly the same man she had met years before, and had corresponded with since periodically. Along with the dreaming they did.

He is handsome but he has dark shadows below his eyes, which though hidden under hazel contacts are grey on grey associated with never properly sleeping.

The eyes of the Old Souls.

He looks recently broken. As though smiling comes with great difficulty. As if the words and beliefs he hides behind are in actuality no true armor.

She wonders what the proper body language to assume is; to cordially shake his hand as a comrade; or to kiss his cheeks has an old friend, or, well they were not lovers or even old friends. And this was their second time meeting. In the world of the real they had met just one single time, on one single evening. But in dreams they had something else altogether.

She was never nervous, but she did regard this man as a certain threat. A threat not to her life or her mind, certainly not to her heart because her heart was numb to all words and deeds done by men. Having kissed his very souls, having spent night, after night in his mind; she worried that he might know her souls a little too. And this was a very difficult thing to accept as a candidate.

Firstly, that this murderer was from the blood of the chosen. Secondly, that he seemed unable to die. Thirdly, that in the real world he might actually desire her. Lastly, that it was her duty to accept him as a courier from here to newly liberated New York City, when his driving, according to all accounts was much worse than her own.

It would be one thing to be killed or tortured by the enemy. This was the constant risk of aiding the resistance, but to die because an American never learned to properly drive; unthinkable.

The way that she moves is not like human women, she has elegance and force in equal parts, and there then emerges a disarming smile and she quite nearly thinks to embrace him. To hold him with a tightness that in dreams is so familiar, but in the world they have but shaken hands only once. She has done it in dreams a hundred times. And so many other things with him. She has raced dragons with him and explored the surface of the moon.

He stands there leaning against his vehicle a white Charger 2009.  Which, for all its lack of fuel efficiency will be worth nothing unless her paper work permits his release for if he leaves the boundary of Waltham Third Perimeter Shrakasa; his aorta will explode. Oh quite literally.

 

And what’s an exploding aorta to a man who has never been able to die?

 

A painful waste of a third dimensional opportunity to transform the human condition, that’s what. He is wearing the grey multiform, permitted to his faction. Her white skirt with blue linear patterns blows in the subtle but refreshing August winds.

Has he ever torn her clothing off in a dream? Has she ever let him reduce her to another conquest, another bedded woman making an excuse of her own lusts and her own physical wants? No not ever once! He has asked to be held and so she held him tight; he has held her delicate and painterly hands. They have danced under the stars in over a thousand and one sequences of brightly colored controlled dreaming.

And those dreams were beautiful.

She strides ever closer and she sees his half smile, the left side of his face mostly. There were so many reasons why a whole smile was impossible to the gun slinging, rebel hooligan Sebastian Adon; but she immediately feels the entirety of his gaze, his full attention brought to bear just to take in her. And that half smile, she knows is the fullest thing to showing happiness he can in this life bear to muster.

I will just extend my hand and then step back for the right hand salute given by otriad fighters to their commanding officers, he thinks.

I will marshal all my best parts, knowing that she is a sacred woman and that my place in the chain of command is now different since culmination of the uprising, since the eradication of my otriad, since, since the debacle of my relations with the woman named Natasha Andreavna Moonskaya, the tragedy of which I have not fully reconciled. And she is all but too familiar with the moving parts thereof. An embarrassment of my judgment.

My goodness, he thinks; I’m must suppress my longing for this woman before me.

She walks with grace and power, she is in control of all her moving parts and in control of the fields of energy which are in perfect coordination top to bottom.

I will never let this man seduce me, she thinks. He is a rough and primitive creature, despite the fullness of his soul’s ambitions. Despite his mother being of the priestly class. What is more, she thinks, how did this warrior get reduced to slavery over a wild woman? In certain circles he is still called the ‘American Shamel Basayev’. And most official circles think he is finally dead. But, the reason he was stashed away into the enemy gulag archipelago was not simply because this was good place to hide him in plain sight. It was because he was being punished by the leadership. He had been on trial awaiting sentencing for 38 counts of infraction including lack of spiritual discipline; conduct unbecoming a rebel Calvary officer; four counts of massacre; three counts of ‘incorrect use of the word love’ and one very serious count of ‘complete self-compromise accompanying jeapordization of mission via liaison with a woman possibly aiding the enemy.’

Enguarte.

The trial had not concluded, yet the full findings were complicated. And, of course his “wife” and partner is a woman with considerable influence with the rebel leadership and the Godhead.

Something tingles in the base of his spine. Like Tiger Balm.

Something glows in the gold brown depths of her eyes.

I will not allow my emotions to cloud my perception of the facts, he tell himself from the Code of the Haitian Gentleman.

I will not fall for this man and his tragic albeit heroic existence, she swears to the code of her own integrity.

Shake her hand, this is the second time meeting; salute and take her to supper while the transfer papers deactivate the Nanobots in my skull, he checklists.

She will take his hand, this is our second time meeting; accept his salute which acknowledges her leadership over him, let him take me dinner, while the paper works clears and bribes are wired, she thinks. Let him take me what was once four hours, but now is four days drive down the coastal highway from the United American States toward the mile high wall, New York and the Breuklyn Soviet. Where most likely the judges will order two shots to his head. His head cut off. And his soul bottled up forever in limbo as he pays for his roundabout decisions that cost everyone so damn much.

I’m thankful it’s her that I will be working with, he think. If they’re going to kill me in New York, at least I get to spend the last four days with her.

Shake and salute, he affirms.

Shake and begin the road to sentencing she affirms.

She’s less than four feet beautiful from him.

And best the best of preparations yield to passion.

They throw their arms around each other and embrace like two long lost lovers separated by battle and sea and fate and the cruelty, the duality of some very, very bad decisions made during the war. They are locked so tight cheek to cheek.

This is the second time they’ve ever met in the world of the real.

He can feel her heart beating, she can feel him breath. Their souls make love right there on the roof of his car, they don’t let go for what is in real time a hot minute. But time stopped for them both the minute they held each other again.

They step back. He then salutes. And he passes her a note without saying overtly what she knows may be in his heart. Inscribed on his very ventricles.

She takes glance at the note. It is quite obvious that the man likes to write his mind out. There are a thousand tiny characters in Cyrillic, she knows what they will tell her even if the grammar is a mess and the spelling is poorly.

They immediately embrace again. Tighter still. She looks into the note over his shoulder.

It is very poor form to love a man who in four days will be sentenced to a final death.

“Don’t say it,” she whispers. Nearly pleads.

“I won’t. I’ll just show it,” he replies.

“You have less than four days,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says.

“Why did you do all of those things,” she says right into his ear and grips him even tighter.

“My passion overwhelmed me,” replies Sebastian Adon.

She steps away from him, still so close though that that the angels inside of them may still be holding to their ecstasy.

“I find it nearly impossible to be charged with your fate,” she admits.

“The past is a useless story Ms. Adelina.”

“I have read reports of your future too you know,” she retorts.

“The highway to New York is perilous. If my driving makes you nervous we can switch positions ok?”

She now looks him into his eyes.

“That sounds ok. Both sides of you face are smiling at me,” she says.

“That’s because I’m standing before the woman of my dreams.”

“Watch you words little Prince,” she warns him.

“Don’t call me that please,” he replies.

“Sebastian, the road to New York is perilous and I want you to promise me that you you’re going to remain in control of your emotions. That you’re not going to break your word to me on any level. And, that no matter what they do to you in New York I’m going to be at your side and you need to be by mine, in the way that is appropriate.”

“I promise Ms. Val. Appropriately.”

“Ok, start the car. If you don’t make me completely comfortable with your driving I’m taking over and you’re going to have to ride shot gun all the way down. Which isn’t very manly in my cultural context.”

“It’s good to see you again,” says Sebastian Adon.

She nods in quiet agreement.

She never knew him in another life. And that was a little exciting. He’d never dreamed with a woman before. That was thrilling, that kind of investment in him. Even if she’d mostly been in his head tinkering with the wiring.

“Give me your gun,” she declares.

He takes out a small revolver and hands it to her. She checks the chamber and notes that there are no bullets in the gun. She puts it into her satchel.

“Do you remember why we used to take pictures of the sky and text them to each other,” she asks him.

“No. I always assumed you were just artistic,” he replies.

“There’s nothing like a beautiful sky to substitute for love when love is gone, or hope when hope hopeless,” she tells him.

“You’re Russian, you’re not supposed to believe in hope,” he says.

She takes his hand.

“Your American, you’re not supposed to know what the word love means at all but I’m giving you a shadow of a doubt. You have one chance left to make a man of yourself. Otherwise they’re gonna hang you for happened during the rising.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says.

“It’s nice to be appreciated,” she replies, “now let’s get ready for the road.”

 

He almost says it. But she gives him a look.

“Be a real man and check your passion until the proper time,” says the look.

 

The sky above Shrakasa Waltham is pink, blue vanilla and the weather is beautiful because the Ivories have developed cloud seeding weather apparatuses. There are no more open Ivories in the United American States except here in this camp of 70,000 in the Massachusetts foothills outside rebel Boston which, like New York is no longer part of America.

If you’re just tuning in to our frequency; if you want to know what kind of story this is. Well it’s definitely some kind of passion play; a Post-Soviet epic love story.

In the previous Act we learned of man who didn’t know how to die and his tortured love affair with an agent of the enemy. In Act One we learned of loyalty.

How there came to be a full blown human rights revolution in the United States of America had very little to do with those two protagonist-antagonists. And the uprising itself was not the work of men and women alone, but also gods and spirits, monsters and suffering old souls.

We began with loyalty because it is the basis for all good human acts. And now we jump seven years before the event of the first part of our serial; to account for the things which were unleashed by woman and men enraptured by their passions.

This interlude has taken place before Act One and after what you are about to embark on reading.

Adelina was ordered to accompany Sebastian Adon to newly liberated New York City; to a besieged place called the Breuklyn Soviet. It was not purely to keep him calm before his execution. It was also to directly ascertain the very specific particulars of what he had compromised to the enemy.

“I don’t judge you for anything you have done, but I am quite curious as to why you did it,” declares as he puts the Dodge Charger in drive.

“We were all in a most uncomfortable situation,” Adon begins as they take to the road, “there were past lives to account for, there was hope and investment in the future, there were debts to pay.”

“You need to tell me everything that happened in the six months before the uprising,” Adelina flatly tells him.

“Must I?”

“I cannot save you and I cannot fix you or tame you, but if you will tell me the truth and stick to your promises I will make sure that you get what you deserve one way or another.”

There is a dinner at a weigh station on the lip of the black tarmac highway. To get to New York they will have to take a more circuitous route. They will eat there and wait until the sun goes down. They will have to switch vehicles, they will have to evade bandits and other various gentlemen of the road. They will need to grease many hands at check points staffed by rebel and federal and gangster armies. And eventually they will have to fly over or find a tunnel under the mile high wall.

“There’s going to be plenty of time,” she tells him, “You need to go slow and get deep with me on this.”

“Must I?”

“Yes you must. You are accountable only for this life, but it is unclear to me and other interested parties not only what you did in your past lives, but who’s side you’re on now.”

He thinks about it.

“I’m only on your side now,” he whispers.

“Well that is because your old friends now want you dead and your enemies think you’ve been buried already. You have only two allies left and Oleg the Bear is still temporally missing in the Urals.”

Or perhaps at the weigh station just up federal Highway 95.

“My wife sent you?” asks Sebastian Adon.

“Yes. Emma Solomon sent me.”

“She’s not really my wife.”

“I know she’s not really your wife.”

“Does Emma think I betrayed the resistance?”

“No. Emma just thinks you mostly betrayed yourself.”

“And what do you think Ms. Adelina?”

“I think you have a brief window to prove your place in history. As a great hero or a despicable traitor who sold out his closest friends to make a deal with the devil over a two bit whore that he got tricked into thinking was his old soul lost companion.”

“Those are strong words,” says Adon watching the road unfold.

“I’m a very strong woman.”

“That’s why I might…” but he shuts off. You can’t put a timeline on a dream or series of dreams.

“When I met you on my birthday I thought you were a charming scoundrel. But I have come to realize that I believe you innately to be good. I am unclear still on what happened leading up to and during the rising and if I am to be your true friend I must know that in totality before we arrive in New York.”

“When I met you I knew immediately that I must see you again and that you were not like anyone I’d known before.”

“Honey, pick your words well.”

“Ms. Adelina, I’m worried I let my passions get the best of me.”

“Well we shall see and we shall hear,” is all she replies.

The car accelerates, the road unfolds faster. She tells herself he is a most precarious man. There are both merit and dangers to that. He tell himself to review what he knows about this world and world to come.

The highway has many, many perils.

“There were so many nights that I could no longer trust myself and you were there to teach me.”

“Start with the relevant beginning,” she says.

“I am sure that one cannot love another when one hates themselves.”

“Do you hate yourself Sebastian Adon?”

“In another life, because of beliefs I held and reckless actions I took in the name of our freedom the enemy took from me. A woman and a child. I have never slept well, nor lived happy since.”

“Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé,” she says in French, “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

Again with the Little Prince, he thinks sardonically.

“If my inherited memories are true then I have caused some great amounts of carnage for cause and country.”

“I do not know if they are all true,” replies Adelina.

“I am quite happy you’re here. There is no more preferable a witness I could ask to vouch for me,” he says.

They’re gonna end you in New York, she thinks and he hears.

“I vouch for nothing honey, I know you only as a magical dream. But, the road is long enough for you to reconcile that. Don’t let me down ok.”

“I did many things in the name of our cause. I do many things still as acts of passion.”

She takes his hand right hand which he has extended to her, she squeezes it.

“Both hands on the wheel,” she then says.

It is sad to meet a good man four days before he will die. For no matter what he chooses to tell her she knows what he has ultimately done! And nothing can absolve him, nothing he says or does can save his souls. Oleg the Bear said be very careful with him. She has his gun, but she is not aware yet that she also completely has his heart.

If the mind is a limitless tablet, and his animal soul belonged now to devilish promises made, if his godly soul and hers are still quite playfully holding hands in spirit worlds and dreamscapes; what is left is a mechanical heart. A pounding, pulsing drum fueling his war path and guiding his way in the darkness.

The road unfolds empty as they speed to the diner at the junction.

“You don’t have to tell me everything, but please tell me what matters,” she says.

“Only you own and you rattle my bones, you turn me over and over until I can’t control myself,” comes over the Fire Station on the radio. The dancehall version.

She gives him a small look.

He changes the station to Tchaikovsky set with house music.

There are many people that want this man dead or alive. There are swarms of angry vultures circling above the car, metaphorically.

“I’m not in the business of saving souls or fixing people,” she tells him.

“Well how now, what business are you in then,” he smiles.

“I traffic in language and also dreams,” she softly replies.

“And also evidently me,” he says.

For eight months she has been in his mind and there was little she had seen there that would not make normal people nervous. But, Adelina is not like normal people and very little makes her nervous except the possibility that when she stops being numb for lucid intervals she realizes that this rebel bandit has quite possibly fallen for her.

And were it not for circumstances!

She might let herself fall too?

Impossibilities of fate.

The world of now was unfolding right before them and the world of dreams was inconsequential. She has been charged with a messy assignment and she has no back up, nothing to rely on but her will.

“Will you stay in control of your emotions for me honey?” she asks him looking now at the little note he gave her.

“I have made you promises.”

Seven of them she observes in his micro-Cyrillic scrawl.

“Then in good faith I take you as a man of your word.”
“After dinner, before the road I’ll try and explain myself to you darling.”

“Take your time, go slow. Nobody knows you’re alive in this part of the world and when we get to your city I’ll walk through the job.”

“There’s a job still for me then?” he exclaims.

“What you thought this was just going to be a dark Russian American love story?”

“Well I don’t know what the genre is.”

“What’s a rose to a fox,” she asks him eliciting for the third time the phrases she’s programed him with to access his dreams.

“What’s a jackknife to a swan,” he replies in the code that they have used for eight months on the satellite phone before bed.

“Don’t hurt me,” he says.

“I don’t have it in me,” she replies, “just show me your soul and I’ll show you mine. Try not to kill anybody on the road to New York.”

He wonders if she’s talking about his driving.

“In your culture what is more important; loyalty or passion?” she asks.

“What are you getting at?”

She pulls out the silver steel hand of the hamsa around her hung neck and flashes it for him out the corner of his right eye. Except he had given it to her in a dream.

“Don’t tell me you love me again until you can love yourself as well. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in your potential for good. But if you break your promises to me you’ll prove your enemies right.”

“Adelina, I…”

He wants to pull over and taste her again like it was in the dreams.

“Don’t say it,” she warns, “keep driving. I’m hungry and as a Haitian gentlemen you must of course never allow a woman to be hungry.”

She knows his code, she knows most of his story, but there is still a four day window for the highly unusual things to occur.

He watches the road, both hands on the wheel. He doesn’t want to let her down.

“Adhi, I…”

“Honey don’t say it,” she says again firmly.

“Please one time aloud. So you hear it in person as you have it in writing.”

“No. Not yet. Not until you really mean it.”

“I’ve done such crazy things in the name of it, I’ve killed so many people, I’ve invaded three counties, I’ve lost my wife and child, and I’ve died. Over and over again,” he murmurs.

“I know. So don’t say it to me until you know the right words. And you’d better be willing to back them all up with actions.”

“Fair enough.”

“I read your first manuscript, I’m very concerned about your dead wife and child, and also your relations with a certain woman named Natasha Andreavna. It is suspected that your claims to loving have often been subsumed and subverted. It is suspected that you were used. And that your passion over took your word and your loyalty. With most tragic results.”

“Do you believe that then? That I’m a traitor who knows nothing of love?”

“I know we women lead the resistance because we can truly love and you men do most of the killing because you cannot truly feel.”

“You read my first book, you’ve been in my head for eight months. Don’t you know what you’re looking at yet?”

“I’m not clear yet that you can separate your facts from your emotions. And I didn’t read all of your first book, just enough to get a taste of things to come.”

“Adhi, I…”

We wants to say it. He wants to make it into poems and novels and paintings and sketches and thousands of loyal deeds. He wants her to believe in him like he believes in her. He wants her to see that his past can be absolved by his present.

“Baby don’t say it.”

She uses sweet talk sparingly with men she hasn’t gone to bed with. But you go to bed with a man’s dreams, you spend months together in an imagined world you feel a certain intimacy that extends to the physical realm at times.

“We’re almost at the weigh station,” he says.

I will not judge him for anything he has done, she thinks but I will hold him to everything he says so the moment that he says that simple word aloud he will have wedded his cause to me, and that is a complicated and explosive thing indeed. And to repel his advances is a matter of time and orders, but were I to feel again, she thinks, well he is a bit my type.

From the moment that he saw her on her birthday he had known she was a very different creature. He wanted her as a partner by his side. But eight months ago he was blinded still by a distracting influence and reeling from the aftershocks of it. That was when she entered his dreams as the Great Revolt made the long simmering spiritual war a quite bloody contact sport.

Story time again. This time though our parables will draw attention not to violence done in the name of loyalty, but instead the acts done when we are overwhelmed with passion.

“Strast,” she says, passion in Russian.

“I’ll tell you how it came to be that I played my part in the uprising,” he says.

She doesn’t like politics, so she responds, “stick to the parts with passion and allow me some insight and judgment as to if you’re the man I’m looking for.”

“Darling don’t be numb,” he says feeling layers of loving that are impossible to verify the source of in the world of the real.

“Darling just be realistic.”

The sun is down. The stars are up. They park at the weigh station and get ready to fill their bellies with food in preparation for the long road to Breuklyn Soviet.

“One last sentimental thing,” he says locking up the car.

“Go on then,” says Adelina, “before I make you have a heart attack,” she smiles.

“If it comes out of my mouth in the next few days that I have done things that upset you I am sorry. Please understand that we all have complicated pasts, and some of us complicated past lives. I swear to you I did not betray the resistance. I swear I will make sense of all this actions; those in New York, those in Haiti, those in Israel and Africa. I swear to you that you will have my undivided loyalty.”

“Listen, if you must you can say it one time, as you have already written a song about it and started a war in its name.”

“Adelina, I…” but he does not say it for he knows how little in English the word means to her and what a mockery he has made of the concept too.

            For a second she turns away. Impossible, she thinks. This is the second time he’s met me! What does he know about love at all?

What a ridiculous notion to love another so quickly!

Based on shared dreams?

“I know. I’ll try and not say it again,” he says a bit ashamed at her reaction.

“It’s not that,” she starts.

“What then?”

“Your words have to count that’s all. You need to not say things just to hear how they sound, you need to say things to declare things that will be.”

“Why do I know you so intimately and still know nothing,” he says.

“Because this is our second meeting,” she jokes, “the rest was just a dream.”

“I…” he stammers, but the word is unable to form.

“You have only just begun to know me. In my culture there is a ridiculous arrogance in saying words you don’t mean when you can’t back them up, said only because you’ve caught up in the heat of something,” she says.

“It’s a very traditional feeling and it is backed up by eight months of dreams.”

“I will wait and see if you feel that way this time next week, for there are many things done in the name of passion, but they are not the same things done in name of love.”

Why can’t I say the word he wonders? And the answer is she will not let him, so strong are her powers over him. For if that word was good fuel in act one for poems, and the basis of the Partizan Song; then we must now examine motives of our Postsoviet Protagonist-antagonists yet anew.

“There is incredible power in language,” she tells him, “but sometimes talk is cheap. You’ve loved early and loved often, and that makes me suspect you also love easily, but all these things are beside the point. We have a treacherous four day journey to reach your city, and then you will be put on trial. It is my duty to inform you that whatever feelings you think you have developed for me in dreams, I am nothing to you now but friend and comrade.”

“I won’t use words I can’t back up with actions.”

“Well I suspect that you may try.”

“I’ve ruined myself several times before over the idea of a perfect woman.”

“Well don’t do that again.”

“You’re not an idea.”

“You don’t know me yet. They say that I have what science has yet to prove in the blood.”

“Well that I believe.”

“Your defenses are lowered, you dreams have been invaded by thoughts of me, and you write well and have pretty brown eyes like mine. But watch the things you say, I will make you put your money where your mouth is. I will make you ready for trial.”

“If things escape my mouth that proclaim some newly forming feelings…”

“We’ll be sure not to act on them,” she says.

And with that in mind they went cautiously to eat supper before they took to the road under the cover of darkness.

                           And in real time not much longer.

The dinner at the crossroads is empty except for them two.

Though thoughts of her had pervaded his mind for the past eight months, now sitting across from her about to bite into his Ruben sandwich, the gun slinging ambulance man, a wanted rebel hooligan new little of what to say.

“Why is it that you do not speak any Russian,” she asks him.

“I have no talent,” he replies.

“No talent for language?”

“No talent for listening. It’s my most dishonorable trait.”

“No, being a murderer is your most dishonorable trait. Not speaking Russian means you’re just lazy. You’re file says you’ve had several Russian partners. I call it lazy, though I do not judge you for it.”

“Indeed, well then what is that you judge me for?”

“I have nothing to linger judgment upon at this juncture.”

“I am indeed then lazy and also a bit ashamed. For I do love the thought of knowing that which you think in.”

“I am merely surprised that living and working alongside three Russian speakers you acquired nothing.”

“I acquired some fucking and fighting words. Please believe I bring more to the table than my talent with English.”

“You bring a great deal from what I understand from you wife.”

“Not my…”

“I said before I know what you are to each to each other. It is clear to me that you are far more than a murderous American bandit who while trained to save lives spends most of his energies killing people. ”
                           “Can you make no small talk woman!”

“Eat then happily and be quieter,” she replies.

He returns to the Ruben feeling vaguely that for one who claims to never judge she has arrived at some rather serious prejudgments and will be deterred from them.

She wonders if Oleg the Bear will arrive on time or make them wait, or whether he will get there early. She wonder is he will come alone, or bring a woman. And she wonders if that woman will slow them all down.

Sebastian is unnerved by silence. It reminds him of sleep, and also of death and nothing about a silent moment makes him feel at ease. It makes him feel also like an inadequate conversationalist. And he begins to second guess his feelings, having realized that when not allowed to speak of politics or feelings, he has little to work with.

“I have a soft spot for writers,” she finally says, “I understand you wrote a book once.”

“I did. A noire, it sold less than a hundred copies.”

“Well maybe if you’d written it in Russian it would have had a better reception.”

“Maybe it was just a bloody mess of a book.”

“If I recall it was about a paramedic and a whore on the eve of the revolution was it not?”

“It had a bit more to it than that.”

“Well of course. To you. I read some.”

“So not your style.”

“No. Not really. A little too violent. A little too sentimental about the wrong things. Your poems are much better.”

“I’m flattered you took the time to read them.”

“You began sending me them four days after meeting me do you recall. Under some pretext of soliciting my technical opinions on airplanes.”

“I was sincerely curious about airplane terminology. I was also sincerely interested in attracting your attention more general.”

“And here we are.”

“So the book was not to your tastes and the poems were all splendid?”

“Some more than others, but I will say that you have a good handle on the English language. Although your spelling is ad hock and your grammar most irregular.”

 

Oleg Leonidovich Medved enters most gregariously.

He is well dressed in various black and gray tones and carries a close cut beard which does nothing to disguise the Ivoryish aspects of his Slavic complexion or the Slavic attributes of Eurasian manly disposition. He is a man twice the size or other men who prefers to break others with conversation not brawn, but can resort to that if needed. Sebastian stands to greet him, they are old friends and they embrace before either man can or will acknowledge either woman, for he goes nowhere alone and with him is the young modal Yulia Romanova, a brown haired slender beauty.

“The American Mayakovsky is much alive! I am glad you are not really as dead as the telescreens now claim. The Millennium, I am aghast at the recent carnage. I only hope with you and you wife officially “dead” the ceasefire holds. Tovarish poet paramedic, glad to see you again!”

“The same Comrade Oleg, the same!” responds Sebastian. And the two men embrace in a gruff but friendly, eastern European fashion.

“This is Yulia Romanova,” Oleg says and goes to embrace Adelina whom he has known for some number of years. In fact it was he who introduced the two of them last April on her birthday.

They all are then seated at the dinner men facing men and women facing women.

“A perilous journey ahead,” toasts Oleg as soon as drink has been put in his hand.

“Cheers,” says Adelina. What a silly British thing to say, to toast well; nothing.

“Is it true they aim to finally kill him in New York?” asks Oleg as if he despises all pretenses or suspense. Which he does.

“There is reason to believe that the revolution’s leadership has arrived at doubts as to Mr. Adon’s commitment to the values of the resistance. There are certain factions that want him put on trial and put to permanent death.”

“Well I say we skip New York, and all fly out directly to Cataluña” interjects Yulia.

“Do you know this man so well you are vouching for his safety on public airlines,” asks Adelina to Yulia with vague scorn.

“No, I simply don’t like trials and don’t like New York now that it has gone communist,” replies Yulia Romanova, a self-proclaimed white Russian.

“I liked New York capitalist, I like it communist. The issue to me is who knows Sebastian is alive and why do they suspect him of treason to the revolution?” asks Oleg.

“Because of circumstances,” states Adelina and as she even says the same she squirms a little inside.

“Fuck Circumstances. Quite literally. I will of course vouch for Sebastian Adon and testify that what he did for that woman was nothing of his own choosing. If anything it spoke well to his dedication to lost woman, or to saving, or to art. But I was there when they met and am privy to the entirety of the tryst, and I know this man did not betray a thing. Except is own heart perhaps.”

“Thank you for that friend,” Sebastian says.

“Ain Davar,” says Oleg in Hebrew having lived four years in Israel once, once when it was there.

“Let underlying facts be placed upon this table then,” states Adelina, “this man is most uncommon. Three years ago he became enamored with a Russian call girl. His relations with her led to the underlying causalities that triggered the mighty revolt. And then, to save her he signed a contract with the devil himself. And then souls left bodies, this man walked his way across time down a rabbit hole. And then became alive three years later. That in the revolt’s eleventh hour he and his wife could seize thousands of hostages and perish in a bloody sand off in Midtown Manhattan. And awake alive miraculously a third time in Shrakasa Waltham!

“His exile,” Adelina explains with a hint of banality.

“Ah, yes thank you both, and you too Ms. Yulia for delivering me out of this cold wretched place,” says Adon.

“It is nothing, droog as we are all fans of your work, and friends of the people and the wider goals of the glorious revolution,” smiles Alan Medvinsky, also called Oleg the Bear, who is paid in cash dollars, billing by the minute for his very tricky work.

He has worn many hats in other lives.

And thus begins our very rocky road running from Brooklyn Soviet to the satellite camps of outer Boston; to the City of Port-au-Prince, then to Santo Domingo and Havana; then Kingston and then Madeira, to the final invasion of Europe; then to Cataluña, then to Moscow burning our way across the great mountain fortress of pale Europe; to the remembering and also forgetting. And finally Burma. To all the places and possibilities beyond the narrow struggle to survive. But on that fateful cold winter day, we four never made it out of that dinner, telling stories to make it through the cold.

 

For before you try to storm the mountain, before you get to build upright human castles, battle white and black demons both and build your grand castell to victory; you must drill. For in the face of indomitable odds and opposition; zealous persistence and ineffable might are your truest weapons. You build your alliance, you ready your team;

 

You prepare for the day it is your time to join the Great Revolt.

     

Chapter 1

Safe house 38P, 2012ce

Special Engineering

Camp Waltham

 

 

 

In fast fading lights of sunshine she appears to be my goddess, taking temporary refuge amongst the surely ranks of man. I am meager sinning hapless flesh, and why has she taken my feckless company, why do my trespasses make no rendered judgment?

She fails to tell.

She found me dying toothless lying on a third hand spring mattress long too used by rootless fuck, hungry, penniless and still sinful inhabiting a refugee ghetto, in bombed out special engineering camp in Eastern Massachusetts. Three years after I supposedly died in a Great Revolt.

I had no mind, I had no front teeth; my face was born mutt like. My mind had been recently lost. I filled my lungs with black smoke and poured poisonous behavior into my gullet; vodka, beer and wine.

She said I was not allowed to kill anyone, myself included and that I upheld. And she said we were to paint and write and adventure and also to heal, and that we did.

She said we might dream every night of beautiful places and things, which we could shut out the vile cold winter by making life between us warm.

She I said wasn’t to hurt her.

And I failed. I so completely failed.

Miserable me. Malicious, feckless damned. Curse me I failed; I reduced her and me to a ball of tears. When she wasn’t looking I again bashed my fists into a brick wall, I threw myself down stairs, I even struck at my own face!

“You are a fucking man without honor or integrity in words!” she wailed and clutched me and I begged and cried and reduced myself to sobs entreating her not to leave.

Well now where is all this going?

Ah.

Every night before we briefly moved out of that camp and into a small clean flat in the hills above town, as I lay in my squalorous dwellings, a place on avenue Prospect 38 packed and sub-divided into dwellings for thirteen Botswanans, Ugandans and Rwandans, Spartan and periodically food friendly; we would use our mobilblats to message back and forth, radio the details of our next dream.

Adelina and I, not the Africans. With them I dreamed in solidarity, not particularly longing for I knew with Adelina I would live forever, but in Africa I would violently die.

The drudgery of my assigned work in Shrakasa Waltham involved a manual of removing of mostly perished corpses from satellite camps and a mental of cataloging various atrocities, in the name of “co-existence studies” happening at that time in the Middle East and Africa.

She was tutoring the illegitimate sons of newly arrived Chinese and Saudi oligarchs how to speak in English. Until I acquired a vehicle she would drive to Shrakasa Waltham from Shrakasa Brighton-Allston which was always a matter of small bribes at several checkpoints.

In the beginning I saw here once a week, then twice a week, then as often as either of us could escape from our respective wage slavery.

Every single night since they dumped me in that wretched Eastern New England camp, since they dumped me raving mad and moon howling, toothless, as I previously said; ever sense our “third date”, really our third meeting; well soon after anyhow each night, right before midnight we’d use the mobilblats to pick a dream location, often in the Caribbean; or in out space; or Belize, or Fiji, or Trinidad and also Togo, once or twice Madeira, Prague and Paris too.

A small beep or vibration, a red light and I’d see a small message on the mobilblat:

Adelina: Hey babe, where are we dreaming tonight?

I’d pause from the Castaneda book she gave me which I never understood. Or perhaps the Incredible Lightness of Being I was reading on her recommendation, or from my human rights agitation propaganda work online, or if I wasn’t reading, maybe I was drawing her something colorful albeit unremarkable. Or, hidden away in that 13 way sub-divided slum on 38 Prospect perhaps I was beating myself to smut; if I was self-fornicating, normally to some big breasted sex slave bent over taking two or three men in all the holes of her body, and I’d turn that off without finishing myself off if she messaged me, because I couldn’t be in both spaces, I could also realize how much she felt the world’s energy.

You don’t text message sweet talk of dreams; razgo vorchiki to a goddess while you beat yourself, mentally satiating, participating in a vaguely closed case version of voyeuristic gang raping.

In this recollection I was just reading a book, trying to grok Castaneda, and failing to.

Adon: I was reading more Castaneda. I’m a little lost. They’re taking a lot of magical plants and smoking them.

Shortly after, beep; red flash.

Adelina: : ) Keep at it.

One weekend in late November we escaped the camps for a weekend to a small, desolate island off the coast and she gave me a bag of roughly used paper back and hard cover magic books by Castaneda and Pavel. I’d been trying to follow a path of healing she was intent to keep me on. Putting healthy things in my mind, not the violence, hate and smut.

Adon: I will. How are you?

And the two minutes of pause meant she was either getting ready for bed, or thinking about what to respond. Or whatever else I was darkly projecting happened over in Camp Brighton-Allston.

Adelina: Tired. The message comes in.

And I always want to tell her I miss her, but she lectures me all the time about it not being manly to be overly emotional, proclaim all kinds of things you don’t mean, can’t back up or validate. But I wrote it anyway.

Adon: I miss you.

Adelina: I miss you too. I’ll see you in dreams in ten minutes babe.

Adon: Burma then in the Bagan temple complex.

Adelina: A picture of rows of gold temples pops up on the mobilblat. She has imaged me several pictures of Burma to focus my mind on.

Sludkeh Snov. See you soon. She messages.

That means sweet dreams in Russian.

I want to just type, I love you. But I don’t for she had earlier threatened to break things off if I said it. I had not hurt her yet, that was much later, but I had kissed her several times, and we’d also made love and she put me inside her and I had and wrested her from another lesser lover, I had intentions shall we say of being her man, but then she broke things off over the “I love you.” No, it was not only that,  it was that she also hadn’t wanted anything serious after Alexei had lead her on and crushed her, last summer. A month before we reconnected in the camp.

Adon: see you Burma lady.

Adelina: Don’t keep me waiting ; )

And for the evil I think I did, and would later probably do, for all my brazen broken promises, my dashed high minded beliefs hiding a wretched core; I never kept her waiting for anything. And I almost always brought a gift; and I suppose that could count for something.

No.

Clearly not.

 

 

Scene 2

Safe house 16a, 2015ce

Shrakasa Waltham

 

 

Adelina arrives in the cold of night.

 

Sebastian, oh Sebastian! Your nothing but trouble to all you claim to love. He called out for her and begged her nightly to acquire him.

 

He was always awake deep into the night, writing his shall we say; a manifesto, or a love poem. Deep in the study of maps and charts and reports from the killing fields; grim and boring. Her maroon KIA Soul Ranger from Korea is steaming from the thirty-eight minute drive from Brighton to Waltham. They’ll have to dig it out in the morning as it never seem to ever stop snowing, for the past three years blat. Over the river and through the woods she went to avoid the various checkpoints and bandits. Here was a scene that happened for year without getting tired, a night journey based on endless amounts of needing, some pushing some pulling, some romance the promise of love, but far too often something violent and degrading, masked as, well masked as longing.

One astounding thing about her was the variety of looks she wore. The way she carried her out worldly self, as well as her firm control of her surroundings via her deliberate metamorphosis from often carefree nymph to a severe and serious instructor of social etiquette and use of language. This perhaps this was the result of being born into the tender firm and earthly body of a non-aging and listless school girl, while her memory of events could trace its analysis across four centuries of wax and waning hardship. Her analogue disposition was that of vast kindness. It was the temperament best suited for dealing with savages and bonobos alike. For she was not descended from monkeys and her soul was not like any other he’d encountered.

She rings the doorbell of the Waltham flat he’s just rented for them in the hills above the camps. A strong improvement from the sub-divided fire trap they’d nearly set on fire when she let him sex her for the first time. She’s wrapped in a long black fur coat and improbably balanced in heels despite the level of snow fall. She’s coming from a work party.

He kisses her hard before she even closes the door behind her. He thrusts her against the wall clutching her tight and he smells like Burberry cologne. She likes his taste now that he’s quit smoking. She can smell on him the desire to have her good and hard. He’s tender until he drinks a little, or gets her ass in his palm. He keeps on and off drinking, but he’s on his way of the bottle and into full and total recall, she hopes.

 

She pulls him in and tells him, “You miss me a lot baby?”

 

He always misses her, it is said all the time but need never also be said!

She’s all he thinks about. Her stunning baby face. Her smile. How she fits in his arms. He hangs her coat and she grabs his ass.

He carries her up the stairs. All he can think about is how tight she is every single time he enters her, how hard she kisses him back, how much he loves her, loves every single thing about being near her and just how long she can take his madness, well it remains to be seen for he is mad man indeed. He’s insatiable for her. And she can occupy his mind and body for many days. The flat has off white walls, poor lighting and smells like scented candles. But it’s better than the one before. In the room is a new red desk they picked out for his studies and writing and queen sized brown wooden bed with posts. Nothings on the desk at all. He lays her on the bed and kisses her hard again.

“Slow down,” she whispers anticipating his hungry lust, “we’re gonna be in this winter for years in this camp probably forever,”

“Slow baby slow” she whispers.

He breathes deep. His mind can’t stop running ahead. Running into being the past and future all at once when he’s with her.

The text in all day long on the mobilblats, they’re almost always in constant contact, messengering about everything and anything. She works in an English language tutoring camp near Newton for newly arrived affluent ones on their way to university; lots of Chinese and Arab. He works day in the Special Engineering Camp for Poverty Alleviation, every Saturday for 24 hours he works as a paramedic in a place called Wonderland; a camp in Revere Beach testing new control cocktails, opium derived on white surfs.

He plays with her gently. Whispers in her ear, “I love you.” She moans and say, “Please, please, please you love the whole world.” She hopes he is gentle, because it isn’t hard for him to go from puppy dog eyes and pillow talk and poems, to well, being brutal in the bedroom.

He looks up and she’s her happy almost forever childlike beauty, her never aging face.

She looks like a sexy little school girl, as cliché as all that sounds. She can also be anything else, but always-always beautiful and dignified and pure. He wants her to be his boss outside. He wants to be her servant and student he knows she’s wise beyond her years by a hundred. But in their inner apartment he wants her to let him break her in. He wants to tie her wild ways and fuck her so ferociously that she cannot remember another man but him.

 

When it seems like she is about to cum, which is charade for she can cum on demand, her whole body contorting in ecstasy; he picks her up and pushes her over the red table. She knows there are both hand cuffs and a loaded gun inside that red desk. And he is a lot of things, but he sure as hell is not a cop. A cop like her ex-husband. He fucks like a cop though, well most of the time.

Like he wants to break you in, like he wants to hurt you somehow. Like he’s not mentally fit to be a father. He’s gonna be in this camp forever. Even thinking about handcuffs and she flinches. Many years later, later after the camps the only thing that could make him filch was seeing a Red KIA Soul drive by somewhere, sometimes it was all fairy tales. Sometimes it was base animal behavior.

 

The difference linguistically speaking between Horashow, which in Russian means ok or doing well, and ‘horror show’ in English, well it’s not a fine line at all. But he was a man that make seamless transitions.

Between being ok, and suddenly very not ok! But, I’ve read all his books so I know how the story will ultimately end. He kisses my neck he whispers her will get us out of this camp and to the freedom of the Wild West Indies; be tell me he’ll give me children and safety and his forever soul.

 

I peel back the false skin over each wrist and reveal my fully tattooed hands. He bows to one knee realizing just what I am. He drops to his knees and he kisses my feet and pledges himself to me again. And again and again.

 

 

Scene 3

Warehouse 32a, 2015ce

Charlestown

 

                                                                                                                           

            My name is unimportant, and you as a barely literate rabble of foreigners could hardly ever seem to pronounce it; so now my papers say Ilya Lubov, IL-YA LU-BOAV. I’m at my inner office auditing a company my firm just acquired. This office is listed on a website of tech firm I founded, but honesty you’d never be able to find it on your own. You’d need help.

You’d need to fuck me until I wasn’t paying attention to you, then you’d have steal some key cards and somehow even know where to find it; then you’d need a raiding party to shoot your way past both drones and Fenian hooligan mercenaries, then go down a trap door.

Good thing that didn’t happen, yesterday. Because what that bitch helped them steal was a list of people and places and assets and ins; well, I just got double penetrated!

Well, the quarter began well I was buying and I was selling and I waking a killing. I flew one girl to Mexico and had my way with her and blew her little mind, then left her back penniless in her mediocre life, they fuck you so much harder when they’re hungry and unsure of their future. That was fun. Things were going really well, at all my layers of finance and I was up for a promotion, was gonna get into better levels of club and higher heights.

I took another woman to Spain, she me met me in Madrid and we went to Barcelona. She was happy little school teacher, honestly not much to hold on to, but she looked perpetually 19, like brand new, even if she wasn’t all that un tested as they say. I think I just wanted to tear apart a school girl, and frankly when you’re getting around my age, 780 years, well you’ve done the real thing, gotten it out of your system, you need more. Like this one I heard on the wire was actually, possibly the, or a messiah of Chelyabinsk. Yes, imagine the thrill, I could buy an underage girl on the market, hell sometimes I sold them without even testing these days, I was busy; but imagine to break a chosen one, break a real life angel on the wheel with your own cock, how could I refuse that.

My standing at the club would rocket, my net and my shares all of it. But you have to be careful, you never know what will happen when you fuck with magic, with Russian magic in particular. There were not many of these woman left alive.

A little history, a little back story. My name isn’t really Ilya Lubov and I am 780 years old. How could I be that old, well because I pay my health insurance bills, which are different in caliber than yours. I pay for new parts, new livers new kidneys, new bones new skin, I have replaced almost everything since I began. I was born in Russia to a Mongol invader and the sorcerous he ravished. I am aware therefore of many things you are not aware of. So many things, like for instance that the human species is much older than you think it is and we have been much more advanced and much, much more egalitarian in the past than the present.

For instance when I was born for instance, in parts of Africa space programs had been in existence before the Gregorian calendar. For instance, by the time the Golden hordes sacked Moscow and Damascus, and killed all of the men, and raped every single one of the women inside; well humanity had been living in a general state of equality and fraternity for 8,000 plus years, except for three large quarantined zones in modern Europe, the region of the Great Lakes in Africa by the source of the Nile and the region of Modern Japan. Now this is all very, very well documented, there are holographic films on it. But go ahead, trust you national history book and your internet. I’m sure you were taught the world began in 1945 when the Allies defeated the Axis. I’m sure you were taught the Cold War was about nuclear weapons and ideology not breeding rights. I’m sure you associate the Holocaust with killing “Ivories”.

I could teach for a living, but instead I buy and sell things. I own all kinds of intangible things that allow me to profit off tangible ones. Like, the barely listed internet firm that offers web solutions to companies around the world, but just try and find our physical office in the mostly derelict Charlestown loft warehouse. I mean you can call and you will eventually reach a flesh-bot walking around claiming to be me, and someone will eventually provide you a technical solution, but that is honestly not the purpose of having a shell company.

Sometimes artists try and capture what we are, we old ones. I’m not even near the oldest. They make vampire movies or science fiction so maybe the public grows so tired of media magic they can’t fathom real, old dark technology and old dark magic. Which is real. And let me say, that sense we forced the Ivories to build us the World System; well we have sucked you all dry and frankly imposed a kind of manufactured poverty and scarcity that never ever existed before. We’ve build military machines that never, ever existed before. You may have heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but you didn’t hear about all the other times we used an earthquake, or a flood or dropped a bomb and called it an inter-ethnic genocide.

You might read this in the West and think civilization is advancing or declining, I will tell you that you have no idea just how much we pray off you all. My favorite time of year is when we stage election in various countries and so many of you think you have options, think that it all matters. You actually have developed loyalty to your owners, you hang your plantation work camps flag as some symbol of pride.

780 is not that old, I’m called a baby in certain circles. I’m not invited to Bohemian or Bilderberg events, the Masons and the Order of St. John frankly freak me out a little. I’m not even on a Forbes list by proxy, for instance Gates and Buffet are just flesh-bots, pawns of people you’ve never even heard of. Let’s just say our own ‘Forbes list’ would have to calculate in human heads and land, not make believe currencies we use to impose the scarcity regime.

I did a vacation recently in space, you have no idea how fun it is to screw in space, but you need enough room and also a large cabin, if you’ve ever screwed in water and you liked that well try space. The earth, for your information is not the only habituated world, nor is it as salvageable as you think. Preparations to leave began in the 1940’s Gregorian, disguised as the World Wars, but that is a very long story what happened in the World Wars, because one it would blow your mind too much and two, well its dark even for me.

They, the humans, because when you can live a thousand years you do evolve are actually multiple species that look almost the same, but act markedly different. Generically speaking some come from Bonobos, and some come from Chimps. And, there has been marked evolutionary diversion into more loving and more war like breed. Chimps and Bonobos look similar, almost the same as German and a Russian naked, but! But they are different. Chimps will rips your eyes out and gang rape your chimp wife. Bonobos like cuddling and feeding each other. This is science man! What you learned in school was proll feed.

I’m a little drunk, that’s why I’m making this video. I have reason to believe that someone very, very close to be has sold me out to a peasant rebellion. I have reason to believe someone ran off with my latest girlfriend. And, my hard drives. And, they have client lists and they have old soul network lists and they even have aces codes to the floating fortresses and moon bases. Basically, you don’t actually evolve in 780 years to point where a young hot girl with a real tight pussy can’t still set you up.

Blat, I’m have to kill so many people to make this right. What a mess. And I take my 34^th shot this time from the bottle, this time not even commanding my liver to work faster.

The phone rings, rings, her voice mail. Blat.

“I’m gonna kill everyone you ever cared about” I tell the voice mail, “and I’m going to make you suffer indefinitely. And I’m going to keep him alive, forever, and torture him until he cannot even find noises to scream, for I know you didn’t think of this plot on your own bitch!!”

I crush the mobilblat in my hand.

In 780 years, and I’m young, I have tasted almost every major wine, eaten virtually everything including human flesh (tastes like Pork), I have climbed almost every major mountain, experimented with all know and some unknown drugs, I’ve done horrible horrible things with female bodies. I’ve helped organize ethnic cleansings. I’ve basically helped sell the majority of the human race into a reserve pool of parts and labor. I am a lesser Oligarch.  And I’m not sure how yet, maybe because I wanted to fuck a school girl not a horse this quarter, maybe because even after 780 I’m half chimp, basically. I’m gonna rape her to death and cut off her head. I’m gonna torture all of them! If I don’t move fast and ruthlessly, there will be serious repercussions. Because 72 hours ago a new rebel group voted to declare war on us, which is not new or exciting. But, that they could lay a long game clever plan, and steal from me names and numbers and places of old souls, that this band of rebels could go hard as motherfucker on dozens of lesser oligarchs all over the world and I’d be blamed, that troubles me a lot.

 

Scene 4

Safehaus 16, 2015ce

Waltham

 

 

She was sacred and crying and I’d never seen her this uncompromised.

Thinks Sebastian Adon.

She was curled up under the covers of three comforters, crying and shivering on my big red safe house plush couch. And I was holding her hand, guarding her seated on the floor of the apartment, a blaster in my other hand filled with bullets, bullets that kill. Everyone was on red alert.

The night before she had arrived back in the United States with Ilya Lubov who had done god knows how many depraved things to her in Spain. Made me want to throw up, imagine him leering over her panting.

Forty eight hours ago delegates from forty nations signed a declaration of war against the oligarchy in mountain bunker in the Western hills of Mass. The delegates signed and hugged and saluted each other, as they knew it would be the last time the 49 of them would likely see each other alive again; and then via numerous and multiple routes proceeded to exit the country and by the time Ilya arrived back, ‘Ilya the lesser Oligarch of the North East sector’ the majority were safely out of the country, only a dozen remained including Sebastian Adon & Amitai Ben Gurion, the Israeli delegates, the two Haitian delegates Watson Entwissle and Tiputti Capois and Arelene Daly of Erin, Charlotte Kamande of Uganda and a squad of six Americans.

Her hand was wet with fear and she was crying unstoppably and this was a poor sign if this was indeed the woman sent to lead us in the coming uprising.

I don’t know what Ilya did to her body and mind. I didn’t ask her about that. But I’ll tell you what happened, it happened really fast. And I’m sure everyone is mortified we moved so quickly.

A year ago Adelina Blazhennaya, the warrior marine Pete Reed and I infiltrated the Republic of Haiti and working with Tiputti Capois to drill hundreds of new medical guerrillas. After the rendezvous with rebel leadership in Santo Domingo and Havana I returned to the gulag camps in Waltham and Adelina left for Moscow.

As per the plan we would fake our brake up, declare tumultuous hate for each other, and via electronic correspondence build a plausible portfolio of distance and hate. And in when in Moscow, on behalf of the rebel alliance she would bed who she had to find the identity of the lesser oligarch who ruled North Eastern states, the greater one too hard to hit, and she would get us his name. But she got much further, she got this pig, this scoundrel oligarch to meet her in Spain.

Let me say that this was not my plan. Let me tell you that while I have been staff sergeant in the rebel movement since 2001, and as an old school myself it has been told to me that I am very old; well under no circumstances would I have colluded to send the mother of my only living children into danger, into heavily occupied Russia, to the fortified zone of Moscow (known to be the current summit of the great world mountain) to BED OTHER MEN! Never. But it was the orders of my ex-wife Emma Solomon that she follows, not mine.

 

Emma Solomon had come into her life and told her to put me back to work, to take me out of the camps and ready me for newer things and bigger battles to come. She flew to Moscow in September, she came back to meet me in New York in November.

 

I begged her in the Empire Hotel, I begged her on my knees to escape with me to the relative safety of the Wild West Indies or Cuba, or space or anywhere. And she told to shut the fuck up. She told me in that hotel room that there was no future for our children while the oligarchy ravished us all like this, there was no future for this species unless we carried out our directives. She told me I knocked her up long before Haiti and she took the child to Russia to give birth, that out first child, a girl was already born, safely being raised by her mother in Che, I told her I would give up my rank and I would cash in my chips, I even begged her to collaborate with me and be done with this war, and she told me to go fuck myself, called me weak. I cried and I begged and yelled and I called her a whore and I broke a mirror with my face. And she took me sobbing and bloody off the floor and made love to me for the very last time, and pregnant with our second child she left for Moscow this time breaking contact.

The camp, the Special Engineering Camp 44; Shrakasa Waltham was built in the foot hills West of Boston by half an hour in a vehicle. When the Blizzard of 2014 came in, we were cut off from the outside world for the rest of the winter; there were road closures, curfews and even to get into Boston took days. The camp held nearly 4,000 prisoners, several hundred in the graduate development program for ‘sustainable development’ studies. The resistance in New York had ordered me to infiltrate the camp in 2013 and capture tradecraft, and make international allies.

Although most of the world lives below $5 a day, most were not aware of the many uprisings which rocked the United States of America in 2011-2012; that rebels and leftists and unions and partisan fighters had captured cities up and down the coast from Miami, Florida to Bangor, Maine. Most of the world was simply informed by the media that hipsters, the homeless and various communists were participating in failed urban uprisings in the USA. Arab Spring protesters, Islamists and the underground had by 2012 knocked out the governments of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia; and major uprisings were launched in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, all of which are ongoing in various degenerations of violence and civil unrest. However, no one ever was allowed to know that uprisings far up the mountain, far closer to the World System Core happened in Hong Kong (suppressed), Chelyabinsk (successful) and thirteen rebel Soviets were established between 2012-2015 in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Newark, Hartford, New Haven, Boston, Miami and Detroit. And while the events of these uprisings never reached the world, by 2016 there were 13 confederated city states autonomous of the USA.

It was long believed that the resistance was much stronger abroad and in the ensuing years numerous attempts were made to find the rebels in other nations. But a heavy quarantine sealed the 13 Soviets from most outside contact and in the subsequent war of attrition between 2013-2016 millions starved, tens of thousands defected, Boston was recaptured and Detroit was obliterated completely.

The events of those tumultuous years are recounted in a variety of journals published as ‘The Partizan Song’ fictionalized and ‘The Oral History of the US Separatist Wars’ a more critical account by historian Michael Goul-Wackowsky. Though the second is disputed by many because Goul-Wackowsky was widely believed to be a police spy.

She was crying now for several hours, I had never seen her cry except once I made her cry when she came to believe I had an affair on the eve of our deployment to Haiti. The lights were off in the safe house and Irfan Khan, one of the two Pakistani delegates was downstairs with an assault rifle. Tiputti Capois had left with Saadiya Usmani, the Sheikha of Karachi via a cab to bring a brief case to the home of Ricardo Veshanti, the Rastafarian Chief Liaison Officer of the Union; his home a long time rebel base and meeting hall had a hatch in the floor which descended to the sewers where a courier team was preparing to copy the contents of the brief care and shuttle the contents though Konnecticut to the nearest rebel Soviet garrison in Hartford.

I have a gun and Irfan Khan has a rifle, and Tiputti and Saadiaya have the brief case and in the brief case is all kinds of data that we need to unleash anarchy in the finances and logistical control systems and social clubs of the oligarchy; and Ricardo Veshanti is ready with his courier team and the messiah is sobbing.

 

Adelina will become the Dror ha Tzadikk, candidate for messiah in about one hour, when Ilya the Oligarch retaliates as hard as he can.

 

My portable radio goes off, it’s Roj Zalla the only Kurdish delegate, “they’ve mobilized a very large contingent out of Charlestown. I would estimate you have an hour. Copy.”

“10-4, we’re gonna leave the safe house and head for the hatch.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she declares.

 

 

 

Scene 5

Safehouse on 16 Kings, 2015ce

Waltham

 

 

Irfan and I had to the best of our ability barricaded and taped up the windows of the safe house which overlooked the parking lot and street. We had dropped the Haitian and Israeli flags off the balcony ledge which was a flag signal on our part that all positions were to be hardened and the volunteers were to be called up. There were only four roads of approach into Camp Shrakasa Waltham, and the safe house was amid a large cooperative housing development on the Western upper most slope of the great hill the whole camp and village rested upon. Thus, a spotter could see the flags drop, confirm via radio it was an activation, and then, climb one of the three massive radio towers called the three Eiffel’s of Waltham; and hang the flag of Zimbabwe; which was the signal for ‘get to your position, mine the roads, this is a call up’.

And it was just after high noon when we dropped out flags, and 12:15pm when the flag of Zimbabwe went up the tallest structure in town, and then it was no going back.

Saadiya calls me on the land line, “We are at Malcolm’s, are you all safe?”

“Roj called.”

“I know Roj called, you should get in your car and get down here to the hatch, I’d estimate we have 55 minutes,” the Sheikha Saadiya Usmani has a British accident.

“She won’t leave,” I tell her.

In the next room Adelina was taking a shower.

“Sebastian, we don’t have a lot of time. Tiputti, Ricardo, Botchello and I are almost done moving the files onto the inter-web and into the drive, when that’s done we’re heading down the hatch and heading to Hartford or Dover, the couriers won’t tell us.”

“I realize that. You may have to leave without us. She’s very stubborn.”

“Sebastian, I realize that you are sleep deprived, and may not be able to hear me. But I order you to get in the car with Irfan, and make the rendezvous. Or, as you know Ilya’s men will burn this whole place down and many of our supporters will die for nothing defending you and her, when we could make this painless.”

“Sheikha, what would you have me do?” he mutters.

“They’re coming with many violent men. We need to get all the delegates out of Waltham, we need to put all the supporters back to sleep. If you can extricate yourself in a timely fashion it could save many lives.”

“Sheikha, I’m trying. She’s in the shower right now.”

And Saadiya Usmani the prophetess knows that perhaps this the last time she will hear him alive.

“Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” she says and puts down the phone.

I put on tea. Irfan comes up the stairwell; the safe house is a rather large two bedroom apartment with a now heavily barricade balcony overlooking the parking lot and main road called Kings Way. I can see the flag of Zim still fluttering, Kudzai the biochemist sure got that fast. The enormous IED’s that will take apart the two largest bridges into town were his doing; cooked up under Ricardo Veshanit’s home. If it comes to that.

I hand Irfan a mug of black tea. He’s of medium build, an older man who ages well, classy with thinning hair a heavy drinker and analytically minded. He’s former Pakistani military, before he was sent to the camp used to provide security for the present there. Alongside Saadiya he makes up the other half of the Pakistani delegation.

Where he had acquired a fully loaded AK-47, in this camp, at this time of the year under this state of affairs, who knew. Such a thing from Irfan Khan was not hard to believe, he had connections for worse things. Getting them and moving them for sport and for fun or for the welfare of country, his country of origin.

He sips the tea and slings the rifle over his shoulder. He too has a British accent.

“I have three clip and four hand grenades. I have placed an IED near the entrance to the house and on the first approach to the road. We can set them off by remote. Where is she?”

“She’s taking a shower.”

“A long shower.”

“She’s a dirty girl,” I tell him.

He winks, he has a good old boy sense of humor.

“Saadiya told me that I am to again order you to pull out of this position and head to the hatch immediately. She said if you refuse because you think you’re protecting the girl; I am to pull out,” he checks his gold watch, “in ten minutes.”

“You know I’m not going to leave her side.”

“I anticipated that you would say that.”

“She’s my wife and the mother of two of my kids.”

“Yes, I anticipated that you’d claim that.”

“I’m a Captain too, Saadidya can’t order me to do anything.”

“Look it’s a fully volunteer outfit, no one can enforce any of these orders. It’s about respect. Respect for the total fubar mess you’ve landed us in less than just two days out of Congress. Two days! I thought we had more time to run and hide.”

“I’m sorry, she came back.”

“You’re the fucking general man, you’re the chief. The top most leader really! You fucked up. You’re not allowed to play with other’s lives like you have, with hope like you have. They trusted you, I trusted you. In forty five minutes a private army will over run our position and obliterate this camp. Burn down every structure, kill anything with a pulse. I estimate that this entire encampment might, might be lightly defended by forty students with small arms.”

“Are those real bullets in you AK?”

“Do I strike you as man who would have not real bullets in my AK?” Irfan asks.

“No. I didn’t think you in the peace camp of the union.”

“And I am not.”

“And your gun, are those real bullets in your gun.”

“It’s not my gun. I took it from Ilya after I broke his jaw with it.”

“Your commitments to non-violence are thin, eh comrade captain Adon.”

Irfan grins, he grins a lot when he’s nervous or drunk.

“Is she really your wife?” he asks.

“In a very biblical sense.”

“I thought more like a mu’tah marriage.”

“Well it began like that. Then certain things were made clear.”

“Is it true she has two children by you squirrelled away, hidden in a fortress deep in the Urals, somewhere between Yechateranisbourg and Che?”

“The ISI doesn’t fuck around, do you?”

“I don’t know anything about that Captain Adon. I just know that if you reported to anyone besides yourself, and your idea of your God, well; you’d be shot.”

“Can I smoke?” he asks.

“Yes, but on the balcony, she can’t stand it.”

“Who pays the rent here eh?”

“The US Federal government is paying the rent, and they don’t like the smell of smoke either.”

They go out on the terrace into the freezing cold of June, it wasn’t almost ever cold in June here. Winter has carried on in the Northwest for three consecutive years now. Allegedly it has something to do with ‘climate change.’ In reality, there have been three years of non-stop snow because Ilya Lubov and Dmitry Khulushin, the two major lesser oligarchs of the Northeast sector lost a bet to the Koch Brothers; the two lesser Oligarchs of the Midland sectors; and the brothers shut off the heat, quite literally. Full climate control has been a technological reality for many hundred years.

I ask him for a smoke with my hands and my face.

“Well, what now?” he asks.

“You finish your smoke, I finish my smoke when she gets out of the shower we clorophorm her, roll her in a sleeping bag, booby-trap the house with a hand grenade and get in my car and we drive fast down the hill on the rum roads, we get to Ricardo’s we all go down the hatch and Kudzai orders a stand down, and the camp goes back to sleep, and we end up in Dover or Hartford, eventually ensheallah Breuklyn Soviet.”

“I like when you’re rational mind kicks in. I thought you completely whipped.”

“I just needed some smoke.”

“She’s a wonderful woman. A fierce, indomitable warrior.”

“I know.”

“That thing she stole, you stole; that information will blow a hole in the side of their system. Names, places, pass codes, license plates, and bank account numbers. Anarchy.”

“I had no idea she’d come back with his head on a platter like that.”

“Well he’s gonna to terrible things to you both if he catches you, and he may.”

Irfan looks at his watch.

“Who’s left,” I ask.

“Virtually all of the leadership has escaped. Jefferson, Refilwe, and Saiph Khan left last. Only Sultan plans to hold his ground here with the supporters. Ah, and the Afghans of course will not retreat.”

“So it wasn’t always snow in June,” he asks.

“There was never snow in June.”

“As we have perhaps a minute more before we take care of the businesses of rapid egress, as of course all three of us might be killed just getting to the hatchway; would you mind paraphrasing, what exactly the fuck happened between the day after Congress, and this morning.”

“The short version?”

“We don’t have time for a soliloquy.”

“My unit stole a list of names and bank account numbers of the fourth richest American oligarch. He was fucking my ex, who is also my wife, things flew off the handle in a violent rampage, and here we are,” I say.

“Um, more.”

“My wife infiltrated the close company of one of the richest men in the American lesser oligarchy then living in Moscow. He fucked her into a million pieces, god knows what else; he made her his concubine. She copied his hard drives, she identified where his data cache was in Charlestown. They went to Spain, my brother took procession of half of the data, but the rest was secured in Charlestown. They flew back, Ilya and Adelina the day Congress ended. He flipped on her and locked her in a room in his facility there. I raided it yesterday morning with forty volunteers. I broke his face with the barrel of a gun, I stole back my wife, I also stole his Russian and America hard drives. We got pinned down by his enforcers and private army. So I called in an airstrike and that sort of changed the color of the sky above Boston.”

“How much of this did you pre-meditate?”

Irfan asks knowing exactly how much of that story was in Adon’s head space, and how much was real.

“Very little. I hadn’t heard anything until she popped up in Barcelona a couple weeks ago. All I got next was a call from her friend Lana telling me she was in trouble, early yesterday.”

“Did anyone in the union know you were going to conduct a military raid, supported by bombers and artillery from Boston Soviet?”

“Roj knew.”

“Of course he did,” Irfan smirks. That sneaky Kurdish plotter/ patriot always does.

“So look,” I say and toss the butt over the barricade, “I don’t know where her head is at. She’s been through, well sinister shit. She’ll get out of the shower and sort of pretend everything is cool and Lana is gonna meet in Cambridge for dinner, and she’ll just kinda mentally detach herself from realty.”

As we’re all trained to do, Irfan thinks.

“And that’s when you grab her, drug her, wrap her in a sleeping bag and we carry her to the car?”

“Precisely.”

“Carry on.”

“It’s just a fifteen minutes’ drive down the Rum Road down to the home of Ricardo Veshanti; then we stick to the plan.”

“You realize this realty you and her have created are both deviant and unstable, you realize that if anything other than that; you, me she and the rest going out of this camp and the hatch closing behind us, you realize he will skin her alive in front of you and keep you alive for a thousand years for torture, for this set up. For this epic mess.”

“Listen, if I wasn’t afraid for her and these children I allegedly have I’d be less inclined to believe in her magic.”

“Brother, listen. All of us were brought to this place to report back to where we are from. You have orders, I have orders, we were sent here to network, and that we did.”

“Irfan, things happened very quickly. And got a little out of control.”

“You burned down half of the towns between here and Cambridge in the largest mechanized artillery battle anyone has ever seen since maybe the Battle of Brooklyn. You stole a list of lesser and upper oligarchs. You pistol whipped American Capitalisms equivalent of a duke. You made off with his property. You did all of that 24 hours after the single largest coordinated meeting of rebel fighters in the last 100 years met four hours from here. They’re going to kill us all Sebastian Adon, there is not going to be anywhere left to hide.”

“Well we can get as far as the hatch for now.”

Adelina Blazhennaya comes out of the shower in bathrobe, ignores us both and heads to my bedroom to change.

“What’s that beeping?” Irfan asks pointing to my open black Lenovo computer.

“Drones,” I mutter and look over the terminal.

“Lots and lots of incoming terra drones.”

 

 

Scene 6

Highway I95, 2015ce

Brighton-Alston

 

Thinks Ilya, a lesser Oligarch of North Eastern American sectors:

 

I underestimated these fucking Americans. And it is easy too because they have so little education, they have so little collective bargaining power, they’re completely deluded about their political system and they’re all mostly over weight.

But then out of the blue, they do wild cowboy shit.

I’m going to keep this man alive for a thousand years and torture him like he’s never been tortured. He clearly loves Ms. Adi B., so I’ll have to keep her alive in incredible suffering too to get at him properly, can’t just skin her on sight. Jesus I’m in a bind.

Our convoy of forty black bullet proof sports utility vehicles, jeeps and half trucks is plowing its weigh up Highway I95; anticipating that these terrorist bandits have the capability to blow up the bridge we need to take to get into the camps.

Waltham is basically on the top of a low lying mountain, there are four ways in that we can expect them to booby trap. We are not going to take any of those ways in. We’re not going to run right into a typical Chechen trick; convoy ambush. We are about twenty minutes from the camp perimeter. They’ve already killed or disabled all of the police guarding the town and camps. It’s very hard to control myself right now. I’m very emotional.

My mobilblat rings, it’s Dmitry Khulusin, probably calling to mock me.

“Faggot Piederass I told you he’s a sneaky Ivory bastard,” Dmitry says.

“What do you think will happen when we get to the camps?” I ask him.

“Niggers will shoot at you, bombs will go of left and right, they’ll burn down the whole place before you get your hands on anyone, and they also always seem to dig tunnels.”

“Right, and I need him and her alive.”

“Why? Bomb the whole fucking place. Kill as many as you can! They’re mostly niggers and Arabs and Ivories; nothing incredible is coming out of that Shrakasa anyway.”

“Dmitry, I need to take them alive. And I need to get my hard drives back.”

“Ilya, baby, droog. They already have copied your data to the interweb and foot shuttled it down the tunnels to old New York. Even if they can’t crack it all open yet, they will. It’s gonna be ready for anonymous decryption at every one of their terrorist bases by sun down.”

“Well, what would you do, in my shoes?”

“Kill yourself. Before the Kochs, the Slim Helus, the Buffets, the Bezozs, the Ellisons, the Bentleys, the Biggalos, and the Upper Oligarchy realize what you lost, set up over some tight pussy talking trap. And she doesn’t even have any tits.”

“You lost most of your best lands to this man and his friends, will you not help me?”

“I don’t have the energy to play with their Black Magic anymore.”

“Fuck off then blat!”

And I almost throw the mobilblat out the window.

She betrayed me, they used me they fucked me good. As soon as the other peers realize I’ve compromised half of the cream of the North Eastern Coast, Air Strip 1, Saxony, Normandy, the Spain Lands and frankly quite of bit else in Upper Europe and the Gulf Colonies; well they’ll cut my head off. And play with my brains.

I lived for 780 years, what I learned; humans are violent selfish monkeys that maximize pleasure and minimize pain, except for a small sniveling breed we’ve killed down to almost nothing that move and think collectively.

I wanted to fuck a chosen one up her ass. There all kinds of rumors that the Upper Oligarchs keep these witches as pets. Some of our best hunter killers are of Hebrew blood, I mean all of the white Ivories are working for us now one way or another. But I thought I bought and seduced her for a reasonable price. I thought she wasn’t awake.

We all read the reports that the Muslims and the niggers are protecting the last of the chosen. We all read about how many bonobo descendants are left. We all hear that stupid fucking word Dror haTzadikk! Dror Ha Tzadikk! I mean it’s outside my jurisdiction by from what I know most of the human slavery campaign was to sell as many of these witches into brothels as we could to breed ourselves a deterrent to various incarnations of the resistance movements in the colonies.

They’re going to cut off my head. I misunderestimated the Americans.

The phone rings again. The convoy is getting close to the underground tunnels we can enter the camps from below.

It’s Dmitry again.

“I pity you. So I’ll sell you a secret.”

“Go ahead then.”

“I want 50 million Bit Coins for it.”

“If it’s that good I’ll may in Swiss Francs.”

“You can wipe out the primary rebel leadership in one shot, you can hit the submarine black freighter with Emma Solomon and Avinadav DeBuitléir when it surfaces to rendezvous with people fleeing this camp.”

“I’m not sure that will save my skin.”

“Yes, they will skin you for this. But maybe killing Solomon and DeBuitléir will earn you enough credibility to be allowed to come back to a body.”

“No one is so hated as those two heinous scum, why would you do that for me? Why not advance your own station before the high peers?”

“Because I hate Sebastian Adon. I hate him so much I’d sell my own birth mother to spit roast him. And anything I can do to hurt him I will always do to hurt him, and to kill his leaders. That could hurt him a little.”

“Why do you think the two most important rebel leaders are on a black freighter submarine coming to rescue these bandits?”

“Because unbeknownst to you and your cock was up the ass of the highest powered candidate there is next Solomon, Adelina is her immediate and direct disciple. By killing Solomon she is next in line to be their new messiah.”

“I fucked the messiah up the ass! Amazing.”

“You’re a pervert, but that’s expected. Being very rich and powerful is scientifically proven to breed perversion as you know.”

“I’m going to put their messiah on a chain and break her completely.”

“So pay me bitch. And I will have a war head fall on them the minute they land on their stupid little island they value so much; the block and New Shoreham.”

“Alright. Done. But I’m going to take them alive somehow before they reach Block Island.”

“You need them to get close so they radio their friends to come get them. Which means just bomb the camps into the ground you know they’ll sneak out some hole into a tunnel and make their way according to their protocols? Yesterday’s truck rocket battles made you look like you’ve totally lost control of your serfs. ”

“You’re one to lecture. Half your city fell Soviet!”

“Route the money. Bomb that Ivory camp with drones and just wait for the informants to report strange things happening in Konnecticut on the roads to New Galilee. We can mop this up by the end of the weekend, and maybe you’ll just lose your skin privileges.”

 

 

 

 

Scene 7

Chelsea Garrison, 2015ce

ISLE OF MAN

 

 

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

 

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

 

I’m not fully happy with some elements of my life, thinks Siegfried Sassoon the actor. I cannot exactly say that I am satisfied, though I do have many elements of a good life going; I am not using my human potential; not as an actor and not as a man.

 

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

I am following a new serial on Netflicks and Chill; the premium film station now that we get all out television from computers and cell phones. I have no stomach for film or TV! I was classically trained in Moscow for the stage! For the fucking stage, but that is a dead medium now. I have bachelors in philosophy, I wrote my thesis on the history of time travel. I work as bar tender at an elite supper club in the Isle of Mann. I have a pleasant and attractive girlfriend, she is not as amazing as my last girlfriend, but she makes me happy and keeps things mostly drama free.

 

My father works for the military industrial complex, I rarely see him. My mother is a hippie. It’s pace love and light, and then you marry rich; it’s good for your future, your children’s future. My father has a job I don’t know the details of; his company holds patents to space craft and commercial airlines, it builds them for thee United American States; the UAS has been the name of the 87% of the USA that was not lost to socialism during the Separatist Wars of 2012-2015; the Capital is in Chicago. The 13% lost is called the Confederation of Autonomous Soviet Republics, the Isle of Mann is just over the river from Breuklyn Soviet; which is one of the most heavily armed hot beds of the sedition. The Bronx and Queens are confederated with it; Staten Island is an enormous military garrison, it got very blood for three years, now it’s all quiet. The rebels threatened to use atomic weapons and took hostages, I will tell you what appears to work; terrorism it seems to work every single time.

It is actually understood to be far less bloody than conventional war, and a lot less expensive. Who fundamentally funds these rebels is a subject of great debate in the high class circles I run in. Oh yes, the upper classes are composed of big brained thinking men.

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

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

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

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

I once wondered if Adon would analyze his own privileges being white, being raised upper middles class from a family with land; well his father is no lesser oligarchy but still they were the House of Adon! An esteemed house allowed into certain elite clubs, given land in both the District Financial and the Hamptons. Well suffice to say that house was outlawed and obliterated after the Great Revolt.

They stripped his Ivory father of all his land and ranks and executed his entire family, this is all I read. Sometime in the 2013.

The world is not a much changing world. There are always barbarians at the gates, slaves in cages and unrest in the colonies. It has always been this way, it will always be this way; who am I or Adon or any to clamor for a new way. Adon and I used to sit in the bathhouses and I would hear his yarns. I could hardly believe much of it was real. We were in university together, though I never joined his movement officially. Never took the plot outside the steam room. The House of King and House of Adon were of relatively equal social stations. He seemed to disregard my sympathies to him and grow angry as we got older that I didn’t wish to die on some barricade like him; but there are not barricades now; there are only strange events. Strange changes to reality that happen to keep up with the future science and black magic making war.

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

Make us a good price!

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

My ex, I can’t say her same as it was so painful to lose her. Her father is a Greater Oligarch, from her and from Adon and from the whispers at the Box; I learned that truly nothing is as it seems.

Sebastian Adon, before he embraced the Baha’i nonviolence teachings of Sheika Saadiya Usmani and was inducted into the Blue Lodge; well he was a killer, I watched him evolve. I saw him go between talk and action over a period of ten years, he was changed by his experiences in the colonies; Palestine first then in Haiti.

I will not speak to what did or did not happen during the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis, there are wildly different accounts. I never saw him again after that night when the whole country first learned his name. They say he died. As did thousands of hostages being held all over the country that night! And then a calm. And then, a great gold mist blew over North America. The internet turned off. The world outside our country was blacked out. And in that gold happy mist changes were made, and there was no more Adon. There was no more United States; the entire population was put to sleep.

And when we woke up out of the dream, out of the week following the Millennium Hostage Crises. 13 % of America was a wild rebel free zone, and 87% was called the United American States, had always been. And you couldn’t take a 45 minute train to Brooklyn, no this violent anarchic thing called Breuklyn Soviet was a 40 mile drop off a cliff where the East River used to be. There was mile high wall between the edge of that cliff; and I was still in the UAS, which had always been the UAS; but Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx were not. These were now autonomous zones we were prohibited from traveling to.

I got a letter in the mail from Adon, I guess a courier moved it. The letter stated he was interned in a special engineering camp not far from Boston; another liberated City State. He told me that shortly his compatriots would be taking him out of the camp ad returning him to Breuklyn Soviet, which was of course (he claimed) now ‘free.’ And what did he want, why had he written?

Of course he wanted something. He never was capable of just having a friendship. He had taped a micro USB chip to the letter; it contained god only knows what. Nothing would shock me. He letter asked to go to 7^th FDNY EMS Outpost in Chelsea, find Anya Drovtich, buy her a drink and give her the chip. Just commit treason, matter of flatly.

I had met Anya Drovtich once before the letter said; the sexy Polish chick with the dreadlock and red Hijab. That narrowed it down a lot. What the rational person would do, despite having knowledge of a highly irrational world, even sympathizing with the resistance secretly. Having bathed and been friends with supposedly dead public enemy number three, behind DeBuitléir and Solomon, ahead of famed Jamaican Rebel Commander still at large in Breuklyn Soviet Mickhi Dbrisk. I remembered Anya, I let them both in the box on night against my better judgment; they were planning to take hostages. In the end they were ordered to stand down, Adon got drunk and pole danced for her in a private room.

He wasn’t humorless.

I look at this letter in my hand and I wonder what I should do. Turning it in means incriminating myself. The televisions have said he was killed in the hostage crisis along with Solomon; this is proof of sorts he is alive; maybe his prints are on this hand written letter. His security culture is sloppy I know. Maybe throw it away? What’s on the micro USB chip? Should I open it? Maybe this all a setup, maybe the Joint Terrorism task force is looking at anyone Adon used to know and I used to Banya with him twice a year, he’s been to half my theatrical openings. Maybe it’s another purge. And why would he send this to me, all of these years later. He’s been officially dead for three years. Yes, the hostage tragedy happened in 2012? I think so. 2013? Maybe, they say never forget but I do forget. So much happened, so much changed. SO many people died in the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis. I know, what the public doesn’t know which is that the rebels were very close to using nuclear warheads against major Americans cities. Leveraging that was what allowed the Separatist victories. I know that Department of Homeland Security pumped gas into all of the hostage points, four if I remember and that gas killed most of the hostages, not the rebel small arms fire. And I know the official story is that Emma Solomon, a citizen of Spain and Sebastian Adon a dual citizen of the USA and Trinidad, some allege, also Israel lead some forty terrorists into a packed showing of a new Broadway play and held hostage some 850 people, mostly the crème de la crème of the lesser Oligarchy in New York and celebrities; and then coordinated seizures of buildings happened in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston and Chicago; and then there was 48 hour five site siege; and the terrorists called for an end to the three year Separatist Wars and independence for 13 Soviets; 13% of USA’s territory, including all of Puerto Rico.

And then, blood, fire, gas and then as if nothing had happened all. Just like a mass shooting or a bombing in Baghdad.

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

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

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

On year, maybe 2011 Adon and I went to the bathhouse on 88 Fulton, now called Bath Tip Gym; and maybe he liked the Banya so much cause we can talk freely, no phones no hidden mikes, you’d hope, no cameras, you’d hope. Or at least the illusion of privacy in the stream and sweat.

He took out an envelope and showed me pictures of the atrocities in Syria; told me they were preparing to send fighters and medics; would I go? Would I raise money? Well I feigned enthusiasm but ultimately contributed nothing. Like when he’d asked me to carry out some operation on the trains they were planning.

Well anyway, everyone they sent into Syria was killed. He was shortly after arrested and tortured for sedition. And by September 1st, Labor Day 2012 the Great Revolt had begun and the rebels soon took Brooklyn, Queens and the rest.

History will absolve almost everyone. I have looked this man dead in the eyes in the steam of the baths and heard him say seditious things and never informed. I am still absolved. One day people may look back at their uprising and say they committed atrocities, they were extremist, anarchists even! They tipped the arch with their fuckery! If you showed me video of Adon executing four men with a shot gun, like the one they played on TV. If you tried to tell me Adon was really an Persian sleeper; a Shi’a tripled agent. Like they said on TV. I wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe he’d killed a single person.

I ask myself again what on this USB? I could bring it to China Town, they would tell me for a small price. Or maybe I’ll bring it to Anya Drovtich. Hand it over to the Banshee underground to get it where it need to go. Those people can move anything.

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

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

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

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

They used to say on the TV; ‘if you have nothing to hide why do you care if we watch you’. And then there was Snowden who defected to the Russians and testified that every single cell phone call, text, email, even ToR and snap chat was stored in NSA server warehouses, filed and linked to social security numbers. Even when Patriot Acts I, II and III came out; basically cancelling out whatever proud rights Americans thought they had; we said we were not terrorists, who cares, drink booze, and watch Sports; Netflicks and Chill! They used to try and tell us on TV Democrats and Republicans were different somehow. Well they things they say are different, but now both parties are suspended under the War Powers Act of 2013. Who’s the President of the UAS, that’s what Anya the paramedic will ask me, or my accomplice after out name and maybe if we know where we are. The orientation questions.

But if she asks me who’s the President of the United States of America, instead of asking me who is the President of the United American States; well that’s resistance code.

Adon told me in the letter, ‘when they take you pretend you’re very drunk.’

I wonder if I will see my old supposedly dead friend ever happy. What would make a man like him happy, a nice girl; a year on the beach? A fast car, a published book? Well everyone has a price do they not, we all have a price.

Sadly, what I think will make my old friend happy, as happy as he can be at this juncture. “Falsify a medical emergency, avoid detection by using some proxy you seduce and pass off that card to the underground. That would make me happy.”

 

Well he said as much in writing:

 

“The aim of the entire Great Revolt therefore is to take full control of the means of development at the most localized level without using violence to do so and harness our collective might to secure our human rights entitlements once and for all.”

 

 

 

Scene 8

Baha’i Outpost 443, 2013ce

Cambridge

 

 

Let us digress slightly into the divergent past. Two years back perhaps, which is to say Common Era 2013 or AR 1, one year after the beginning of the Great Revolt; but still in the satellite camps and shanty towns outside Boston.

 

We, at times are too enamored in our literature and film with the theatrics and heroics of men, thinks Adelina Blazhennaya.

 

They are most unstable creatures! So easily aroused and so readily violent. Hark I will tell you why I was flown all the way from lovely sane and stable Chelyabinsk; Tank City, to be building boiling plots in the North Americas; amid their anarchy. They were hardly tame before the Great Revolt, but now! And any little thing can trigger a mass shooting or an ethnic hysteria. Anything.

I journey from Philadelphia to Boston on horseback, (yes horseback) and I wear the elegant and more importantly insulating fur of the Siberian Black Bear; I with my lovely brown locks falling out from under look like where the wild things are. There was no other way to travel, except by horse because then, and then was 2013ce; the Separatist Wars were raging. There was a no fly zone down the east coast imposed by the United Nations; New York City was burning to the ground and the rebels were one day winning one day facing decimation and massacre. There was no longer Fung Wa bus service; there was Fung Wa horse-donkey convoy and believe me you me it cost more than $25 American. But I was not paying to be sure, the management was.

They offered me a Dmitry as an escort, but I adamantly declined. Robots and clones are a sign of the times; and the princely warlord cum lesser Oligarch Dmitry Khulushin, lesser oligarchy of the Tri-State area is both a sadist and serial philanderer turned himself into a product line called Epic Escort, hire and program your own Slavic prince as body card, or whatever else you need. Having a second of third, or hundredth Dmitry in this world was a serious array of problems onto themselves. It will one day lead to a crisis of Dmitry’s.

With the rebellion clearly forcing the United States of America into the behaviors of a maldeveloped country; well the roads between New York and Boston were so bad we of this Chinese lead convoy had to move four weeks atop animals to reach the People’s Republic of Cambridge; for in 2013 Metropolitan Boston was largely in rebel hands excluding some of the Satellite towns to the South; Quincy Center was still part of the USA, but North all the way to Salem was the Rebel Confederacy. My quarry, the man I was send all the way from Russian Federation to find was interred in a concentration camp called a Shrakasa, held there since 2013 near a town called Waltham; where with a bomb stitched to his neck was both designing the rebels technology for the revolt and via his dreams giving the Oligarchy shockingly accurate predictions of the rebellion.

 

This man, supposedly dead since 2012, has been locked in this camp with his mind wiped out. He has forgotten a great deal about the past and future and he is being used.

 

What a game we all play. Everyone a serf to someone, and I suppose you will ask who is my master? Well you’d have to burn me alive like the others! I am from an old order, older than either the rebellion or the oligarchy. Older than anything. I serve women who are wise, and that is all I can say at this juncture. My paper works gives my name, as Adelina; thus must be my name! My profession is that of an apparatchik to an education firm; teaching English is the pretext. Which one I cannot say, I have signed a non-disclosure agreement, but a big one!

So in October of 2013 I arrived in the People’s Republic of Cambridge and arranged to be brought to the Baha’i temple outpost 433. They plied me with hot sweet tea and cherry juice and gave me hugs. I would never openly say what my birth religion is, but I am certainly no stranger to Baha’i’ events and customs.

 

The Baha’i’ of Greater Boston, like Baha’i everywhere are apolitical, hyper-educated, hyper-diverse and explicitly always non-violent, charming but often boring. That they are also much massacred has driven them into their long standing alliance with the Israelis and thus, have entangled them messily into the Great Revolt. There are many Baha’i in the Breuklyn Soviet and that they are so protected by both the clandestine services of Iran and Israel speaks to their importance in events.

I am a delicate flower, but I have managed to cross the Ocean by steamer-sub and make this four week ride north to the outpost. Because of heavy fighting near Newton there is no reason to believe I can meet Sebastian Adon soon. But they tell me that he will travel in a fort night to partake in the Night of Power, a 19^th day feast. And I trust these people are they are sober and sincere and blessed heavily by the one true manifestation of Allah. Yes Allah, the part of a name not the useless conjecture of a noun, or worse using a listing of qualities to describe a majesty instead of thing who loves us and wants us to win.

If this pretext doesn’t work then Oleg the Bear my friend will bring Adon to my birthday on 12 April, which will work; as he seems too infatuated with Oleg, looks up to him in some strange way. Like an older brother he never had.

After a long hot bath and much tea and delicious food I sit with the Sheikha Saadiya Usmani who while they have no clergy is a prominent local leader. A shapeshifter they say, I have just arrived so I don’t believe in magic until I see it.

Saadiya is a magical woman, she is barely four feet tall and moves as though there were no fixed joints, she moves as though her vessel is pliable. She is a Pakistani and speaks with a British accent. But she moves and thinks like a Maagi, a so-called white witch. She has been here in Boston for some time and has been elected one of the nine Baha’i; of the local assembly.

“Welcome to Cambridge, it’s a little more tumultuous since the war broke out last year, but we have for some time been out of harm’s way because of MIT’s missile shield system, and the minute men,” she says to me calmly in her British accent.

“The minute men?”

“Yes, the paramilitary irregulars of the Libertarian Party trucked in six months ago from Burlington and the Vermont Free Zones; they are far better organized than the militias from BLM and the Ivoryish partisans; very little of the fighting has affected us except for shortages.”

She opens a map.

“As you can see the UAS Military is concentrated in Quincy to the south and on the Brighton-Alston line to the West, and there in district Charlestown is a massive Bratva garrison, because of all the smuggling routes. The People’s General Assembly is located in lower Boston; on the Jamaica Plane; the four biggest factions running the operations here are the BLM Alliance, the Democratic Socialists, the Freemen and the Libertarians. Other than us technically it’s a Muslim free zone.”

Enough small talk my eyes say.

“Where is Adon?”

She points to a mountain to the West of Boston by four days convoy. Waltham.

“And where more importantly am I, Adelina Blazhennaya to make my home?”

Saadiya points to a town called Brighton-Allston, on the Federal side of the demilitarized zone. And with her powers asks Adelina who is actually more important to the cause then Sebastian Adon we can’t get both of you out alive; Adelina responds silently, with her powers; I don’t know, probably we leave him behind.

“Is he awake?”

“Not in the slightest. We’ve just begun a liaison of letters which indicate he remembers nothing before being brought here.”

“What’s you pretext for being here in the camp?”

“Teaching English.”

“And him?”

“He’s studying and designing training modals, he believes them to be cutting edge, but it’s all recycled Cuban technology that we’ve had for years, maybe decades. He’s applied for a para permit to move bodies around as a paramedic in Revere, he’s get cleared in November.”

“Why do you think he’s still asleep, a rather dangerous liaison this could quickly turn into. It doesn’t seem very random at all they sent you; who sent you Maya Sorieya Emma Solomon? As she someone put you together.”

“An Israeli agent absolutely put us together.”

“Well who is more important an asset to evacuate, in the event of outright nuclear chaos’ you or him?”

“We’re both important in different ways. We need him out of the camps and back in the bosom of Soviet safety. This area’s security is highly artificial. We’re not so much in a free zone in the same way New York mostly is; we’re in a strategic buffer zone where the oligarchy is conducting a great deal of, shall we say research.

“I have read that there is a train under the Charlestown district that goes all the way up the mountain.”

“Up the mountain, all the way?”

“Yes, this is what I’ve heard. And I have heard that neither Adon nor any of his colleagues are really sleeping, I’ve heard they’re very much plotting how to get on that train and take it all the way to Moscow.”

“You presume that Moscow is the very top?” asks Saadiya Usmani.

“I know it be.”

“I am not sure if there is really a train, but we believe there is a hatch their up the mountain as you suggested.”

“Who is the main oligarch running this sector, before the Great Revolt began?” Adelina asks.

“He is called Ilya Lubov. He has a fortress in the Western mountains by Mt. Greyloch. He lost a bet to the Koch Brothers in 2010 so they turned off the geothermal weather grid, that is why it has been hard winter here ceaselessly for 6 years.”

“I heard 3.”

“6.”

“So it is possible that below Charlestown or perhaps Quincy is a hatch to a tunnel that may lead all the way up the mountain?”

“Yes, as you know much of the Great Revolt was a pretext to capture control of black freighters, space dirigibles and fourth dimensional weapons.”

“Who does Adon work for?”

“That’s a tricky question, his ex-wife we can only hope and not Perchevney the great devil.”

“Not the Baha’i World Congress?”

“He’s more of a card carrying Baha’i than a real genuine practitioner. He contacted us a month ago stating he had some complex case to resolve. He had formally resigned his membership and faith under Israeli direction attempting to make Allehya in 2010. It is my understanding he is coming here to ask for re-admittance.”

“Who does actually work for then?”

“We can really only again speculate.”

“Can he be brought under control somehow?”

“Well that’s what you Adelina Blazhennaya were introduced to him to do. Who introduced you?”

“An Israeli sleeper, a photographer named Oleg Medved, also called Oleg the Bear.”

“So the Mossad is assisting to get him out of the camps?”

“Well, people who speak Hebrew are trying to get him out of the camps, I can’t say of this is a Mossad job. They have their hands full.”

“Adelina Blazhennaya are you a Russian national from Chelyabinsk?”

“Soon a dual citizen.”

“Your mother…”

“Yes.”

“You been here for quite some time have you not, since age 17?” Saadiya asks.

“Yes, but I go to Russia once a year to see my family.”

“But you’re not linked to Oleg and the Israelis, via shall we say by payroll?”

“No. I was contracted directly by Emma Solomon to work on this unlimited operation. Having a direct liaison with Sebastian Adon is new news.”

“He’s been seen with Oleg Megved all over the twenty towns. He can’t pass the ring road or the aortic bomb in his neck will kill him. He may, or may not remember the events of the Great Revolt and Millennium Theater hostage crisis. He may, or may not remember his wife.”

“Emma Solomon?”

“Yes.”

“The…”

“Yes, we think so.”

“That mercenary, that brutal hunter killer was actually married to the Tzadikk HaDror?”

“Yes. But they’ve haven’t consummated the marriage with living children and they haven’t seen each other in over twelve years. And Emma is rumored to be a clone, as the woman actually he married was slaughtered by the Israeli Oligarchy on request from the Order of St. John’s in 2001, a day before the Towers fell.”

“So much back story!”

“You’re coming into the story during an intermission, but there were many acts and many partisan songs before you were destined to meet this great anti-hero.”

“So if Oleg was sent by the Israelis…”

“It’s not actually clear that he’s been sent, or if he is setting Adon up for either greatness or murder, they may well be just be connected by a shred of Chosen blood and common interests in their life of night,” Adelina states.

“What are you here to then, make him great or try and kill him?”

“What am I here to do? I’m here to try and make sure he is serving the cause.”

“Well since your people built his modal maybe you can get him to turn off.”

“He’s not just a robot,” Adelina says flatly.

“He’s not a robot per say. He’s an old soul inhabiting a fleshpot drone your people designed.”

“And who do you think my people are Saadiya Usmani?”

“People of Old Slavic Majik,” she says with a wink, “he’s occupying a mechanical person your combine designed. He did in fact die in the Millennium Hostage Crisis. He’s died a good many times before. So we are using deductive reasoning to assume he is not a flesh and blood man any longer.”

“Well if that is so why does he worry about the bomb in his neck?”

“Have you heard of the Greater Oligarch Alexandr Perchevney?”

“Yes of course. The devil.”

“A devil.”

“Adon if he serves anyone, he serves Perchevney.”

“Was not Perchevney an architect of the Great Revolt alongside Solomon and DeBuitléir?”

“That is believed now to be true.”

“What bloody games are these? What is it all for?” Adelina asks.

“The Baha’i World Congress believes that for Alexandr this is a power grab, but I believe it is much more. I believe he is seeking to annihilate the bloodline in a roundabout way. He is making sure that his seed is impregnating the candidates. He is annihilating those with bonobo blood and he is readying the entire house of Jacob for another big purge like in 1943.”

“All hidden up in this populist uprising around proletarian human rights demands?”

“Well just like Beria did. Or Hitler. Stir everything up and wipe out more of the bloodline.”

The both pause, touched by the bloodiness and gravity of collective history.

“I have read there’s nothing left in Israel. That it’s all been obliterated with atomic missiles. That it’s a clever illusion that the State of Ivory is real, that the Congress still meets in Haifa; but in truth it’s a blighted nuclear wasteland,” states Adelina.

“I cannot confirm or deny such a report,” Saadiya smiles, suffice to say I’ve never been there. I was born in Pakistan and trained in India & Burma, I arrived here via California and was soon after captured and sent to this camp.”

“So Adon will come here to the outpost for the Night of Power Feast, and then what?”

“You need to find out if he’s real or a just robot. Killer, zombie, hero, hooligan, freedom fighter; you have to get it out of him. You need to make him do, what we need him to do.”

“And what is that then, to you?”

“Bring his army of shadows under the actual direction of the Congress, move that army to link up with the larger divisions in Jamaica, Hispaniola, Trinidad and Cuba; move those armies to the hatch in Madeira; invade Europe. Obliterate the second peak of the mountain. With no guns.”

“How will I get him to do that? He doesn’t even remember his own birth name, he is not even aware of what has happened back in New York.”

 

“You’re a linguist, white witch and engineer. Just use your training.”

 

“Engineer, ha.”

 

“Or whatever other training you might have,” Saadiya says with a wink but not a smile.

 

 

Scene 10

Safehaus 16, 2015ce

Waltham

 

 

Adelina had been originally introduced to him first on the 12^th of April, 2012 which was also in fact her biological 26^th birthday, how auspicious. She was and is quite baby faced while strikingly attractive and slender like a modal, maybe even more than the Euro-American conception of impossible physique. She has auburn hair, but it was dyed blond in Russia while she was gone.

She lovingly smiles without much hardship, but is always a real smile coming from a place of actual enjoyment to share company with others. Her physical life span at birth was over two hundred years, but she was irradiated in Tank City, like everyone in Tank City living in a closed city near the nuclear arsenal and testing facilities.

She might have lived indefinitely in her body as it was born, but she’s actually dying slowly of cancer. Her spine has bulging disks and has developed scoliosis, though she hides the tremendous pain with mediation and constant yoga. She in the meantime has looked 17 for a decade.

Sebastian Adon had been interviewing for acceptance at Shrakasa Brandeis; you had pay your way into the camps after all; and had become a correspondence and bemused ally of her casual friend, a Ukrainian Ivoryish fashion photographer named Oleg Megved; also known playfully by his modals as Oleg the Bear, which is exactly that which his name means in Russian.

Oleg and Sebastian had met a year prior at a Gypsy Festival, called the Bohemian Festival in the borderlands between Brooklyn and Queens. Their post-soviet bromance revolved around Sebastian’s incredibly reckless pursuit of the girlfriend of a ferocious Russian businessperson named Dmitry Khulushin Koch.  A manipulative and tragic digger of gold previously mentioned named Natasha Skorbogatova. Sebastian proceeded while perusing this quite taken woman to compose upwards of sixty-four poems. However, most of them spoke more to his suffering and poverty of agency rather than any particular thing about the woman he sought to steal.

 

And shortly after the revolution called the Great Revolt in the United States began.

 

By the time she was really done, he defeated  her with him he would composed those sixty four odd poems and several hundred-page novel, though the novel too like the poems were not really about her, they were about his suffering demons and tragic  beliefs. You need to have more than five hundred American in the bank to carry off a Russian woman from a well-resourced man, even if he cracks her face once in a while with the ultra-violence. That then said this literary courtship impressed mostly Oleg Medved who took to calling Sebastian “the American Mayakovsky”, and introducing him to Boston’s many Russian women.

 

Moreover, that was how on her birthday, still very much “in love” with Natasha Skorbogatova; Sebastian met Adelina. And they began texting each other just perhaps two weeks later. Texting him daily words in Russian. Tring to educate him and get in his head.

Later, perhaps six months of texting words in Russian later, well then it was the Fall of 2013 and Sebastian Adon, in an effort to overwhelm her skepticism of any amorous or literary thing he was capable of producing.

 

He wrote her a new kind of Post-Soviet love poem; one that didn’t even cause him any suffering and he wrote for her alone, and performed it on a gaslight street corner of the Waltham Camps near Prospect Ave.

 

She beamed, and he recited;

 

“She Sometimes Amazed Me; How much!”

Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.

 

To my love: Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya

 

Every time we kiss it takes me out of this place!

And there will be more time for kisses!

Hold me fast and take my tongue from me as well as all my new found essence.

Absorb for me and let me then carry you further than ever before.

When man is submerged in the flood water of his longing,

When the rapids break the legs below him,

Voluptuous folds of over powered temptations yielding bed sheet utterances, belonging.

The desire to muster his best qualities,

His full works brought to bear for that singular woman thrust before him.

As my rough parts are made a puppy faced rabbit!

And my soul into a naked exposure,

Your hands, hips lips a flush of all endless ways to bring the winter to better closure.

And then tight ripped verse.

To chainsaw the rough cut marble of composition, to bash apart the inadequacy of poor form which might hint that all done for you was not unique.

Depart.

Comrade Blazhennaya! You sometimes amaze me how much.

Such, I shall tell you what rights mean to me, dare we be glutted, yet so cold in Babylon make plain your wishes, I will get us free!

 

I see you not judging, or hiding well judgments!

From my past escapades or the demons in me!

Not judging we! I am beyond aleaved that we is now two and has been cleaved down from three.

Yet, wet lips still spout insurrection.

They bite the tongue, I bite my tongue in only one language. And lips which once from words but strike keys into bloody history, misconception.

See the melee!

See the thrill of “to us impending victory”

She asks:

               “How many of your poems sound close to same? The want of affection of a daughter from Russia, the toll of such women, the toll of your struggle, the playing too hard of no rules at the game!”

She says:

               “Take a short blade and cut the warble off the words, trim the American vernacular down to half the size.

Surmise, drop vanity, your chornay like use of countless profanity. Make again proud form, verse you rehearse until we’re ready to perform.”

“Make language a beautiful thing!”

No instrument to bludgeon about thy demons an enemy’s down with the Winter and up with future, the coming of Spring!”

“And who,” she asks “art thou biggest enemy? Thyself-Thyself Comrade, squandering don’t you dare, stare, look in the mirror see the source of past troubles, he’s laughing at you or crying at you! Comrade take care.”

 

“Thyself if so untrue is pleasing to no one, not one single no one, not even the darkness in you,” she declare.

 

I respond; “Comrade Blazhennaya, my sweet Adelina I will moan every moment touching you and beside you render myself a smiling man with a past of no great countenance, you’re not like other woman we can’t be labeled by our continents!”

“Our consonants!”

“Most wanton. Touching you or looking through!”

“I long every day for your touch!”

She sometimes amazed me how much!

Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.

 

Scheming into dreaming, another bridge called Karlov!? I love to dream beside you, separated by nothing but desire, but happy always for the dreaming we do.

The duct tape that when I lived impoverished I used to patch my dressing shoe.

Take that blade that you were offered,

Cast that thing aside!

Seize control that vessel, bleed it red or bleed it blue.

What mean that Haitian flag to you?

 

“Talk of love or talk of sin or talk of rights;

You are too happy now to die before winter has finished setting in.”

I want nothing more or train robs, nothing more of winless fights.

“I want us to dream of ways to win!”

It’s all or nothing motherfucker! She imitates; “For a Baha’i Russo-Haitian fighting Fenian you sure still like to make your dradel spin.

 

“What’s now not haunting you ought make your words more beautiful,” she says, “No more Victor Gin.”

“And are not small beautiful moments, dreams and things, smells and tastes and landscapes also dangerous to make tunes and tomes too?” she asks.

“Are not sad barricade ballets just belligerencies to thine enemy self?”

“Do not invite fire into your home, the Victory Gin is for self-murdering men, who don’t know how to begin the sniff of a win. Onto the shelf.”

“Your guns and your bullets your lies and worthless desires of dueling with devils!

 

“DREAM CORRRECT! You command my respect, your humor in nightly visitations to Burma to Paris to Trinidad; you call that all love, your love is forever suspect!”

When I see the smile of Comrade Blazhennaya, I know her as a plural woman.

I profess her my longing and I take her commands.

A woman who like I is disconnected from aspects of realty so she might better love the place where she lands.

A pause again, cheers to now and cheers to never again; might never loving trysts rip out hearts asunder, might never ideals take needless lives, cost rivers red of blood, denying life all grace or wonder.

I cheers to total truthfulness, a pause’ I’LL SEE YOU; WHEN?

Again and Again and Again.

I speak freely before you, I dare.

Until fireworks over Bagan’s skies are but a symphony of promises kept to me and you, and Blood red balloons of the Banshee insurrection not a spark compare.

She asks:

“What for then comrade! When you kiss my lips and write your poems on the softness of my stare; what is you’ve set yourself to do?”

 

“If you promise we, or the entire Breuklyn Soviet our liberation true then mark my words your words will return to stab a blade in you, and dash yourself and burn apart for the emptiness of the promises you sew.”

My hand overtakes her finger, her hand on the clutch.

She sometimes amazed me how much!

Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.

How much she knew my heart and yearned to know the plots of my soul. And perhaps I could amaze her too, not with all the adventures to come or the tall orders of deeds I had promised her and the world I could do,

I say.

“Just remain by my side and all of the happy you put on to me, I’ll reflect it actions right back on to you.”

 

Fini.

 

She smiled and smiled and smiled, and we kissed and kissed and kissed; and when her Red kiawagon tumbled off in sputters into the night back to the settlements on the Brighton-Alston line, I loved her and missed her immediately though we would dream together every night for nearly two years. Yes, doubt my claims to love, but I did love her and she did me under impossible conditions!

 

But woe is me, for I have said such things before to many lesser women.

 

 

Scene 11

266 Bigmar Street, 2015ce

Charlestown

 

 

Everyone up the mountain wanted to know what had happened in Charlestown; wanted to know if their name was now in the hands of the terrorists. Wanted to know and couldn’t seem to get the answer; was the hatch compromised? Did the rebels know about the train up the mountain to London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow? You need another train for Beijing. The rails are just different.

Dmitry had dealt with Adon and his ilk for years. You never knew what you were dealing with for the man was/ is a lunatic; he was simply not grounded in this realty. The reality of the way things ‘actually are’.

They had served in the Frontier Calvary together for two years. They had been unlikely but rather seemingly chummy friends for before Adon become a Muslim, or releveled himself to be a Muslim; he was hard drinking, womanizing Calvary Officer.

We digress, what the fuck happened in Charlestown on the afternoon of 28 May, 2015?

Sebastian Adon, wearing a grey battle dress multiform, and a weathered brown leather jacket parked his grey charger mod in the mostly empty parking lot. It was just before dawn and snow fall was light for late May; light for the fact that it almost never ever stopped snowing in Greater Boston, it had been like that for as long as anyone could remember. The charger steamed in the tundra of the warehouse district and many people were watching this dawn raid, though none could be immediately seen. And there was urgency, it was in the air.

Urgency looks mostly like smoke.

On a small red pad was an address and a room number and he had hardly taken an indirect route. He was about to barge into 266 Bigmar Street, into a multi-site warehouse which housed thirty to forty shell companies and trucking firm; barge right into a front company called Solutions Comprehensive LTD; and planned to shoot Ilya Lubov in the face. It was the very early morning of 28 May, 2017 Gregorian; or common era as is normally marked. It was also AR 5; five years since the uprising began in New York. It was two years since the bloody murderous chaos of the Millennium hostage crisis. It was 48 hours since the founding Congress of the Development Union; it was just one day since Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya messaged him; “I’m back.”

According to Adelina’s friend Lana, Addy was strung up in that warehouse. And Ilya Lubov was thus a dead man. Sebastian Adon, in his own mind alone was carrying a .45 automatic repeater. In his deranged mind he was about to violate primary standing order #1; do not take human life and primary standing order # 2; do not destroy property; because in his mind, his mind alone right now union members and affiliates were positioning truck mounted artillery launchers in the hills around district Charlestown, and on his signal, they’d light the whole vile traffic point up.

But in reality the gun he grabbed was empty air! He gripped nothingness, firmly. The forty fighters thought to have his literal, lateral back, there were none. None at all. The death trap toward which he was barging, was fully loaded.

No one stopped him in the perimeter, though a bead was on him since he got out the car. Which did transform in the eyes of all other beholders from a Grey modified Charger; to dinged up puny Honda Civic. The district was eerie and silent at this hour, 05:04. This was a place of whores and truckers, bunkers and tunnels and spies.

 

He made it into the dim lobby the front doors were not even locked and the buzz board had the listings of dozens of fiction based and highly questionable compiles; there was what he wanted ‘Solutions Comprehensive Limited’; on the fourth floor, but probably anywhere. No one had mopped the floors in a decade.

It was all just a shell, just a cheaply lit cover story for nefarious transactions. Did anyone even actually believe that it was a real business, which ‘real’ things happened in this barely warmed ghost town called Charlestown? All these trucks coming and going from the ship yards, all these containers on these trucks. What was in them? No one ever asked certainly not the Boston police department, in the pocket of the Fenian Mob. When your circle of existence is small, you never know the names of the underbosses. You never wonder what’s in the trucks.

And the answer was that mostly banal things were in the trucks. Consumer goods, agricultural products. Women sometimes, but really that wasn’t anyway to get a woman you planned to work the bed on a contract into the country.

You just paid for her to come and married her off to someone. That was more cost effective then getting caught somehow with dead hooker asphyxiated in a shipping container. Solutions Comprehensive, according to the website was a tech support maven & global supply chain logistics fixer. Big words to say nothing. Sebastian tries to find the floor and office, but the place isn’t really designed for anyone to find anything.

 

He just pushes it all along, follows long poorly lit hall ways past big locked doors. He walks a very long time, covers three floors it seems, the lights flicker. This place is built to deft perceptions. His hear is beating faster. Where is she hidden?

A man put his hand on Adon’s shoulder, makes him jump. The man is an Fenian foreman dressed in coverall, he has a thick brogue.

“Eh, whatya looking for lost?” he asks.

“Sorry, looking for Solutions Comprehensive.”

“Eh, well I know thinking yer lost.”

“I’m sure it’s at this address.”

“I’m the superintendent, I know every nook. I don’t know any Solutions Comprehensive paying to lodge here.”

“The super?”

“Super.”

Adon takes out a smart phone and shows the man the site. The man nods.

“I think ya have the wrong building, brother.”

“This is the only building on the whole block.”

“Above the block yes, but what about below and beside the block. It’s a tricky area. People are lost all the time. Trespassing by accident on the turf of the others..”

“You’ve never seen this man,” and Adon shows the super a picture of Ilya Lubov.

“Never seen that bald bustard.”

“He’s a very bad man.”

“Is it?”

“I’m gonna kill him.”

“Eh now, listen, ya can’t say things like that here, no kills here.”

“He’s holding my baby’s mother hostage in a blue duffel bag.”

“Is it? And yer here to find her, and subsequently kill him; in this very building?”

“I know she’s here.”

Tricky fucking Fenians.

“Maybe she is, but I never seen that man, never seen the blue duffel, on this floor anyway.”

“What’s your name, brother?”

“I’m called, Ian Murphy, Superindenant of facilities, card check time then is it?”

“Card check away.”

And Ian Murphy hands him a green badge which identifies himself as Ian Murphy O’Grady O’Connell McMurphy, Superendeant of facilities, Teamsters Local 240. And Adon hands over a blue card which identifies him as Walter Sebastian Adler, paramedic, Uniformed EMT & Paramedic Union, Local 2507.

He then takes this all more seriously.

“And ya have no front teeth then?” Ian asks.

“The rumors are mostly true.”

“Is it true you once murdered forty men with a ball pin hammer?”

“No, that’s not true.”

“Is it true you decapitate and then drink the blood of Slavic prostitutes?”

“Not true, slander even!”

“Hm. Well, Mr. Adler. Should I call you Ilya Lubov today then?”

“Yes, that will do.”

“Welcome to your new office, sir, looking for a big blue bag with a young Russian girl inside it then are we, at Comprehensive Solutions?”
“Yes, that is what I’m looking for.”

 

“You seek a Russian girl in a blue bag, bound and naked?”

“Well I have no idea. I just know she’s here. I know she’s in the office.”

“I have to make a quick phone call, I need to check in.”

“We’re still good? You and I?”

“Oh yes, pull out your teeth a second,”

And Adon drops out his tree front teeth with his tongue.”

“Thick with madness, its maybe really you.”

“You can never know a gift horse, but to look it in the mouth, old Russian saying.”

“Mr., eh-hm, Lubov, we all know that isn’t an Old Russian saying at all,” he says with a cheeky Fenian grin.

Ian Murphy takes out a clunky phone to call the Secret police.

Sebastian Adon takes out a mobile phone to call the regular, normal person Boston Police and they both make the calls reporting suspicious behavior in the warehouse, give a precise location and ignore each other and put down the phones.

 

Adon notes, the battery on his phone is suddenly only 2%.

 

Ian McMurphy he puts down his phone, as if one hold, “You should go, you’re in imposter. Place will be flooded with the constables soon, ya ain’t gonna get out alive, not that ya care, but the girl might care, the one in the big blue bag.”

“Listen to me Finnegan, where the fuck is she?”

“Haven’t the foggiest. You’re a trespassing deranged EDP,” he then whispers, “take fucking salt and go to sleep, or they’ll get unruly on the Gulliver, put you down again.”

“Ok. I’m going to shoot you in the heart in you don’t tell me where she is,” I say and take out a make believe invisible gun.”

 

“You know you’ve got nothing in your hand man, you’re in a world of psychotic make believe, dancing a mad jig on a hatch way to the other side.”

 

“Is that even a real brogue, or do you put that thing on to get chicks cause you’re ugly,” I ask him putting my inviable, invisible blaster to his chest.

 

 

 

 

Scene 12

266 Bigmar Street, 2015ce

Charlestown

 

“The rain in Spain is mostly Champaign,” Ilya Lubov says.

 

I tell him he’s a dead man and he won’t leave this room alive. So many break out a gun and the and hurt him bad, rearrange his ugly Russian Ivory hybrid bald disgusting face.

Nonviolence can suck my cock. Stupid nonviolence I’ll break your ugly face too!!

 

The dull wet noise of fists on his face. Did I even flinch? I hate him so damn much.  So I forget nonviolence and keep trying to kill him, as hard as I can, this vile rat won’t die. The best I can do is murder the biological host.

 

I’ve dealt with these demons before, for I am one. Everything is bleak and disempowering, everything is useless. I continue to beat him and I hear the thud and rupture of shells comin down outside. I guess Roj called in the air strike. I guess I don’t have much time with this snake.

 

Of all the pain and humiliation I have suffered in this life and all the ones before it, all the snuff and torment. It’s worse that they wipe me, they make me forget, they manipulate me into doing things I didn’t agree to, Emma and the oligarchy both; they prey on my immortality.

 

But I’m awake now! Bombs are lighting of outside I can feel it. Roj has ordered artillery strikes to level this township

 

You bald snake, you yellow rat bastard ! And I threw myself upon him, I fly tackled him and brought the butt of my gun to his face, frack!

 

His desk was kicked over and his papers his useless front papers covered in dust got a coat of blood from his oozing Gulliver.

 

Fwack! I brought the barrel down again and Ian Murphy must’ve just excused himself, kept out. I beat Ilyas face with my fiats and the gun, the dead thudding of cracking open his face, sitting on his chest brainy him to death. Could you even really kill these animals? Wasn’t that too good. Too easy.

 

Sometimes, when I’m killing or I’m saving at a high enough intensity I can remove myself from linear time into some hyperzen, it’s actually not very different muscle memory patterns I use to murder people or save lives. I am sad to I f……………………

 

 

 

Scene 13

High Tower Complex, 2015ce

Isle of Man

 

 

So, that little red flashing light on the starlight map on my smart top; it tells me that serfs are storming the hatchway in Charlestown, pushing the line demonstrating that my associate Ilya Lubov has lost control of his section, that the serfs might seize a train or compromise the hatch or worse still march an army through it toward Moscow.

 

My name is Dmitry Khulushin Koch, the real one, the darkest little prince; 2,000 years an Oligarch. I have dirty blond hair and smug un-aging grin. My father is one of the Upper Oligarchs of the Pan-American sectors and the East Siberian plain. I once won the city of New York in a card game, then lost most of it to fucking niggers and communists. Sometimes I am unsure if I live in the last ‘free’ city on earth, or rather I live free in earth’s last real city.

 

By that I mean such a violence has over taken us, such a clear and present danger to the power centers that maintain the global core; the inner 46 zones are threatened. I say “free” not like the commies do, free to do what I want to whomever I want, now that the war is declared.

“Let me begin this yarn by telling you something about my little rugged feudal homeland that the local leaders like to call the Big Apple, the control room of the rest of the country even still. First, let it be said that a small place one has rarely left seems like a big place, a central place, a world of mythology springs from it, one’s first love is always the best love, if one never had the opportunity to love after.”

 

The place we, in the inner locust circle; myself, Khan, Brera and Perchevney; the call the ‘Republic of Man’ is something of an island on a hill, a mountain fortress we disguise with holograms and such; but made so not necessarily by virtue of being surrounded by the sea. It has only two major adversarial population centers on two colliding sheaths of rock we call the North and the South Isthmus: ‘Isle of Man’ on the North Isthmus which in hologram looks like it has a very large harbor, but few seaworthy boats as all the water has been cluttered with increasing multitudes of various war machines; if we turned the illusion off the Isle of Man would be 64.2 kilometers sharply above sea level; the third highest point on the mountain of the Core. It has very tall wrought iron buildings, but no respectable jobs: everyone is some kind of serf or some kind of prostitute, or overlord to service. It is built on a sloping monstrous hill where all the richest citizens congregate near the top, right under heaven but never, ever touching it and still even in those heights the rich need air purifiers. On the South Isthmus, which is much lower to the water and much-much larger is the city of Breuklyn, or the Breuklyn Soviet depending on parlance of tabloid of faction. A micro-republic with two sectors Breuklyn Soviet to the South shore and Goddess (once Queens) Soviet on the North Shore; they both absorbed part of the rest of Strong Island out all the way East to the anti-nuclear defense facility in Montauk, and the hatch there to Space Dirigible 718; one of the largest crafts.

 

This is a place largely populated by the non-white Ivories, Noires and Chornay which are known for hording gold, stealing cars and copious amounts of handgun violence, as well as worshipping all the incorrect old deities. There is deep and heavily mined valley in between the two cities and the toll of the single bridge between them is very high. It appears due to hologram that there are many bridges and that the Isle of Man is level to the Breuklyn Soviet; but that is again an illusion. It is impossible to get across the bridge without the proper papers, and completely impossible to cross the shield Wall on Wall Street without six degrees of multipass on your mobilblat and a UAS approved pass card.

It is perhaps incorrect to describe our micro nations as two grinding, mountainous Isthmuses connected by a single bridge; there’s those by the water, living in six story bunkered poverty like cock roaches and us like gods in great towers. An Isthmus geographically connotes a narrow winding land corridor between two larger land masses. So called North Isthmus certainly is just a small mountainous island of indiscernible size made highly vertical by towers of glass and steel. South Isthmus is certainly a considerably larger island: called Strong Island; one could say is quite long. Both islands are surrounded by sand, not by water so to call it a sea or even an island is a misnomer. Grey rock drops off into red sand. There was once a great ocean, but like many other things: it dried up.

The hologram allows the serfs to imagine that seamless travel is possible to all parts of the United States of America; but that is not true. They go where we direct them. The “Manhattan” of “Brooklyn” they see is just a mind game.

Our historians sometimes say that the calling of the two departments Isthmuses was a play upon the idea that at one time the North Island was very prosperous and highly connected to the world of the future, while the South Island was connected deeply with the old world, the old country and the forgotten past. So in truth, neither was a proper Island lacking water, nor were either truly an isthmus because they were equally isolated connected to nothing, but in a country where only 5% of the population can truly read, well such nuances are truly lost to the rubbish bin of words used correctly.

As said, the United American States is 87% of the territory of the old USA; which crumbed out of being in 2012; the Republic of Man, nominally part of the New York State plantation is based in a land of high of mountains and deep sand. Roughly 100 hours’ worth going easterly from either city and the wanderer will encounter a very high steel and concrete wall cutting the south Isthmus into the Administrative Department of Breukland Soviet, independent and isolated now for three years; and presumably over the wall some worse and treacherous place. There are no gates in the wall, and it is to be thirty bistouries high. There are also many landmines and un-exploded bacteria crystal bomblettes. The only thing I know for certain is that to the west there are mountains and a vast and impassible desert, and to the east over more mountains a very high and completely impassible wall. And then it’s all plantations and suburbs and factories and prisons; I fly over it sometimes to reach the other citadels.

Our leaders zealously fortified the boarder against our enemies in the “Republic of Brooklyn” which presumably lies over the wall to the East. Our people and the Brooklynites, Brookynians, or perhaps “Brooklyneers”: it changes within our three newspapers periodically as well as nearly interchangeably; well we and they were at war for a very, very long time. Before terrible shortages of just about rumored everything began to drain our once proud nations’ resolve generation after generation of our youth will be sent to engage in large scale, bloody and always indecisive skirmishes with Brooklyneer youth over the borderlands between the two states of being; there are 13 such breakaway zones and we have been unable to crush them; they seceded in 2012, the Separatist Wars went until 2016; there was almost a nuclear exchange and a boat load of terrorist attacks.

Our leaders never attempted, and our history books never explained why we were always killing each other, humans I mean; but there are many credible rumors on the subject largely related to theft of women, also the eating of pigs. Back when there were pigs. Which taste like people, so we eat people now cooked to look like old pigs, oh well.

I have never met a “Brooklyneer” I liked, and I only seen a picture of a “pig”, but once a very old man, a veteran of the thousand year war, or at least the very end of it gave a lecture at the local canteen about when the ‘Former Great Space Powers’ decided to help us build the mile high wall.

He had told us, in between shots of Parv Blue Label and long swig swells of Barlakh, that roughly a generation or two before his time there was something called the “Roman Empire” and they were a very powerful empire and we were one of their most important economic satellites; then called the Empire State. An outpost really. Maybe a rich city-state on the border. The “People’s Republic of Han” was another great Empire, far larger in population, also apparently handier with crafts and known for their sly looking ‘chinky eyes’, whatever that meant. The “Republic of Brooklyn” then called a “borough” was their landing point of invasion, their beachhead in the UAS or occupied whatever. There was also a rival hegemon called Eurasia; or the “Russian Federation”. Sometimes I let these drunks old men try and process reality, then I’d drain them of their blood.

We Slavs were poorly understood until we shed rhetorical socialism and conquered Europe. Except for the rogue elements like Putin and Navalny who want to bring the USSR back!

For a very long time apparently both the People’s Republic in East Asia and the Russian Federation helped pay for us to be at civil war with what conceivably had once been our own people living in occupied Brooklyn, so that they wouldn’t have to fight a far more costly war with each other, they being the States United and the hordes of Eurasia. And that’s about the extent of what the old man at the bar had known.

I am not interested in politics; I am into cars and rape.

Oh, and at some point “peace” became briefly fashionable so the Han, who the proles call the Chinese helped the Brooklyn separatists constructed a very, very tall wall between our small micro-Republics and that was all before the known world imploded and we took our local leaders very, very seriously.

The Administrative Departments of Brooklyn and Queens had, until 2012, an official census population of roughly 8 million subjects; 7.8 million are serfs who could leave their masters land some several hundred thousand are mulattos, they are some part Chornay but are land holders, card carriers and have valid points of the multi-pass. Across the bridge in there were Administrative Department of Man there are 2 million free citizens, and no Chornay except as house slaves.

Here a man can be a man, they say.

My mother, a Russian Slav of Kazakhstan said you can always tell a Chornay because he neither prays correctly, nor looks symmetrical physically. My hair is very blond and my skin is very white, so I know I look correct, and I pray to the one true god Jesus King of Christ, orthodoxly so I know my religion is the right religion, wink.

The Republic of Man is very logical actually, and it has to be being perhaps the only true free city left on earth, I keep saying that because Han Oligarchs and Slav Oligarchs have imposed strange systems that make doing business hard. There are now many new small wars waging far and near because of the competition of the great firms within the three power-bloc. I have not ever been anywhere else on earth besides the mountain tops, once Mexico; but this is what our leaders tell us our free press. The higher one lives on the hill of man, the more one has contributed to things surviving efficiently around here. The biggest contributors are the financial planners, medical scientists, the law-makers, the magnates and the senators. They all live high up above the Financial District, the Mid Towns, the Park and the Sides; one side for white Ivories one side for white protestants and above the labor reserve pools of Harlem and Washington Heights and certainly very high above Breukland in a pleasure castle called Fort Washington Acropolis; the Citadel. The more Chornay you are the lower on the land you live, the closer ultimately to the security wall and the sea and the terrible raping, murdering hordes of Brooklyn that if not for out hydrogen bombs and bacteria cluster rockets would surely storm the wall and kill everyone. So we’re told.

 

It is mostly terra-drones that go in to fight the rebels. As it should be. In 2016 there was an incident in the Isle of Man called the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis; in a newly opened hippodrome showing the Opera Carmen; rebel gunmen took the lesser cream of our city hostage along with thousands of international heads of state at the UN General Assembly. It degenerated into a blood bath; many foreign leaders and great local lesser oligarchs perished.

 

While it has been said the terrorist leaders Adon and Solomon were killed, I know that not to be true. I also know the Persian Revolutionary Guard Corps furnished them with intermediate range thermos nuclear warheads and we only gave independence to the 13 separatist zones because they nuked Washington DC, yes indeed they did.

 

A tumultuous couple of years.

That was the decisive moment in the three year war, when we could no longer kill Brooklyneers indiscriminately largely using bacteria crystals and robots. Or perhaps it was only a thousand days. New metrics have been introduced clarifying old fallacies of Gregorian time. The latest multi-dimensional poverty index assures us that Africa’s average 33 year average life span is far ahead of the international curve; even though there is now longer a UN we still try and measure things in their rhetoric.

Our minds have certainly expanded since those primitive days of globalization when our leaders had though the world was getting smaller. And for some reason flat.

So there you have it, my micro-country, and my brave little world. And it belongs to me! Perchevney lost in a card game in 1998.  The Senate has announced that comparative productivity is up, vice is down, serfs are happy, Mulattos are quiet about their political ambitions and Blan on Chornay violence is down from last year. And human rights indictors in all sectors show our sustained societal progress.

 

Aided by high science, bacteria crystals and hydrogen bombs there have been no skirmishes with the People’s Republic of Brooklyn in nearly six years.

 

 

 

Scene 14

Box Night Club on Christie Street, 2015ce

Isle of Man

 

 

The Box Night Club, on Essex Street still in the United American States. Enter Siegfried Sassoon, a Cuban Actor who reads alone aloud on a dark and smoky stage from a ZOB Pamphlet, distributed circa 2012ce. The drunken Bankers, the new money the celbritards are all under the influence, and he’s supposed to insert a large onyx dildo into two twins dressed like maids, that’s the “scene”. But the curtain comes up, and there are two young girls, from Eastern Europe.

 

And he drops the dildo to the stage, out of his back pocket he pulls out a widely circulating pamphlet, and he reads:

 

 

“The Enemy of Human Rights & Development is called the Oligarchy!”
The Enemy of Human Rights and enemy of the people is a disciplined, and vicious network of elites. No matter what nation we are referring to, we refer back to these elites as local branch of a Global Oligarchy.
They are our certain enemy and the enemy of humanity generally.
Learn the word for it is what we call our abject opponents and should always be used appropriately and with discerning discipline.
At all times they empower themselves at our expense and exacerbate the high crimes and violations caused by the more powerful oligarchies and highly entrenched elite in each nation. While these are numerous mass human rights violations of our day, all Human Rights categories and entitlements under attack in every nation on earth.
Questioning the source of our misery and combatting the resulting mass poverty like we were in fact waging a people’s war for the survival of vast segments of our human kind is the core of our methodology.
Our enemy, once again, is called the Oligarchy.

 

A transnational global elite that not only controls supply routes and natural resources; they affect all of the inequity of distribution that so perpetuate poverty.
They do so completely selfishly and with little to no common ground other than their total greed. They share no creed, color, ideology of belief. They simply are united in their excessive and wanton power.

 

And what it, they, perpetuate is the exact mass poverty that is greatest killer of the poor and three quarters of the human species that has ever existed.

 

Our enemy is the Oligarchy and resistance to it must be strengthened in every nation. We cannot measure human progress in narrow and banal economic terms. We are far more than numbers. Statistics of productive workers learning to read and having our children survive birth. More than wage slaves or chattel slaves. Human progress to the Oligarchy is about securing their position indefinitely at the expense of the rest of humanity. Sustaining our productivity measuring our world in GNP, infant mortality, and literacy.
We demand the fifty eight human rights entitlements as ours to be enforced and safeguarded just as our baseline measure of that thing called freedom.
Our demands are not only directed at the U.N., NGO’s, or political leaders of Hegemons.

 

Beijing, Washington, Moscow and Berlin.
These are not the only seats of their power. There is an aristocracy in every ghetto, a kingship of every slum and of course bosses on every plantation, camp and factory.
They have everything to lose because they have mostly everything in their possession and we are asked to give our lives to get them even and ever more. This is not just an indictment of the wealthy and insatiable. This is about organized traffic of slaves, guns and narcotics. The manufacturing of genocide and war. This is about competing power centers, perhaps thousands of Oligarchies that all functioning without coordination will eradicate us.
And many of them are completely insatiable.
There are those that ought to be tried as war criminals under the standards of the International Criminal Court. There are other that are just mega-criminals. What makes an Oligarch part of this Oligarchy is not only his or her sheer power over the lives of regular people, the masses. Us. It also involves to what degree do they violate our rights or turn us into a productive or profitable resource. A slave, a wage worker or an uneducated consumer!

 

 

Exit Siegfried Sassoon, to a nervous applause, if any.

 

Surely someone has already called the secret police, if they are not already here. There were no tits! No Jazz and no tits, no evil sex monkeys? What kind of performance was this to be!

 

A bouncer he knows James Brown, a big black cat of a fellow, James tells him he had better go out the back door and ‘run for his life’. So foolish to pick convictions over tits and cash and work. I would never, ever do that, thinks James Brown.

 

 

 

Scene 15

Highway I95 near Newton, 2015ce

Massachusetts

 

 

The Interstate 95 Highway, barely visible due to heavy snow falling upon us! A weigh station on the road South to New York, the City of Many Many Lights. Enter Oleg the Bear, Sebastian Adon, Yulia Romanova and Adelina Blazhennaya running from a hail of law man bullets! Bang! Bang Bang! RATATATATATTATTRTATTATATTATATATATATATATATTATATTA! RATATATATATTA.

 

Thinks Sebastian:

 

Everything was on fire and my ears were ringing. I could smell black smoke of our vehicle on fire struck by the rocket from a drone.

It did not take us very long to get noticed. It occurred at rest stop in Konnecticut. For all the bribes that had been paid to allow the four of us to depart in certain quiet, sometimes you miss something critical, like an outdated registration on the vehicle. Or, an expired Easy Pass.

 

And then a gun battle erupted in that weigh station, between the broken glass of the McDonalds, the spilled coffee of screaming patrons fleeing and everyone got separated. Yulia pulled Adelina under a car to hide and Oleg the Bear and the local police shot it out for a bit, until Oleg’s gun ran out. Adon didn’t have his gun.

 

Thinks Sebastian:

 

The two local cops unloaded their shooters on our position and we were unable to see where the women went to.

 

The sirens were very loud, the terror sirens that go off when accused terrorists are doing anything, and Oleg and I are running into the woods. He’s limping like he took one, but that doesn’t slow him down much.

I’ve gotten slower, I used to move so fast when shot at back in Palestine. I don’t have my gun, Adelina took it, blast! Where are the women? It doesn’t really matter now. I’ve seen this before, I can’t seem to escape from these camps! We get pinned down, Oleg runs out of bullets. The Secret Police, the department of homeland security show up. We run through the woods for a while. I’ve been smoking for two years in the camps and I can’t run like I used to.

All that talk, all those bribes, it didn’t matter. They catch us using helicopters and drones and flood lights.

 

We’re both pinned down somewhere out in the woods.

But, we die on our feet not our knees! Little consolation really.

 

The bodies of the four “Red” terrorists are displayed on all the leading channels of the evening news.

 

Exit Sebastian, Oleg, Adelina and Yulia too from this version, this episode of the world. I was killed several hundred times in this way, sometimes in cars, sometimes in planes, sometimes shot to pieces, sometimes burned alive, sometimes lost lonely and lethal she tried hard to keep me together, keep us together, but I always came back and she was there waiting. What a keeper.

 

 

Scene 16

Sheffield, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

The Woods of Konnecticut, near Sheffield stand thick and green even in this wild winter. Enter Nicholai Mapfre, a film maker from the South roads via modest Zip Car. Enter Adelina Blazhennaya, a Russian linguist, from the North. Enter the brothers Eric and Joseph Ruhelman, Franco-German bikers, from the West near Buffalo. The first unit was lost, but the body of Adon is still warm.

 

Nicholai Mapfre, who has sleek straight black hair like the beautiful mutt that he is had to zip-rent a car under a fictitious identity and drive three hours into the plantations of tobacco country Konnecticut due to a misunderstanding about the pick-up as well as the state of comings and goings. His contacts in the underground told him the Israeli team were all killed.  The pickup was the corpse of Sebastian Adon. The year was 2015, and the revolution, the union, the events you may or may not have read of had and hadn’t all happened yet. You see reality, is not like a corpse. It doesn’t need to be bagged and tagged. It happens for different people at different times. The body was warm, and it needed to be because the South bound car dispatched because of the confusion around to whom the body should go needed to be resurrected by a sorcerous so she could testify on what it saw.

We are not banal, pale monotheistic Christians, so we do not live in the reality of black unchangeable static metaphor. Sebastian Adon died when bullets stopped his running, and then when electric currents stopped his heart. He was tied to a gurney and they were giving him the juice as per protocols. But with a kiss and bottle of vodka that corpse could tell many things to us. So Nicholai sped Northbound and Adelina sped Southbound, and she hated him so much now because he had betrayed her so many times before he died. In ways that made her livid to breathe him again.

Everyone was now dead. Everyone that have ever known him had been put to death in the jealous rage of young Oligarchs Ilya and Dmitry. Also Laurence Koch. Nicholai Mapfre was alive because he had never joined the union and mostly stayed out of Adon’s cell records for ten years. Adelina was alive because she had the power of a coy young god. And Ilya wanted her badly back for fuck and conquest. So badly he cracked her jaw and Sebastian had changed the color of the sky above the City State of Boston.

He’d ordered Charlestown razed and rocketed into the ground and fire dust, simply because Ilya worked there. That was just 45 days ago. 41 if you counted the interruption of the Bangladeshi Wedding.

The Franco-German Ruhlmann Brothers had paid 9K in bribes to steal the body and switch it out with the body of a homeless lune from Buffalo, NY. They didn’t affiliate with anybody but Princess Akhtar, the newly Muslim wed where they’d shared a table and rounds of juice with Adon, a day before his second capture. But, we’re jumping around too much. Too many names and places and you were raised on TV. It’s impressive you’ve even reading this. Words are so boring.

On 28 May, Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya returned from Moscow. The day after the ZOB came out from fifteen years of the underground and formed a trade union with about eighty other delegates from dozens of international partisan groups. What did the ZOB stand for, shut up, say the Ruhlmann Brothers; Eric and Joseph. Eric is dark and Joseph is more Nordic looking. That guy Adon was a dead man. And had we not been well paid and respected his general odd character we would not have converged with our muscles, Catholic icon tattoos and fast cars to steal a dead Ivory, excuse me, a half Hebrew, half German Fenian terrorist.

 

The sky was still black above Boston.

Thousands; almost a ten of thousands had died over one strike to the face of Adelina. Ilya slapped her when she walked home with a bag of groceries Adon had bought her, that was one story. Adon moved her out. He tucked her into bed. He had every reservist called up by the 29^th rockets blew away Charlestown with everyone in it. Ilya lost three days earnings and a hand and an ear. Most of the camps around Boston were put to flames by the serfs. This was not the old Adon, the peaceful-nik. He killed a small City over one hair on the head of his intended.

Intended? Yes, Adon had long proclaimed he would marry the high priestess Adelina Blazhennaya, but they had been separated by Moscow. By Moscow? Yes, but Moscow she had fled for Moscow after witnessing so many things she could not explain in Hispaniola, in Haiti the heart of so much darkness and raw ambition.

Well it was 17 July now. 45 days later. The Akhtars were married and on second honey moon. Charlestown was a crater. Ilya was missing an ear and a hand. Adon had been brutally tortured, and was evidently now dead. That’s what the certificates said. Nick was speeding, except until Konnecticut; Northbound. And Adelina was speeding, except in Konnecticut South. And Kudzai Chikwamba was back in Sharashka Waltham because he was too black to bring anywhere. You’d get pulled over driving the actual speed limit. But of course Kudzai, being a believer in the prophesy was a supporter of the companions of Adon.

 

And Adon, well he was quite dead.

 

So the Ruhlmann Brothers stole the body. And Nick brought a video Camera, and Adelina in deep wooded hide away poured the Vodka over the corpse. Reached her hand into his chest via the mouth and pulled out a black, black heart. It was still, then it was again ticking. And she wound a small lever upon it. And miraculously the bullets feel out of his body. And she quickly, quietly made the three men turn away and she kissed him. And he came again to life, his 14^th incarnation.

 

“You bastard,” is all she said, in Russian, “You cheat.”

The dead man Adon, he may have blushed.

 

 

 

Scene 17

Camp Stafford Springs, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

They all sat there wondering what this man could possibly know that made him so valuable that were running around this tobacco ginger bread village country waiting for him. And, yes Adelina Blazhennaya, the daughter of messiahs could answer that. The ‘there’ was firstly, the nifty trick that Adon didn’t die as other men did, he became reborn with only some tinkering and his corpse no matter what degree of harm came to it; reformed, slightly overweight and slightly burned yes, but a knock around guy who doesn’t die was hard to come by. More importantly he possessed a certain more interesting trait. He drew people to him how were awake and had their own Allah given abilities.  And doggedly, sometimes with guns sometimes with speeches he had for over 4,000 years been protecting the bloodline of the prophesy.

 

The bloodline of prophets, messiahs, high priestesses and the Mahdi; Emma Solomon. Now, this was a dying reality. The Great Revolt had not happened. The Union had gathered great partisan factions, then inadvertedly set them all up to die. Or be assassinated as Ilya and Dmitry had ordered and ordained. That meant, that in protecting Adelina, his intended wife’s honor he had finally incurred the wrath of oligarchs he couldn’t give a heart attack to. Whose money wasn’t tied up in the burned out semis and blackened sky above Boston. He had fallen for a Queen Helen; he’d burned out all his closest allies over a woman.

 

Wouldn’t probably be the first time. Just the most self-destructive time.

 

“Not, because I was in danger, or because he had to, because he slipped up,” Adelina reminded the camera being welded to the moment by Nick Mafre, rather Nicholai Mapfre Bruckman, the last living friend of Sebastian Adon. They had even captured the Bear Ivory Alan Oleg Medved. And cut him into little tiny pieces to feed to dogs. He couldn’t talk or fight his way out of that one. Because Adelina was way more than a friend and the Princess Akhtar was the Princess Akhtar; royalty. You couldn’t be friends with superior species. You could be rooted for and root for them back; fighting!!

“You fucked up chicken, and you just got fried like suicide,” notes Joseph Ruhlmann the big French German Viking with both arms tatted.

“They even got to your man Mickhi Dbrisk,” noted Adelina.

Sebastian just assumes that cannot be true.

Sebastian flinched, his life energy moving throughout the body the Buffalo boys had stolen and Nicholai was filming and Adelina had turned her back to.

“Will she ignore me forever, or just for all of this life?” Sebastian asked Joseph.

“The words that Princess Meftahul Janaat S Akhtar Khan told us; you’re the best killer the world has ever seen, the gunslinger of Tel Aviv and Be’er Sheva. She’s the daughter of an imprisoned high priestess. And since your so called ex-wife Emma Solomon is dead, and Avinadav is dead; well the candidacy for savior is nigh. And we’re Catholics so we get behind Miracles when we see them,” states Eric R.

“Indeed,” reverberates Joseph.

“Is anyone paying anyone to be here?” Nick asks.

“My brother and I were paid by the Akhtars to be here, but since home boy came back to life and the birds above us circle above Adelina, we’re here to learn,” says Eric who has a black brown beard and a picture of what could be the Virgin Mary, or could be the whore of Babylon, or could be Adelina Blazhennaya shifting eerily on his right forearm.

“Your tattoo is moving,” says Joseph.

“I can hear you think man,” states Adelina, “I’m no whore.”

“Well how now new friends, what are we doing out here supposedly so hunted in Tobacco country?” asks big blond Joseph R.

“Wait for it,” says Sebastian.

“What?” asks Nick Mapfre the tragic little filmmaker?

“Now we are five, but soon we will be forty,” Sebastian says.

“The dead man talks in useless riddles,” says Eric.

“Wait for it. Wait. Now.”

Out of the thick green bush erupted men on all sides with hatchets. Ugly toad like men. Planters sent on a scavenger hunt for five heads. Four marks and one young brunette slim lustful capture. ‘Do what you want to the men, lottery tickets for all hacks!’ had smart phoned in Ilya. ‘You bring me the brundinite young lady, unmolested if possible, but things happen in a hack fest I can’t control. One million a body, 10 million for the girl alive,’ these were the orders than sent all forty of Dany McFadden’s planters, hookers, hangers and bangers into the woods with their hatchets to flay four and take one sexy, young, auspicious prisoner.

“Blat,” was all Adelina said.

The Ruhlmann brothers drew their side pieces and mentally counted the bullets in the clips and chambers. Sebastian, who was not fully here yet drew his index fingers out like pistols.

“Wait for it,” he repeated.

The grim mob moved in, but as the lesser, lower base prophet JZ says, ‘what’s a babe to mob, what’s a mob to a king, what’s a king to a god, what’s a god to a pack of non-believers, who don’t believe in anything, make it out alive!!’

“Make it out alive,” Adelina whispers as the hatchet men move in and the Ruhlmann brothers get the itchy to pump clips. And Sebastian looks looking crazy and Nick just keeps filming.

“Make it out alive,” and suddenly plant roots shoot up to hold their paid assailants in place.

“Don’t waste you led fair escorts, brothers Ruhlmann, Sebastian; hold fire.”

“The roots squeeze them until they tangle above shoulder level all forty bandits. She seems to guiding the roots with her hand.”

“A second most auspicious miracle,” notes Nick Mapfre. Three to be a saint, four to be a martyr and five or more; the Tzadikk ha Dror; female candidate for messiah.

The mother of nature squeezes until they have all dropped their hatchets.

“What now brother, shall we dispatch them as they would have us?” asks Joseph.

“Nay. They will know us for while they have slaughtered our people, we will not kill.”

Sebastian looks lovingly to the woman her calls his God, the manifestation of his God as a Valkyrie; a warrior angel, no more. If he has woken from the hands of hospitaliers and Emma and Avinadav and all his brother/ sister allies are dead; then how now, she is Mother of Messiahs now.

“Who is this Ilya man your now feeble friend here has so slighted? What kind of gods are we warring with in assisting you?”

“He is an old god, a creature that has managed to survive very well through all the transitions. And Sebastian burned out one of his major American trafficking points Charlestown, and he thinks her stole me.”

“Think,” smirked Sebastian and the brothers laughed at that.

“Let’s just keep it moving,” Adelina says. “I have made a rendezvous with Arelene Daly of the Fenian Republican Army on my mental. It seems if we just keep moving two of Adon’s choice collections are alive. Arlene of Erin and Tiputti Capois the Haitian sensation; in the protection of one very loose cannon Watson Entwissle, also a Haitian. And then we will number eight. And Watson has a plan to steal an air ship and bring us to liberated Ayiti out of this Babylon slave farm.”

The wrenching faces of the over nourished hatchet men grimace as they pass through the woods. The Ruhlmann Brothers help Sebastian who can barely walk. Nick keeps filming everything. Keeps filming the miracle miles to come. For as they pass through the woods, these chosen five; the birds circle overhead, the birches bend toward her, the path opens itself to them; 44 clicks south west to where Watson is hidden in a tobacco barn watching after Arlene and Tiputti. Make it out alive. Make it out alive.

“Had you not said all my friends were dead?” asks Sebastian.

“They are my friends now, and I don’t let my friends die for silly causes. And you ushered in a world of death and killing to avenge Emma and then me, but my efforts are towards art and meditation. Singing, dancing, healing and dealing with the misery made by men. Can you dig it, blat?”

 

“I can dig it,” is what he thought in her general direction and she heard in her magnificent head. At that very juncture he could dig just about anything she said.

 

 

 

Scene 18

Camp Enfield, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

They moved through the thick forest woods as best they could Adelina advised Nicholai Mapfre that there would be nothing good to film, but the half Indian-half Russian film maker told her they needed what was called B Roll, and she didn’t fully see why or even in her vast powers completely get why they even needed to make movies of these happenings when so many would get to live it.

 

Sebastian was slow to his new body and the brothers Ruhlmann had to carry him most of the way by slinging a branch under his shoulders and lifting him on theirs. And they gruffly nearly asked why the messiah couldn’t get dear or birds to do it. Or just levitate him.

“I’m ignoring him until the time I feel he is penitent for what he has done. As G-d has done to man, but not to woman,” she replied before they could get the words out.

“Why are you still filming us comrade,” asked Eric, “nothing very miraculous is happening. We’re just carrying your mildly heavy droog.”

“I’ll carry him awhile and you can film,” Nicholas Mapfre suggested.

“Is it Brick Man, or Bruck Man or Mapfre,” Joseph asks.

“It’s both and all. Bruck when I film and Brick when I shoot, Mapfre when in Europe as it’s my step fathers name,” he replied.

“Are you a guns slinger like this man Adon? A righteous killer across reality and time?” Eric asks. And then it damn near escaped him but now he realizes, he is a Bruck-man and we are Ruhle-men. And Adon is Adon. What serious stuff to be named a name Adon and not be a man, be someone’s man. To be independent born. How curious.

The forest opens before her but remains thick. It is the hot-hot heat of mid-summer and they are traveling North by North West following day stars only Adelina sees, they march as slow as the Ruhlmann brothers can carry the resuscitated corpse of Adon and Mapfre can b-roll. Where are they trekking; away from threats and towards beloved comrades. For after the merry holocaust Sebastian unleashed on Ilya; came Ilya’s reprisal; death and lots of it. He had wanted to degrade Adon to nothing and keep degrading the daughter of prophets and kings Adelina as was the oligarch way. Rape seduce and befoul all women that might become champions. Turn them to lovely irrelevant side pieces or just level them to whores. One did not keep power for 6,000 years as they had by not knowing to get their potential enemies young.

 

“Tell us a story as to the how now Ms. Blazhennaya,” Joseph requested.

 

She begins in her stalwart, commanding voice, “Now, we are not Christians so we need not make brief basic story telling. We can divulge mystery and divert to camp. In the beginning there were two races of monkey; chimpanzee and bonobo. The chimps were selfish and violent, the Bonobos were loving, calm, cool, and collective. They both loved sex but the Bonobos asked for it and chimps just knock rock took; like the later Neanderthal men then spawned. Now we all are educated rebels, so we believe in evolution. The Adons’ are half chimp half Bonobo; as are the Mapfre’s and the Ruhlmann’s; you are lovely and sensuous mutts.”

 

“She did indeed call you sensuous,” Joseph said to Eric.

 

“And the other men too, mixy mutts. Now around 6,000 years ago, remember that the Hebrew reality is now only 5775 years old; just shy of the Mayan B’ak’tun calendars; 26,000 years of servitude came before they came from the sky; aliens guys. It’s all very real. Superior alien military that in also two dichotomous species crashed hear and also liked sex, liked continuing their line and there ways. And then there were four species here all making love and rape, war and compromise. And more arrived because something was so interesting about woman and man; bonobo and chimp kind; they were veritable energy bags. They carried energy much more seriously than the aliens did and this allowed all manners of things to be powered. Great ships and hanging floating gardens. Pyramids and great walls. Are you following me; you are the sons of waring apes and benevolent and exploitative extra-terrestrials.”

“No stop for now, it seems like a silly movie script. Easier to believe you’re the daughter of King David, 28 generations or more removed,” Eric says.

“Well I am of David. But David was of something and I tell you that he was of gods, but what are gods really? Have you been to space? Have you at least seen all these stars and not known each was a sun that could produce the life forces we have here and did?”

“Yes I believe woman, but how now? What mission are we on?”

“Well I will tell you this; the oligarchy plans to obliterate Adon and befoul me bare foot and pregnant and materialistic. They plan to wipe out you all clearly and take me as a toy for the likes of Ilya Lubov; Ilya ‘I Love you’ as that demon goes on about, Sebastian too, to often.”

“Why were you dating him then this Ilya?” Eric asks. Eric was the brash one and Joseph the strong silent type. Both could do what they had to do in uncomfortable situations.

“Don’t make a martyr out of me yet,” she replies, “I have human wants and human needs. They hold my brother in the thrawl of opium demons. My parents are entrapped in Tank City with no will or way to leave. Adon was my man and he gave me adventure, but Ilya held a key to my family he had potential to help me free them.”

“You collaborated then and Adon made a jealous holocaust,” Nick suggests. These conversations are worth the lithium batteries.

“I am a woman of bonobo breeding. My mother was a high priest and my father a Pararescueman and flying fortress pilot.”

“The best men to the airships and the best women to the pilots,” Adon mumbled.

“What did he mumble?” asks Nick.

“I heard nothing,” definitively says Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya; which means in English; Lena daughter of Anatoly, the Holy Fool.

“Why are you such a holy fool,” demands Adon.

“Speak not or I will close my ears and eyes to you and you will be left as a mad man in the wilderness howling on about your love Adelina who runs with the stars birds and moons while you turn your back on love peace light and guided meditation. Cease talking to me now for you wound me up and caused much useless hardship. I had almost wooed that king to give me my family back passage to Babylon where they would be safe. KNOW YOU how much plutonium glows in or near Tank City. KNOW YOU what happens when the opium demons get into my brother with dirty re-used needles and aids. Quiet please Adon if you claim to love Adelina be quiet.”

 

“Told him she did,” Joseph tells the video camera.

“Did I tell you that should I be made the candidate of choice for Messiah, now that the choicest candidate Emma is dead; should I survive the hassle and ordeals; we will all lie around naked, make art and meditate. Will you follow me out of Babylon?”

 

And many were watching. Because Nick Mapfre, was live streaming hoping it could make someone watching from home care. You see if an Ivory dies in a forest and no one saw him die; you can break him into parts, and eat him as a cracker.  But if a Bonobo warrior woman and her resurrected gun slinging paramedic ex-boyfriend do magic on camera; then in Babylon, the Eagle, the Dragon and the Bear have a clear and present danger to contain.

 

 

 

Scene 19

Camp Mansfield, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

Nine is an auspicious number and that was the number of their little band once they came upon Watson Entwissle carrying a sub machine gun filled with plastic bullets. Watson was a true gentlemen and gangster, and also a paramedic, and he had killed alongside Adon in the days before and during the Brooklyn Soviet, the “Breuklyn Soviet if you wished to spell it correctly. He has seen Adon die several times and gotten his light skinned freckled Haitian ass tortured by Russians before over Adon and his flirtation, constant fucking flirtation with Russian women. His Bent Uzi can flight up eighty men before he has to reload the clip. The plastic bullets will break their ribs and drive them to his boot strap. He’s wearing a thick leather jacket and had a grey beret tucked in the inner pocket. He’s never wear that queer shit like a French fuck.

 

Haitian baby, Sak Pasay!

 

Nap Boule bitch, all of Charlestown was on fire over this latest Russian woman. According to “the prophesy” the most important earth Chakra lay in Moscow and that is why such dark power is harnessed from there. The vampires, I use that name exclusively for these blood sucking white oligarchs we war with; they used the blood of their own people to water the holiest ground in existence. And “the prophesy” says that when the Moscow ground is liberated the other chakra points will radiate peace love and light. The so called Age of Aquarius, on us any day now. Water being brought to us all for long time poor people have struggled. So went the wonder words of prophesy.

Charlotte Kamande is the buxom, beautifully placed together and quite Ugandan lover of Watson Entwissle so-so much does she care for him that she put on a leather jacket too and loaded up a Bent Uzi, and jumped out of a container plane above Konnecticut miles high above to rescue Arelene Daly, a blonde and Fenian and Tiputti Capois, the famous Haitian revolutionary commander of the GAI; these four were the sole survivors of the 1^st Union Congress. All forty-four major other delegates were tracked down and cut down. Had Watson and Ms. Kamande not so valiantly jumped out the sky, and her strapped to him in tandem having never sky jumped before; had not holograms and a barn been used to hide three blacks and one blonde in Konnecticut; then Adon would have been the sole survivor, no wait they got to him and had killed him too.

“Do you know the cross he bears, the Ivory one,” mentioned Watson. “I say Ivory meaning Hebrew because he sure as fuck ain’t a blan no more.”

Charlotte Kamande she preferred him to be European sometimes than Breuklyn ghetto fighter. She once read that he and Adon had killed over 100 men in Europe; hunted out and used Voudoun, their secret powers to wipe out 100 slavers, traffickers, petty oligarchs even a Russian general named Budanov; wiped out a whole wing of the lesser Oligarchy as a Brooklyn Good Evening!

She preferred to think that at the 1^st Union Congress Watson had transformed from adjunct to a murdering band of underground rebels; to respectable politician. They were good and naked an on leave in New York, just outside the Soviet in a village called Yonkers when Watson’s bat phone went off and it said the Oligarchy was wiping out delegates as fast as they had come out the underground; like a set up. And Tiputti called him and said he was hiding in a barn in a place called, or just outside of Sheffield, Konnecticut. Lord have Mercy!

And Adon was dead, again.

“Do you know how many times that man has seen the oligarchy kill his friends, he isn’t ashamed that zealot, maybe he should be. Do you know these beautiful eyes of mine are grow backs, they cut them in another life in Moscow? Why do I follow that man? No I don’t we follow each other we are all following god. You a Catholic, that’s cool. There’s a lot of books and a lot of gods, our god is one true god.”

“Adelina?”

“Who?”

“Sebastian’s new woman.”

“She ain’t his woman. He is just worshipping her like he’s supposed to.”

“No, I disagree,” interjects Tiputti Capois, the young Haitian general with his piercing inquisitive eyes that dart about the room, “When they were last in Ayiti, just this summer, I could tell he loves her.”

“Friend, you’ve only known him in Ayiti,” Watson responds.

“That may be the case, but I know him well enough to know that when he cries her cries for us sincerely and when he sings he sings for us sincerely, and he is Haitian in certain ways as he is Hebrew in others. And the rebellion here has been suppressed with the blood of his closest. The Oligarch is switching things. They are erasing people. I hope Ayiti is still there when we return to her.”

“Don’t worry this bad motherfucker will steal us a plane,” says Arelene Daly in a thick Belfast Brogue.

“That’s right I will and the little Messiah can fly it for us and make the fuel not run out, imagine that.”

“What makes you so sure she’s what she says she is,” Arlene asks.

“She didn’t say nothing,” says Tiputti.

“It’s the prophesy,” jokes Charlotte.

“It is the damn prophesy,” Watson replies.

“She arrives from the East on coffin of eighty eight good men. She brings the dead to life and she moves the world around her with light and love. That ain’t here well we’ve been tricked behind enemy lines into Sheffield Babylon for the last time. Because no planes I can steal without bullets and men will take us out of Babylon on just jet fuel. I need a messiah, and she’s from the east and bat phone said they stopped Adon’s heart noon yesterday with electric current.”

“Is Jefferson dead?”

“I don’t know. I just know that Ilya went after just about everybody. People Adon had just had polite conversation with, his family, his brother, people he used to causally fuck. Ilya wiped him out in just three weeks over this woman and the Charlestown rocket siege,” Watson reports.

“Why are we alive?” Charlotte asks thinking of all the murdered faces of the 1^st Congress.

“Because I’m Watson’s lady,” she smiles.

“So you’re saying a living breathing Sebastian Adon is gonna walk through that barn door,” Charlotte asks.

And then the barn door swung open and walking nearly on his own now a living breathing Sebastian Adon, smelling a bit like sulfur, almonds and Vodka walked in.

“Tricky devil,” smirked Watson.

“How now gun slinger,” and the two embrace. And followed into the barn are Nick Mapfre the film maker, the Ruhlmann brothers and of course Adelina Blazhennaya securing the tobacco rafter barn door behind them.

“I don’t know none of ya’ll but Ady-Lee, nice to see you and Sebastian; you my Hebrews.”

“We’re Eric and Joseph,” Eric says pointing and they shake hands.

“I’m Nick,” says Mapfre, “we met once upon a time in Brooklyn Soviet the last time these fools disrupted the stratosphere. We filmed it for posterity.”

“Can you walk yet,” Watson asks him, “we gonna have to bum rush a plane.”

“We’re gonna fly a train into a plane,” Adelina states.

“Are we now, well as long as you can fly a train I’m your gun slinger,” Watson says.

“How long have you been here,” she asks.

“Two days,” Tiputti says and she embraces him very happy he made it out alive.

“What have you eaten?” she asks.

“MREs and Gatorade,” Watson says.

Adelina gathers up the hanging tobacco and she piles it, then begins rolling it. And it changes slightly. The tobacco rolls become midnight sushi from the sea and she serves it out to everyone. A fuck ton of midnight sushi.

“Of course the Russian messiah can turn tobacco rolls to sushi rolls,” says Joseph Ruhlmann.

“And then there were 9, I didn’t know you’d bring a girlfriend,” Adelina says, “I’m Adelina.”

“I’m Charlotte Kamande.”

“I read about you, you’re an oracle.”

“Tough men with non-lethal guns guarding two candidates from the East,” she smiles.

“I don’t like it when they call me Messiah, so far these are just parlor tricks. Sebastian and Watson once killed 100 men with needles and voodoo. I just came online. Four weeks ago I thought I’d marry rich and move my parents to Southern California. It’s very hard to know Adon, but he’s loving when he’s able.”

“Ladies I’m not dead anymore, I’m standing just right here.”

“So a train into a plane, that shit ain’t subtle,” Watson says, “you big guys give me your guns I want to see if they’ll take Afula specials.”

“We’re more than happy with real ammunition thank you,” Eric says. Having seen too much magic in too short a period.

“Fine, but don’t kill anybody it’s against the rules of management and also the new covenant,” Watson says.

“We didn’t make any new Covenant,” Eric says.

“Brother, and I rarely use Muslim/Union talk to strangers in front of Adelina, she mocks me for it, but you’ve all see a dead man come back to life, the woods swallow our aggressors and before long a flying train; can you just empty you clips and fill up with non-lethally. I’m sure Watson has a few extra clips of Afula Specials,” says Sebastian Adon.

“Says the greatest killer the world has almost ever know,” Tiputti Capois.

“That man is the pale Dessalines,” Watson says, “but I’m Petion.”

“Jacobins be at ease, fill your bellies with Sushi, they will kill if they have the need to kill. I have often decided not to make great men good or bad men great. I have faith in my own powers,” Adelina says.

“I’ll give him my gun if you can turn water into wine,” Joseph says.

She touches an open canteen and it turns into white wine and Joseph and begrudgingly Eric hand Watson their burners to tinker into heavy handed, non-lethal toys.

 

 

 

Scene 21

Camp Sterling, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

Now that there were nine of them they were very powerful, especially protected by so many guns and so much magic. Marching slowly South East in the deep woods toward the coast.

 

The woods were thick and they waited out the day in the cool of the vertical tobacco hanging barn. You may not know this but one of the largest production sites for cigar tobacco is the American Babylonian state of Konnecticut. Now what’s with the Babylon? What does that even mean a civilian might ask. You see, the Hebrew; the Ivory had twelve tribes; thirteen if you counted the divided tribe of Joseph. So these tribes were descended of 12 brothers who sold their brother Joseph into Egyptian slavery which triggered the events of the later book of Exodus in the Torah, or Old Testament. The word Old seems to imply that that the New One; the one about Jesus and his fine work somehow abrogates or replaces laws that are so exhaustively laid out in Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy.  613 sets of laws for The Hebrews; and 7 Noahite; laws of Noah for the Gentiles; everyone else; like don’t rape, rob murder, covey and kill. Basic shit for non-covenant observing people. Now you can’t buy into a covenant until Jesus and Muhammad come and Muhammed one of the first things he does in Medina is restore most of the laws the Romans pulled out. We’re jumping around here but I’m sure this was written for Gentiles and Ivorites that know how to read and can handle dissonant, abstract thinking.

Babylon was ancient Persia and Iraq and more. It was the place that 10 of 12 tribes; well all buy Judah, Levi and Dan never came back. It just offered more than endless tribal wars to extinction with Canaanites and Philistines. It was a modern, pluralistic, developed ancient empire and ten tribes just stayed put. Lost like an American Ivory. America is called the Eagle in Rastafarian tradition to show its prowess as an aggressive empire; one of the four horse men is another allegory along with the Hawk; Europe, the Dragon China and Russia the Bear. We call America Babylon because once you manage to get and stay there, as long as you’re not the black race; you forget where you came from.

“You might send money back,” mentions Tiputti Capois.

You very well might. Remittances make up a tremendous source of livelihood for the people back home. But the longer you stay in Babylon you learn not miss war and ethnic tribal Chimpanzee purges. You learn to not miss Cossacks and the pale of Settlement. You get a house, you ante up in the debt game; you work until you die. You die until you get to work.

This is called a Reality Shift. Like the one that happens every time Adon gets his life so foolishly taken, or kills his damn self. He once shot himself twice and fell off a roof over a call girl that made him write boat loads of meaningless poetry.

“I don’t date Russian women exclusively. I date tough women that might be able to keep me from reality shifts; needless dying.”

“So you used to date that hot little Messiah,” Joseph asks him.

“I did. She never committed much to anything until Haiti.”

“What’s so important to you about this Haiti place, and why are we trying to get there,” Eric asks.

Watson and Tiputti raise eye brows knowing the shpiel of Adon quite well. It is a good shpiel. It tells of the historic nature of the struggles for the fate of the divided Island and its people.

“We are so interested in that island because its people were the first to defeat the Oligarchy. Others had tried. The Greeks took on Babylon and held them back for some time. The Hebrew Roman Wars went on for over seventy years. We were massacred and decimated and turned into sex slaves. The French defeated the worst of the French, but it didn’t last long until Napoleon began empire building and marching on Moscow. Whether anyone knows it or not they are all marching on the Chakra points and all trying to march on Moscow. Genghis Khan knew, he’s the only one to take that sacred ground and now we’re all a bit Mongolian. I would say the Russian Oligarchy with its Ivory advisors is about half Mongolian, a quarter Ivory and a quarter slave; that’s where the word Slav came from. The Tartars used to round us up and take us back to the Islamic Empires. So much history they never teach you. We’re going to Haiti because in a people in land is power, and if we are captured here they will kill all of you and make me a slinky court jester happy house wife,” Adeline explains for him, she isn’t in the mood for his yarns.

The Ruhlmann Brothers take in all the comings and goings in their Franco-German burly way. The leather and blue and grey clad paratrooper, paramedic Watson Entwissle paces without smoking. The bullets he gave them from his bag of strapped clips expand on contact and break bones not flesh. Afula Specials because they were designed in the Israeli town of Afula to keep the Canaanite body count low, well until 2010 when a high degree of who gives a fuck set in after the Sudanese and Russians genocided their own citizens and the DRC mineral wars broke the Ivoryish body count of 6-7 million in the Holocaust; you round up because no one counts babies really. Anyway the Israelis have a whole line of non-lethal weapons for putting down a lesser armed enemy. After the great purge when the resistance wiped out about 104 lesser oligarchs then foolishly lost all its own and more in ruthless civilian kills it was acknowledged that an eye for eye will make everyone blind, but a tooth for a tooth; the oligarchy takes more teeth.

“What is this Oligarchy you keep thinking so much about; these men that killed everyone that mattered in the resistance that Adon ever even smiled at,” Nick Mapfre asks.

“Before we talk about them, let’s talk a bit more about the island we will escape to during the night’s fall,” Adelina says, “Tiputti, would you and Adon like to give us a history lesson on the Peasant movement called The Waterfall Family. Now that the Z.O.B. maybe but we nine; and the Brooklyn Soviet may or may not exist and the resistance maybe over, but for we nine and the forces on that island. You see in another life Adon twice brought forces to defeat the Haitian oligarchy and their murderous collaboration with the NGO Class. First in 2010 he brought medical worker. But it wasn’t enough. In another reality he raised a guerilla band and out of Brooklyn Soviet brought 1,800 fighters to liberate the place. But it was a blood bath and million, literal millions died and the Dominicans all but conquered the place and tricked 200,000 into leaving D R for Haiti never to return. When it was done, again Adon had gotten many of his closest killed, this time perhaps for a cause. The resistance took 1/3 of the Country, but the Dominican influence made sure that nothing changed. Avinadav Butler was arrested and deported, and executed in the middle of the Atlantic. This was a reality not meant to be. So we re-started it,” she explains.

“There is way too much magic going on for us, I’ll speak for me and my brother. We are simple, brutal tragic, god fearing family loving men. We have a rock band. We drive motorcycles. We break skulls only when have to and we only have these guns because Princess Janaat told us that once we stole Sebastian’s body we’d be hunted like dogs. I’ve seen plants attack hatchet wielding white trashlings, I’ve seen you bring him back to life; hold his very heart in your hand. I’ve seen bullets that don’t kill and heard all kinds of interesting mythology. You even told me you’re going to steal a train and make it fly. We, are appalled by the magic seen here. What use have you for us, or even video cameras?”

“Because no one is going to believe in our candidacy if we just leave another trail of destruction along the road to Zion,” Watson proclaims, “I was the only one besides Sebastian there the first and the second time. Haiti is nearly impossible to hold.”

“It is truly impossible, which is why we love her so much and are so invested in here candidacy,” states Capois.

“How do you, restart reality?” Joseph Ruhelman asks.

“We go into the Great Temple and we ask the great and only true God to let us leave our bodies and go back to a marker point. A place where we agree to meet when we die. Adon does this as easily as he draws or writes Russian women poems, almost with glee. We love life more, it is almost traumatic. So we store our best fighters and compatriots in a Temple under the tallest mountain in Haiti. And when we fail, and we have failed so many times it is irreproachably taxing on all of us; we pull back to the Temple and there we emerge. Something has gone wrong though this time it’s all a mess.”

“Ilya wiped out the temple, he wiped out the bodies and maybe the spirits. If you don’t hear one of America’s most talkative revolutionaries yammering on; it’s because I’m cold shouldering his corpse, but it’s because he fucked up. He fucked up real bad,” mutters Adelina.

“He fucked up so bad because he exposed the Z.O.B.s list to Ilya when he moved against him without authorization,” Watson explains.

“We pledged not to kill. At the first Congress most of the awake ones were getting ready to pull the underground out of hiding and fight in the daylight. We had just lost Avinadav and Emma. Haiti and Brooklyn Soviet never were. It was as if we gambled a whole arc of our loss and struggle to wage a struggle with no violence and then; a major leader wipes out Charlestown over an injury to Adelina that is problematic at best to understand,” Watson says.

“I was never even any threat. It was pure jealous rage,” Adelina says, “I was tasked by the late Emma Solomon to ascertain why Adon seems to fight losing impossible battles, concentrate incredible forces, and then lose. For like 3,000 years. He even fought Xerxes once at Thermopylae as an Acadian.”

“I determined that he doesn’t serve the enemy on purpose. He’s just simple insane.”

“I am not insane, I am in love,” comes a voice that is more used to talking in other yarns and realities.

“He is in love with an idea of himself, as all men are. It was our curse and blessing that he both cannot seem to die and he so attracts such mighty defenders, lord knows even as a daughter of Russia I believe humanity needs defending from itself.”

 

 

Scene 22

Camp Griswold, 2015ce

konnecticut

 

Before the barn structure caught flames and they found themselves locked in a ring of fire our band of heroes waited out the day and they all took time to reflect on what was inevitably coming from inference and from prophesy.

 

Now allow us to recount the events of the previous books, but those transcribed by and about Sebastian Adon and the big books too; the ones people make religions around. We begin big to little as Adon would die many times before anything he wrote made print.

The Old Testament is a collection of writings chronicling the rise fall, temptations and betrayals and massacre of the Hebrew people. Abraham the first Hebrew has two sons; Yitzhak and Isa; the Hebrews all descend from Yitzhak who has twelve sons; and one day the Prophet Muhammed will descend from Isa. The tribe of Judah which returns from Babylon with the Dan and Levi tribes gives rise to King David. Fourteen generations later Jesus is born to Mary. It’s about six hundred years between when the Romans pretty much martyr Jesus, fight three wars with the Hebrews between 60 ce and 135 ce; then take on Christianity and change everything. The New Testament is pretty much written over ninety years later by Roman collaborators that drop out the laws of Moses. Now in 646 the Prophet Muhammed arrived in Medina and begins working on the Qur’an, although he is functionally illiterate. This book reconstitutes most of the stories in the Old and New Testament; he also raises and army of slaves, whores, peasants and orphans which will conquer about 1/5 of the earth in the name of Islam. Both Islam and Christianity are taken over shorty after they are propagated by the biggest opponents of the new faiths. In the case of Christianity the Romans, in the case of Islam the Yazidi tribe that butchers the biological family of the prophet Muhammed including his grandchildren Hassan and Hussain. The Seal of the Prophets remains for the most part sealed until 1864 when the Baha’i faith emerges based on blood descendants of Jesus and Muhammed; Bahaullah and the Bab. In 2001; based on prophesy Emma Solomon and Avinadav DeBuitléir carried out the warrior work foretold in the Baha’i prophesies, but they did it much more violently than had been written and some say they invalidated their mandate. Now, Christians think Jesus is coming back. More educated Christians except that it’s a blood descendant, not the actual original guy. Most people on earth don’t know how to read. About 1/3 of the species is Christian or Catholic; a Christ follower. About 1/3 is Muslim. The next biggest faiths are Hinduism and Buddhism. Hinduism is highly problematic in that it reduces hundreds of millions to chattel caste slavery. Buddhism is more like a philosophy that everyone could use a healthy dose of. Most problematically is that there is no “J” sound in Aramaic or Hebrew. So Jesus was certainly not his name. His name, agreed by non-Canonical sources was Yeshua ben Yosef; Yeshua son of Joseph. There could also be no word Ivory; which was pretty much a Roman invention after they fought three major wars in Palestine against them which resulted in total Hebrew defeat in 135 ce. They leveled the temple in 70 ce. Ivory was Latin or nigger. Jesus got his whole name and race changed. It was impossible someone born in Palestine could be white. Muhammed tried to correct a lot of that but he too was used for empire building. The Baha’i almost 1,700 years later came with unity peace love and light. But no one was paying attention until a Mahdi, Muslim Messiah of Muhammad’s like named Avinadav; and Meshiach of the house of David and “Jesus” named Emma conquered the Eastern Sea Board of the United States after an event called the Great Revolt.

It began at the West Indian Day Parade and spread out into most major cities of the East Coast. The largest most successfully held was the Brooklyn Soviet, which perhaps fell or perhaps still stands.

The Ivories, which still call themselves that are still waiting for Meshiach. They reject everyone who has come. Their leaders betrayed Jesus, their leaders betrayed the Brooklyn Soviet. Emma and Avinadav spread the uprising to Hispaniola, and for some time even conquered Haiti as said. But there was so much blood. And this blood tainted the houses of Emma and Avinadav. It was agreed to return to the Temple and restart reality, abandon this one and begin again.

But something has gone wrong because here we are, nine of us in a barn. A barn that is now on fire. And where are our messiahs now? We have a pale skinny Russian brunette that does periodic miracles. We have two Franco-Germans with muscles and know not fear. We have a dead man who all heard was dead, but he walks better each hour fueled by unrequited love. There’s an Indian-Russian film maker. There are two Haitian freedom fighters one black one Mulatto. There’s a sexy Ugandan, priestess but no one has seen her full power.

 

You notice I keep saying nine, but it’s really eight. Nine is the Holy Spirit?  But as the smoke roles in and Adelina Blazhennaya freezes up, as they get ready to think of plan b, c, and d. The thick black smoke brings death, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t suggest anything useful.

  

Scene 23

Camp Griswold, 2015ce

konnecticut

  

Very satisfying at first, the smell of smoke.

Thinks Adon;

 

Yes, something was burning down, but I couldn’t think anything about it because I was so love sick, so broken so totally down over this girl that I couldn’t bring myself to stand and fight. I will tell you that if unrequited love tastes like almonds, well when it goes on longer as it had it isn’t like almonds at all; it’s like punching yourself in the face and then it tastes like your own blood. Because love is supposedly self-less so when you’re eating yourself up over a woman, like Adon had done for two years well it’s all your own fault.

The barn was burning and they just stared at each other for a bit.

I hate you, she thinks. You brought me out of my basic American life and you thrust me into the revolution in Ayiti and I lived in squalor for what seemed like a year and now, now I just almost squared myself away with an ok guy, fine a major oligarch and you ruined it in jealous rage. You completely fucked up and got fucked by Ilya. You tried to burn him down but you’re just not big enough. That’s the damn problem; why can’t you be a man not some ghost not some martyr not some space creature.

They stared so long everyone else began getting a little nervous because they seem to have distracted each other from the hairy business of impending death. Ah, death. Everyone mostly feared it but they and this Mexican stare down was a product of that kind of bluff.

I will say this, he thought; that there may be only a couple things I took into and out of the hill of Waltham. And the one thing I cared about it very much gone. What know any other person of this kind of self-loathing, wondering why she could not see in me my worth? Had I not been through hell, had I not offered her everything? But she truly doesn’t believe I can deliver and it is breaking me worse than the deaths I die. I never have feared death, but I fear that I won’t get over this woman nor can I afford to get out from under her.

You see, if we were meek un-orthodox Christians we’d never even fathom that the daughter of the Messiah might love a hooligan like me. And yes, that is what I am. I reckless knock around hooligan that in every life have acted more like a Barbarian than a child of God’s people. The name be named; Yahweh must often wonder what to do with me. Smite me and bring me back to fight some more.

I wanted to lay down all my fighting when I met Adelina Blazhennaya. I wanted to not die. I wanted to not fight. I wanted to forget about Congresses and Unions. Even the glorious higher power of the cleansing flames of revolution! About uprisings and the struggle itself. She made me not want to struggle; she made me want to have kids.

Yes, you who know we know I am a hooligan and a zealot and all kinds of unstable things, but Adelina made me want to have babies. More than two, well maybe just two to start out. I remember catching the garter belt at a wedding and then like a horrible ass when she caught the flowers I denied that marriage was impending. I’m a horrible person, a total self-absorbed miserable person that will certainly die alone. And have before.

The building continues to burn and Watson rather stoically assesses that the door is barricaded so some party is looking to burn all of our heroes alive. A nice group of nemeses they’ve acquired since Charlestown burned down, as if that were the only thing this band was linked to.

So look, her look said; I can’t love you anymore, you took too much and now I have to live my life now, which may involve super hero shit, or maybe I’ll sell out like I was about to. That’s all my choice you know you bastard, yes bastard, you underground man; you delight in your own suffering but not I. I want peace light love and flowers, lots of flowers. I don’t want to hide guns in my purse, see everyone I know die. I don’t even think I can get us out of this flaming mess. You’ll have to do it.

Me, he thinks? You want me to do it? You want me to kick some ass for you again. No you don’t care. You don’t want to burn up, but you don’t want me to do anything. That’s the hall mark of unrequited love; it doesn’t matter at all what I do, you don’t care.

Well, thinks everyone else I hope the super naturals do something or we’re just gonna start shooting.

Look, thinks Adelina, there are things I admire about you. You’re super committed to fighting for your crazed zealot beliefs. That might make good father material, scratch that, might have made. You might have been a good father and it might have changed and matured you and maybe you’d focus on me and a family and not the god damn cause, your impossible vile cause.

Watson almost says, ‘could those of us that have been invested by god with certain super natural powers could you perhaps jump in before we are choked and burned alive, and I shoot up the door trying to bust out.’           

He thinks, I’m in so much pain. I’m being punished for what I said to her in the Empire Hotel in November when I called her a you-know-what. And then I bashed my face against the mirror and begged to die. Because she wouldn’t come back from Moscow and she wouldn’t trust him that he would quit the game for her.

And neither did anyone else. Their stare down was like mind sex with their clothes on a horrible tease. He wanted everything from her and she wasn’t going to budge. And what happened next, Capois, Watson and the Ruhelman brothers opened fire at the door ‘til they could kick it in and then they burst out the barn with the others in tow; they unloaded clip after non-lethal clip at farm boys, hatchet men, bangers and hangers on the payroll of whatever local farmer was now after Ilya’s golden ticket; but had forgotten don’t toast the main prize.

Eventually they shot up everybody, bang, bang; bang!

And eventually Sebastian grabbed her by the wrist and they got up out of the fire and he said, “Maybe you’ll never love me. And maybe I’ll destroy myself over you for everyone else’s amusement horror and sport. And maybe I’ll got to an early or a late grave actually thinking you were the one! I caught the garter like it was a fucking movie! Maybe I could have been a father! I don’t know anymore. I was in a hospital. My heart exploded and I died.”

This little tif is going un-filmed because Nick is watching a non-lethal fire fight conclude with more bang, bang, and bang!

“Sebastian. I need you calm, cool and collected,” she says.

“I may in fact have to rise to the occasion of greatness and I cannot, will not have you like a puppy begging for my undivided attention. What if I have to part a sea or move a mountain?? What you will be all sad faced and bush tailed? No, get it together. We may be over but I need you to act like the child of a god who will never turn his back on his people so I can act like the daughter of a god who turns trains into planes and gets us back to Haiti in one piece, can you do that man?”

“I love you.”

“Shut up.”

“I love you.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I love, you.”

And she picks up the entire flaming barn and all of the remaining henchmen and she flings them 100 miles into the sky. So, she pretty much got pissed and killed like fifty people in a ball of fire. Boom.

We’re making this up as we go, thinks Watson.

“They’re so tumultuous,” says Charlotte Kamande.

“So is the Old Testament and also the many parts of Star Wars,” says Eric Ruhelman.

“I don’t care what you blow up, what you level, what you save or don’t save. I love you and I will follow you until I die and give you my life gladly. And I wish, I wish my destiny was with you,” Sebastian proclaims.

Watson grabs his shoulder, “be way cool man. She stopped loving. And you gotta respect her because she’s the candidate now ‘cause Emma is dead and she’s not the lost, lonely and lethal miss thing you fell for. She’s a growing god.”

Sebastian drops his head and the pound he gives Watson says, he’s not the man he used to be. Watson remembers once telling him over a phone line, tapped into his prison cell; telling Sebastian a lot of people look to him for inspiration, so don’t fuck up.

“Adelina, Yulia, Oleg? What happened to them after the drones and the shoot out?” he asks Watson.

 

“They probably died, this is the effect of your friendship on many.”

 

Scene 24

Camp Voluntown, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

They aimed to capture a train and somehow make it fly off the tracks.

 

It was easier in those days to hijack trains over planes. They would then take this flying train over the Sea of Galilee, Rhode Island out of Konnecticut and to a place called Block Island; 16 miles off the eastern seaboard, a fallen star ship; and there a powerful woman named Ms. Lisa Star could arrange their submersible transport to Haiti, re-fuel, take on fighters and then, who knew what things were possible, hopefully many.

“Why can’t the levitating train just make it all the way to Haiti,” Eric Ruhelman asks.

“Don’t be greedy with my magic,” Adelina says.

They had survived two serious onslaughts of hatchet men. She’s basically murdered the whole second batch fighting with Adon and that was what you get fighting with a jealous ex; nothing but useless black, emotional and real time death.

The 1^st Congress had declared ‘all killing is a crime against humanity’; a violation of the noble human rights. But she, had not signed shit. Her candidacy was based on three things. One, she was one of the last people to see Emma Solomon alive, had served her will well as ‘the steel hand of Emma Solomon’ so many took that has an anointing. Two, she was from Russia so the likelihood of her being a candidate was way up anyway, as most other nations had murdered all in the houses of prophesy by 2016ce. Three; she could turn water into wine, make plants attack people and she brought people back to life and also turned them into butterflies. Which is what she did with all the henchmen she threw fifty (not forty) miles into the air, as to be in solidarity with this new Congress covenant, although all its signatory delegates were dead, except Charlotte, Adon, Tiputti, Arlene Daly and Watson Entwissle .

Had Adon not decided to go after Ilya so flagrantly perhaps none of that would have happened, because oligarchs don’t make trouble needlessly; they don’t do show big dick/ little dick show things, they just have big dicks and use them to fuck. They don’t fuck to show their dicks, they fuck when they feel like fucking and there was not great reason for Ilya I Love Everyone Lubov to go on such a colossal killing spree except Adon had just spat in his face and fucked with his money too, in the same five minutes.

Now, what did or did not happen between the oligarch and Adelina; who only knew. A girls sometimes gotta do what a girls gotta do. But Adon, a few days after Congress got it into his head that she was in bad trouble. And he was used to his women always being in trouble because he dated a lot of beat up whores, trafficked women and the abused mentally ill; I mean real pillars of stability so he basically in his mind’s eye could paint anyone a victim.

Whatever, before we get to how trains are made to fly with magic it’s important to remember how alone Sebastian Adon felt when he came back to life. Other than Nick and Watson these were all mostly strangers. Adelina was giving him the total cold dead shoulder and the others too, were like; weren’t you just in the hospital? Didn’t you just die?

Ilya got his money fucked with when Adon ordered a brigade to torch and level Charlestown where Ilya did all his this side of the Atlantic dirt. Adon also ran off with Adelina which flew in the face of his ego as well, though she was a side piece.

 

So he came down real, real hard. The smoke cleared over Boston and then Ilya send goons flying in all directions. Gunned down Congress delegates, gunned down old friend. Killed his mom and dad, killed his brother; killed and killed and killed until no one was alive that knew Adon. Even Brooklyn Soviet was gone. It was just this man and his Haitian generals left to kill and he’d thought he’d wiped out their temple too; no more tricks. No more fourth dimensions. But no, the bitch brought him back to life.

“It’s a terrible place to survive a massacre you provoked,” Watson states.

Adon put his face into his hand. So much loss over a woman that wasn’t even that wronged, at least not by Ilya Lubov.

“You don’t have Perchevney to protect you either, they locked him up for some spurious offense,” said Watson referring to Adon’s oligarch protector antagonist.

“What do we have?” Adon asks.

“Two Haitian generals, a film maker, two hooligans, your ex and her powers and my girlfriend from Uganda.”

“What have I done?”

“You took for granted your power and you anted up everything and you lost almost everything over a woman who won’t even look you in the eyes.”

“I thought she was in trouble…”

“Will be printed on your god damn grave.”

“I didn’t realize who Ilya was.”

“I don’t think you cared.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“What do I do?”

“We get on the flying train she plans to hijack and levitate. We fly that shit to Block Island. We get blessed, we get on a black freighter submarine, and hopefully Ilya hasn’t managed to killed Lisa Starr and sink her submarine fleet. Then you pray, you pray hard. They even killed Mickhi Dbrisk and no one loved you more than him, maybe your parents. I didn’t even know they could kill that bad motherfucker. But they killed him real good.”

“Do you hate me now?”

“I can’t hate you. I was pretty pissed in Moscow when they took my eyes, but I got new eyes. This too will pass. She’s very powerful your old lady. Even Emma didn’t so easily move magic.”

“What about Ilya?”

“He’ll kill and capture us, or he won’t. We’re going to Haiti to raise another army and then we’re marching on Moscow. Even with nine of us we are a force.”

“Such a force.”

“You don’t die man. Do you have any idea what that says to the rest of; god or devil we need a friend like you son.”

“What am I?”

“I know you’re basically a good person, but you get very reckless over these young Russian girls and you forget they are all perfectly capable for taking care of their own bad selves. You are a colorful side show.”

“I wanted to kill Ilya, purely because he touched her. Good or bad touch I didn’t care.”

“You got reckless. You burned his shit, you ultimately took a house wife and set her off down the path of the fire minds. You got Emma killed, but strange shit happens, how many times have you died and was it always your fault? You are always mostly to my knowledge on the side of human kind. Ilya is an oligarch, you pissed in his soup. He flipped out and was a lot less loving than his name implies.”

“Don’t believe his lies,” Adelina says dispassionately, “he isn’t clear even in his own mind who he serves.”

He sometimes let’s her be cruel, I mean he did before fly off at her sometimes when she went too long. But he was man and she was Russian, which means she had a loyalty tree. Around a tree was a circle and in hard times up into the tree she’d go waiving anyone not of her blood or feeding her. Which made it curious what she would do now.

“I’m going to stop a train. We’re going to storm and evacuate it. Then I’m going to pick it up with my mind and fly it.”

“I don’t doubt for a second she can do that, but can they be separated once it’s in the air so she concentrates only on the flying and not how angry she is at him,” Joseph whispers.

“I’m fine, the flying train will have my undivided attention,” she nimbly replies.

I wonder, wonders Charlotte what she will do if she has to. That is the question to ask will she turn us all over? Will she drop us and secure herself with Ilya if he allowed it? Why does a beautiful woman spend time around bald men; everyone knows bald men are either evil or have poor genetics. These were the things Charlotte Kamande wonders.

What I want to know is what she will do if she’s backed in a corner, if we can’t clear these rolling woods or if she gets distracted. She has so much power and we are just perhaps play things; what loyalty does she really have? She brings a man back from the dead but won’t even look him in the eye. Won’t even kiss his heroic cheek.

 

 

 

Scene 25

Barn Island, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

I will tell you what a palaver is; it is a serious sit down talking to; it is a scheduled tune up for the mind. We take perhaps a break from the over stimulation of intrigue and great escape to have one right now.

 

A palaver is needed when reality breaks. It is you needing to affirm with another person that you’re centered, that you’re still there. Because when reality shifts the people you were with are not going to be there with you anymore.

I give you my word before G-d everyone will freak out and abandon you as soon as things get a little scary, even your blood and you will be a loon howling at the moon and no will care. That was always what Anya Drovtich always warned would happen, he’d just break and he’s be a zombie a walking dead man howling at the moon and the young ass punk kids would ignore him.

Sweet palaver, a heart to heart to heart like Watson and Adon used to have in their cell in the fire house; when a white officer called Watson nigger and Watson broke that white shirt crackers jaw. And Adon went awol to help in Haiti during the great big killing quake and the FDNY jammed him up. And they used to sit locked up in that cell and make big talk on everything, that’s how there shattah bromance first began, before they went on their great big hit of bad men in Europe. Before the world ended several times and began again. Before the second invasion of Haiti. Because when you got to live a few times, fuck it, live right, live hard.

It had been a very long time since any of our heroes had a palaver and honestly where could they have found time, they could only just gawk at miracles and strange happenings. Charlotte had tandem dove out a plane to end up in this fire fight, now there was a lecture or two later about following those you love into wild adversity. The Ruhelman brothers were knock around guys, but they hadn’t grocked it all yet. They hadn’t certainly sat to talk it out. The palaver was a great talk out. It was a sit in the dirt and unload the realness off your chest about that which was killing you, and this crowd, well a lot was.

Charlotte Kamande had only been dating Watson for less than a month when he informed her he had to go on the warpath, board a drop ship and jump out over the sky of Konnecticut and that if she followed him there would be greatness, but most likely death and she hadn’t even gotten a small piece, not one small piece of affection since the drop and pall mall here. Eric and Joseph wondered was the paying price for this high enough. Would there be really weird shit differential in the future, and how much more. Was this super natural Russian babe a goddess or did they die in a moto cycle accident and wake up in the LSD realm of heaven and hell. Watson being a stone cold mother fucker was not even for a second going to put his gun down and breathe, not even one second. There was very big bad wolf trying to murder them all. Much worse than usual, that wolf ate up all his partner’s friends.

And Adon, he felt guilt and shame. For he was coming to terms with his reckless actions. He felt like he’s done fucked up. But there was raw obsession eating him each breathe he took and each step be jostled out. He was walking dead this time for real. He was empty because she wouldn’t speak to him or look at him she wouldn’t even pretend he was special, that he had touched her well.

Had he touched her well? Had he done enough? Had he given her a better or a worse life getting her all missed up with tumultuous vagabond change makers that didn’t have the resources Ilya did to safe up parents or wipe out tribes. It was like the eight of them were coming out of this fiery dream. A dream which kept trying to kill them.

And what was this about a flying train, really a hijacking of a train? When oh when was anyone on in the leadership of this little outfit; Watson and Adelina going to sit down and say; here’s the plan, Susan. Here is the meaning of it all. Here is what we are out to do.

You heard things like raise and army in Haiti and march on Moscow and you got palaver fatigue, like you didn’t even want to hear the whole thing. You didn’t care to. Wasn’t there an easier way? Wasn’t there a job to get to? A house to save up for? Didn’t the old god just need you to sit in the Church every Sunday and talk out your sins in the box? Didn’t you just get to keep calmer. No flying fucking trains? As if that was something more outlandish than the midnight Sushi trick or the water into wine. This was appearing to be very scary and real. March on Moscow eh?

Not without a Palaver to top all Palavers!

“I am sorry that everything is happening so fast. I’m doing the best I can. My mentor Emma Solomon was bit more tight with her tradecraft. I’m a novice. If it looks like I’m feuding with my ex-boyfriend in the middle of our latest emergency it is because I was deeply hurt by his lack of discipline. You have no idea how much training was poured into this man. You have no idea how many times he came so close to victory and then it was like a laugh in our face from the devil, he is a most tragic man,” Adelina explains.

“But I cannot love right now, certainly not him as he has acted badly and most of all, unaccountably.”

“Are we all having a group Palaver? Can we palaver by group?” asks Joseph Ruhelman.

“We are having a sit down, this is not a true palaver, because right not my whole essence is racing and I can’t really comprehend anything you all might tell me. It’s all very one sided and I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok,” says Watson, “you have sick crazy powers, and we all just want to know our part.”

“Is there a plan?” Eric Ruhelman asks.

“We’re going to hijack a train and get out of American airborne, then cross to Spain by submarine,” she says.

“Yes. I’d caught the flying train part. I meant more existentially. Like is there a divine plan you are adhering to, or are you making this up? Are you going by Old Books, books we haven’t seen, it’s all disconcerting. A little anarchic really,” Joseph says.

“Sorry. I’m totally shooting from the hip with all these new responsibilities,” she says.

“So there, responsibilities, that word sort of connotes a plan,” Joseph says.

“No, I assure you there is no plan, per say” she says.

“Well raise an army and march on Moscow is something of a plan you must admit,” Sebastian Adon says.

“I don’t fully endorse that plan,” she says. And Arelene remembers an old quote from the history books, something about the Third Rome never to fall.

“Well we’re gonna stop following you unless you make us bit more comfortable with the ways you make decisions,” Eric says.

Nick Mapfre films the whole, not-a-palaver.

“I want a word,” Sebastian says.

“Wait, before you go on a heartfelt soliloquy putting together words she is not going to hear I think we are all owed an explanation as to what exactly is happening,” Eric says.

“Ok, big fucking time out,” Watson says.

“There are. Not. Going to be easy happy answers given out. We are also not at this time about to stomach Adon, who is a good man hurting himself with unrequited almond spread love. Big time out. She has even said she don’t have THE PLAN, she has a loose plan it’s a good common sense plan. It involves getting to Haiti where our enemies are less and raising an army there ‘cause we can do that, being Haitian generals, “Watson takes full control.

“Emma had great five year plans and they seemed very thought out, but Emma is dead and we’re never gonna find her body. Avinadav was cunning military leader and he conquered almost all of Haiti and half of Africa then lost it in under a year. So plans are plans they get fucked up. This little smoke stack here is powerful and we are all here to help her and if you don’t want to help her go home. Go home to TV and porno and beer and whatever the fuck, shit,” exclaims Watson.

“I just had to ask because it was already weird and to my knowledge I die, I am a man. I don’t come back. I die and hopefully go to heaven,” Joseph says.

“That too is my world view,” says Charlotte Kamande.

“Well I can’t take that away from you,” Adelina says, “but I can tell you that it is a narrow view. One that might not be so glaringly in your face like Adon’s powers, but I would suggest there are many lives to live before and after.”

It was clear that this is what they were after to make them less afraid; a message.

“If I am to be fair with you all, if you follow me we all may die and the lives you end up with will be very different. But we are after the great liberation if I am not mistaken, we are after the creation of human events that liberate the great mass of long abused humanity from war and poverty; and these events take a mighty army; where ever that army may one day emerge and march to; that I cannot totally plan. But if you follow me to Spain and then to Haiti I will keep us safe as I can and use my powers for awesome.”

“Aye, we’re all with you don’t worry,” Eric states.

“Good, cause I’d have to shoot anyone that disserts,” Watson smirks.

“Can I get a word please, for the love of the gods,” Adon says.

“No, I’m sorry. I can’t! I can’t have you begging for me right now. I need you to be a man independent of my woman-ness and power. I need you not to beg, not because there is some horrible ignobility in begging, but because you don’t need to. And it won’t get you what you are after. I can’t give anything but myself into my work, because the stakes are too high.”

“For the love of Emma one word,” he says.

“Fine for the ghost of Emma take your words and then we must get some rest before make a great train robbery.”

“I’m here when you need me,” is all he says.

There was no other woman he wanted in the world to impress so badly and it wasn’t for her powers, he loved her before she had powers. People sometimes get the powers of the gods they forget where they came from, but no. This was an issue of trust.

 

 

Scene 26

Camp Misquamicut, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

We were not far now from the beach, only a nights walk.

At times a person in life, like a great and epic story cannot decide what kind of story it wants to be, it has to find its way into its true character. And you all seem to have forgotten in all the melee of hatchet men that this is a very character driven story, although the characters are very different perhaps than you.

The stuff of miracles is how this began, but we must draw a noose around it and reign it in for you will reject reading too much more of these miracles coming from the hands of a lonely, lost and albeit fearsome Russian teacher of English as a second language; there are some other variables to square away.

For one thing, who paid the Ruhelman brothers to be there and was it enough money? That is a serious question because it is not so often you are pulled off your bike, barber tattooed punk rocker ways and asked to steal corpses that get resurrected and then march off to foreign lands on flying trains. What if they were not paid enough, would faith sustain them?

What of other whats’. We are told Adon has had many lives, but how has he used them? Has he squandered or has he done what he could with a lot against a lot? Has he just basked in the privilege of reincarnation and used it to awe and fuck a laundry list of Alina, Natalia, Yelizaveta, Alina II, Maria and Adelina; a list of six cold but loving Russian women, was that what he used all those lives for? No, periodically he also fought evil doers too.

What of Arelene the quiet when sober Fenian Republican who was also at the 1^st Congress? She was mistaken with the Holy Spirit she was so quiet but she had seen terrible, terrible things in the coal country of Australia. She’s survived Ilya the butcher’s blade because she’s flown home to Belfast out of his reach, and now she was here. She woke up in the barn after a long flight and short flight a jump out with Watson; she two was in the blue and brown; blue uniform and brown leather jacket and she also had a gun but hadn’t gotten it warm in the fire flight. She was just stunned, what in the holy fuck were they all getting into?!

Now the Ruhlmann’s being Ruhelmen were not going to die without being well paid and they weren’t going to follow this fuck train of preposterous magic much further because the contract, albeit the oral contract over the pay phone with Princess Akhtar was, get the man’s body and wait. That period of waiting was over days, at least two days of walking ago. And their phones were dead, no one had asked the aspiring messiah could she charge phones; only could she produce Sushi out of midair and turn water into wine; they got spoiled.

And the Haitians were taking it as it came because anything this powerful had to be respected and implored; could it be utilized to save their people. Watson and Tiputti had lived several lives enough to see this as a great game and they as soldiers in a great old war. And whatever could make a train fly could unseat the musician, the president for life of Haiti, and burn the Dominicans, and this time for good.

And Charlotte was following Watson because she had this fire in her and she didn’t know when again a man like that, a gentleman and gangster would be her part of the world again. The film maker Bruckman, we he made films, because if an Ivory dies in a forest, you know how the old saying goes.

No one cares if he dies even if he gets caught on film, but you have to keep a record of all these people dying so nobly in all these forests.

I’ll tell you what will happen before they get to rob a train and levitate it, this isn’t X-Men or the New Testament. Things are going to burn down and out gang will thin. Because no one, not one person trusted Adelina Blazhennaya. Not because she was Russian, but because she kept clearly doing what she had to do for so many years to survive. And how would that translate now that she had powers, no expected her to keep burning for them much longer. When Ilya caught up to them she might really be tempted to just do her, become some kind of trophy with some magic and get her parents safe.

Adon, since he woke up from being dead was having a harder and harder time remembering what the Great Revolt was for. He basically woke up feeling emotionally defiled because that who had been his one, well latest true love well she had lay in a bed with that bald Russian oligarch and professed her love for him.

That’s all that mattered to Adon, that he was no more to her. Since she pulled his corpse back to life, and she should be thankful, but he wasn’t. She had left him for another man and he was mortified and the cause, well the cause was going to have to wait a day or two more because all he could think of was pain, the pain of rejection. Of not being good enough, no matter who lives he’s lead, no matter how many saves he’s made, villains defeated, battles one; he could not get this woman back; Adelina; who he loved so much.

They were sitting in the woods a nightfall. The Konnecticut woods are very thick and very hard to break through without a path finder. They were all still following her. In their own ways, for their own reasons, even though no one trusts her at all.

Sebastian thought back to something Avinadav DeBuitléir once told him when they used to preach on soap boxes in dusty Be’er Sheva, “In the days to come we will have to be our own Messiahs.”

He hoped they would be up for that.

 

 

 

Scene 26

Camp Burlingame, 2015ce

Konnecticut

 

There came a point when it seemed like they all had to rest because even young Adelina was having trouble making the fabric of the forest comply with her beck and mystic demands. So they all sat in a small clearing back to back, deep in the green hill country of Konnecticut, perhaps eighty clicks from a place called Stafford Springs where Adon had been pilfered from the Catholic Hospital St. Francis of Assisi. Surely he’d done some miraculous things in his day.

They all sort of crumbled to the ground unable to remember when they had last slept, but Arlene knew; she hadn’t slept since Belfast. Which was about four or more ago, she was good on little to no sleep, she kept positive, which was vital to surviving life.

Eric and Joseph were snoring. They went out cold, no one had really agreed to take watch by Tiputti Capois slept with one eye open, which was the Haitian way when danger seemed near. Watson slept with an arm around Charlotte Kamande and Bruckman snoozed on the ground, the camera finally dead and off. Well he had a backup battery but figured he’d wait for great insight or fire fight, either or. Adelina wasn’t sleeping, just sitting and meditating, and Adon wasn’t sleeping, because being dead is like a very long nap. And a satisfying one.

Then there was no one left to count, nine renegades.

There were all these variables that Adon and Adelina could see because of their powers. He wanted to trust her, but he didn’t. Emma had been so good a proving she was the boss. Adelina was making this all up a she went. She had little to formal training it seemed. Emma had tasked her years ago to get Adon’s head right before the Great Revolt; the 3 million black man uprising at the Labor Day Parade on September 1^st, 2012 that was the precursor to national revolutions that had sense all but taken the USA out of the Great Game. The dismembered United American States regime based in Chicago was lead for Barak Obama for three terms before he was assassinated. Was that real? Since the massive shift in the consciousness that took place on December 21^st, 2013 what was real and what was illusion seemed very hard to ascertain. That was because lots of conscious people recruited at Burning Man festivals and TED talks had just out right sided with the oligarchy. Lots and lots of them, yoga doing, meditating, healthy eating tech and sorcery that just one way or another stayed out of the Great Revolt.

The power of the Revolt had been that it broke American as a hegemon, but certainly not as a people; there were as of 2015 about twenty micro-states mostly on the East Coast; the biggest one had been the Breuklyn Soviet. After a lot of fighting and terror many were brought back into the UAS; but Brooklyn held out because it acquired nuclear missiles from the Russians. Detroit and Boston fell. When this happens in Africa, which it does all the time; do people hear or think about it in China or the US? No, not really. It just wasn’t real. So the fall of America didn’t mean a lot to a lot of poor black and brown people, because Europe still exploited them and now so did the People’s Republic of China. There were just more English speaking whores now it seemed, maybe less English speaking pronouncements for democracy. Actually it was quite a lot like what happened to the USSR in 1989, and what happened in Brooklyn in 2015 was often compared to Chechnya to the glee or Russian commentators, the chicken had come home to roast.

But was it real? Who knew; what the fuck was happening in Syria since 2012; no one really knew; Sunnis killing Shiites killing Alawites killing Druse killing Christians; Islamic State some other groups like the Turks and Kurds; who knew. Just because the Age of Aquarius was steadily bringing consciousness; it didn’t mean you could make a chimp into a Bonobo.

Adon was soon  on his feet deciding to stand full watch, not one eyed Haitian half watch; though he did trust in that. He wanted Adelina to see him vigorously in the game. But she would not see him because she did not care.

Every man would like to imagine himself a real winner but not Adon, for every time he died he took it as a colossal failure. This time was worse because he so underestimated an enemy that caused so much carnage.

I don’t think a lot of people understand what a bitch reincarnation is, what a curse it can be made worse by remembering your past lives quite well.

So Adon was thinking about that. How much he hated disappointing his tribe, getting people killed without really changing the game.

There were bonobos, there were chimps and there were aliens and the mythologies of trying to cover the chimp bonobo wars, the alien proxy conflicts; well you had to be creative. When millions of people had their consciousness way upped in 2012 it shed no new light on the genetic and species level wars for this diminishing return of turf.

You have to take a deep breathe sometimes and realize you’re not wired the same as the other ones. You’re not as risk adverse, you’re not as easily tempted by wealth and flesh, though flesh is always a temptation. He looked on her and felt her grow colder just the small act of that.

He looked on the merry band of rebels here and wondered which would make it all the way to Haiti and when they got there what exactly would they do. Moscow was so far from Haiti. If Brooklyn Soviet still stood maybe some fighters would come, unlikely as most everyone he knew had been killed.

All of a sudden he wanted a cigarette, it was just his default way of remembering pain. Why had acted so stupidly? Why had bitten off a bigger bite than he could chew. The answer was that he loved Adelina more than he could recall loving anyone else and he was both horrified that she was in danger, and horribly jealous that a balding oligarch would take his woman.

Maybe that was his worst fear, maybe which is what kept the war going for him all these lives and all these years. His worst fear was that a woman that he loved would leave him for a man who had money simply because she wanted security over love, and that had happened a lot it seemed in different ways. Another way to look at it is that no woman wants to be with a fourth dimensional revolutionary who seems to wake up yearning to get himself killed again. No one is into that at all.

And yeah, he had some issues with women. He didn’t really trust them, he pretty much other than Emma had never met one that he didn’t equate with being something of a whore; at least in the idea that it seemed all women basically slept with how would feed them. That’s crude but a t some point he turned to Russians because they were more basic about the whole thing; there was romance, there was affection, but really the triple bottom line of dating one is why he did; they never judged you, they always improved you, they always walked away with a clean break almost like surgery if it got crazy, and with Adon it did a lot.

 

The mark of an insane man is doing the same thing and expecting different results, but it also shows persistence, which is attractive in the Russian world; dogged single minded pursuit\ of what you want at all and any expense.

 

She looked asleep, Adelina, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t judging him. She wasn’t missing him or dissecting what could have should have would have; they were done. Done a year ago. She had brought him back because Emma would have told her he’d be useful. And she didn’t hate him that much. Enough to not speak to him, for a while. It was torture to be alive next to the woman, the latest woman of your dreams and she wouldn’t even hand you midnight sushi. She wouldn’t turn his water into to wine. She wouldn’t cuddle. She was done with him.

That was their way Russian women were. They could just turn you off with no lingering. They had no sentimentality that perhaps made relationships linger, when their mate was no longer a viable partner the deal was done.

In the cold forest twilight, the forest spoke in tongues and moon had gone out at some point. The little otriad band was puppy piled and most happily snoring. Adelina was meditating on what was about to happen and Sebastian Adon was trying to keep guard, stay awake and stop thinking about her, which was impossible. He’d have to shoot himself to stop.

Which could be arranged if one thing had to come to another. All he wanted was a soulful and understanding palaver; but he wasn’t going to get one. She was making a point and her point wasn’t a Russian or American point; it was a simple human point.

You are unstable. You brought danger to me and mine. I can’t pretend you’re going to get better, that there is going to be a happy wedding and cute kids. That thing I used to say about you being a changed man once you got me pregnant; a real man made from a father; it isn’t going to happen. You caught the garter and I caught the bouquet, but I’m sorry Sebastian this is not an American movie; this is a Russian American noire. You’re gonna die in a hail of bullets for a ‘cause you didn’t have to believe in, I’m gonna marry on older richer man and if push comes to shove jump in front of a train.

No, no it could be so different he thinks. If I only have just one more chance, one more life to live let me use it to make proud this woman I love so dearly. They tell me what of me? What of my individualism. I know it not so well. I am a merely a gunslinger with a cause who like the sound of his own voice making rhymes, likes drinking, likes riding horses likes fucking as often as he can and likes painting paintings of women with large breasts. I’m a classic man.

 

But if she is a pragmatic Russian collectivist take on new, potential Messiah, I’m just the guy who won’t die, holding the gun with all the rubber bullets. Put the non-believers on their asses if we have to. I’m just at the end of the rope.

 

If she won’t love me then I clearly have very, very little to live for.

 

 

 

Scene 27

New Galilee, 2015ce

Shores of the Atlantic

  

It’s sad when seemingly smart people don’t learn from their mistakes, ever. It’s a true measure of the breed of animal we come from. Chimp or Bonobo; from the earth or from the stars. It’s also not fair to push your alien cultural values or even our beloved universal human rights on people that have had so much bad hard vile gritty shot happen that idealism is an afterthought. I don’t think many people know any of their rights, so they sort of begin praying and plotting and grinding; and they just say, “Ship is sinking boys, get to the life rafts. Climb over everyone you have to.” Well the biggest, brightest rafts are called England, France, Switzerland, Germany and the United States. Maybe all of Europe really.

But, when you get there by any means you find that there are countries within countries, plantations within plantations. You don’t get free that easily, nothing is easy. The white people are cruel and they take a lot out of you. They don’t really want people there that don’t look like them, they make you work jobs that aren’t really very dignified.

The sad thing about people, the idealists that keep trying to get the bonobo out of the chimpanzee; get the holy spirit back in the howling mobs; it’s that they are fighting against something they don’t ever really comprehend the evil of, the thing the whites call the nature. There’s no proof to all that nature; but humans act poorly indeed.

 

Adon had talked a lot about not being violent, but really it was all just talk. It was as if he assumed everyone else came back when they died as well, which was incorrect.

I will tell you what the raid on Charlestown looked like; about one hundred men surrounded it and parked pickup trucks on the surrounding hills and then the shelled the industrial district from homemade mortars attached to the back; like they’d learned in Lebanon. Then like two thousand rocket propelled grenades rained down on a lot of things that Ilya Lubov owned, warehouses full of guns and coke and spice. And they shelled a bunch of houses too that had nothing to do with it. Overall it was a cowardly raid, but Adon himself drove down to the office that was listed on the company website as 87 Roland; and no one was there because a Russian Ivoryish businessman never had the true address of this office on the internet; but Ilya watched his whole payload go up in flames, not his empire; just his American weigh station. Adon kept his promise to change the skies above Boston blue to black; and you could smell all that drugs and software burning.

As he drove in with so much hate in his heart, jealous hate; he forgot that he hadn’t picked up the tab on Adelina Blazhennaya since November around the Indian Turkey festival; and in her culture that means he was burning down a whole lot of things he didn’t have rights to.

She called him early in the morning the night before crying, saying he needed to get her and that’s what co-dependent American cowboys do best; charge off trying to be heroes where they are not needed.

Well he’d picked up the tab for late lunch one more time before he foolishly ordered the raid; left her with her friend Lana before going on a needless war path.

He never found Ilya, he never saw Adelina again in that life. Charlestown burned for three days then Ilya tracked down everyone he knew and had them killed to make a point; stay away from all my shit. Stay the fuck away at pain of death from breaking and burning my things over a whore. That’s what Ilya basically assumed all women were; varying degrees of whore.

Well 40 days later Ilya had ordered the deaths of around 4,000 people; friends, family, people Adon worked with or had recruited; wiped out most of his outer and inner, outfit. And Adon died too in a Konnecticut psychiatric hospital, Ilya didn’t count on her bringing him back.

Everyone was dead, and they were alone in the deep woods of Konnecticut talking about turning trains into planes or some such fuckery.

There was now growing suspicion and also doubt. It all seemed like magic tricks so far, no matter what they thought they had seen; everyone knew the world contained magic, but when you see it you doubt it; it isn’t at all like the movies. I will tell you how the human brain deals with things it cannot accept, it refuses to believe, it invents perfect doubt or then it shuts down. It shuts down so that it has no obligation to absorb big thought.

The forest was quiet, it contained big black bears and evidently men with hatchets. It seemed denser than many American forests, it seemed to over good cover from birds and drones. It didn’t rustle but at night it made eerie noises that forests make. Like there were animals out there lurking and circling and moving in for their kill. Which was correct in several regards because Ilya had paid very large amounts of green money to turn over gun and axe in Greater Konnecticut against our nine protagonists and slaughter all but one; of course he aimed to turn a potential predator into a sexual house pet.

 

There was something very underage looking about Adelina, although in the years of man she was 27; she looked mostly like a pre-pubescent girl. Nothing slightly curvy about her. She had endless men after that attribute, in order to defile it. Sebastian included for he was part Cowboy part Barbarian as well, one was needed to be one to fight them.

 

She looks like a ‘Miss young thing’.

 

Suddenly there again the smell of something burning. The crackle of flame and they were all up out of their huddle; the whole fire smelled like napalm. Ilya was apparently going to use a less surgical approach. I know not if you have ever been close to a ring of fire, but it is not catchy like the song is, it is terrifying and it sucks the air out of your lungs. From vessels above goons were burning the forest down.

 

It was suddenly so, so hot, and we were all choking in the smoke from the rising flames. And where was magic now? We were clearly now going to be burned alive and die horribly!

 

 

 

Scene 27

Port Galilee, 2015ce

Shores of the Atlantic

    It was suddenly so, so hot, and death was upon us, we stayed together best we could flushed out the forests by flame. They must have dropped napalm on us. I remember Tiputti Capois and Watson Entwissle take point and rear respectively; and guided out band to the coastline, out of a choking hot death, the trees were all on fire. I could hear the terra drones, the grinding of metal men charging us, I remember the Ruhlmann Brothers opening fire with their pistols, emptying clip after clip into these killer fucking robots! Adelina Blazhennaya picked up man with her mind then shattered them, but there were thousands, endless waves of running metal skeletons bearing down on us from all sides. Nicholas Mapre filmed it, he never flinched, never got involved, but never stopped filming ever, and well I suppose someone had to. The Terra Drones made a screeching noise as they swarmed, they emitted a shriek to deafen us. Arelene and Charlotte were back to back firing Uzis into the robot hordes. Mapfre filmed on, believing in his hear this was the last stand for sure. Watson lobbed a regular grenade and bunch of robots blew up. There were too many, so Adelina drew a force field around us, a barrier they could not pass, but it so strained her magic, she sweated, she groaned, there are a million metal men trying to dismember us all. And there I saw Watson and Tiputti reloading, saw the Ruhelman brothers cross themselves and load the last bullets they had, thinking about boxing a machine, or a swarm of them, and Arlene and Charlotte they took positions, Mapfre looks finally afraid. What was I doing? What could I do? I had no blaster, I had no weapon at all. I just stood near Adelina should some robot hunter killer get through.  To one side, a burning ring of fire and to the other side the sea and metal men, killer Terra drones bearing on both sides. And then, I looked up and it was too late, an Ariel drone fires a concussion rocket into us; Adelina threw up her palm and it went flying into the drones; woooshe, BOOM!   She is so powerful, is Emma dead is she assuming the thrown?! It can’t be, this isn’t what was written at all. I have to do something, I have to help my……..friends. Yes, these are my friends are they not, only the brothers Ruhelman were paid, all these other were sent to rescue me from Waltham. “The Black Freighter is close, stay tight and we will wall get off this beach alive,” Adelina proclaims with power. The robots howl, I keep looking above scanning the skies for Ilya, this is all wrong, it isn’t like this at all in the New Social Gospel, no dying on a beach, no losing Emma. They’ve been hunting us for weeks, for days! If the Black Freighter surfaces it is vulnerable. And then I realize what they’re doing. Using me as bate to kill her. To kill Emma Solomon and Avinadav DeBuitléir, the leadership. I don’t know how these drones howl, everyone is tight back to back. Adelina looks determined and tired, but weakening. “As soon as they surface everyone follow me into the water,” she commands. The skies are black with vultures, more drones, and a helicopter way up, high enough she can’t bring it down and hold off the sea of metal death all around us. They’d rip us to shreds if no for her, the band is virtually out of ammunition. I smell fire, I smell impending death no matter what happens. I can’t remember seeing this before. Mapfre films for history I guess, Charlotte and Watson clutch hands on each other and their semi-automatics. Arelene prays quietly, Tiputti too. Adelina watches the water, and the black freighter begins to rise the enormous behemoth; the Israeli nuclear submarine which moves the movement leaders around. And my worst fear comes true; rockets hit that ship from all over above, below the tree line. They strike at the ship blowing it to bit before our eyes.   Was Emma on the ship? Was Avinadav? `   “NO!!” yells Adelina and the force field drops; and the drones rush our position. I see Eric Ruhelman fire point blank and puch ha robot in the face, it hurts his hand a lot.    The Black Freighter sinks back on fire, a ruined ship and failed rescue. What a botch.      “When I say go, everyone follow me!!” Adelina opens up the sea like Moses. She opens up a 16 mile corridor out to Block Island and we run down it as fast as we can, the eight is us just barreling into the canyon of water held open with her mind.    “Whatever happens keep running!!” she bellows in Russian, then English course no one speaks Russian here.    A metal tentacle grabs my leg and yanks be back to the shore, we had not gotten far even. “KEEP GOING I YELL,” and I didn’t need to tell anyone twice. Except Watson and Adelina turn back, the others run they run as hard as they can with all they have left running through the Atlantic seawall being chased by drones, the water held up by a powerful young woman.    There is a big flying Ariel drone dangling me, it is hundreds of Red eyes, it tightens its grip and shatters my left ankle.    Adelina with one hand motion hurls hundreds more drones into the brine, “Watson keep moving,”    I’m like forty feet off the ground being strangled.    “Watson, run.”   But he doesn’t know how. It’s not in the Code to run. That thing is so big and I have no more bullets, he thinks no powers like these ones. I hope Charlotte gets clear, and Charlotte runs back firing an Uzi at the Ariel Drone, and when the bullets run out, her eyes go Grey and hit it with fire ball of kinetic fire, it explodes and drops Adon to the ground. Watson didn’t know she had the old majik too.    “Guys, go now. I can’t keep the sea open much longer and it’s a sixteen mile run!” Adelina says. She looks less in control.         “We can’t run that quickly. Let’s just grab him and let’s go!” says Watson, declares Watson.    But before they even get to me hissing green gas hits us, we all fall down, choking. I can’t see where the others are, running like hell, not looking back at all. Mapfre, the Ruhelman, Arlene and Tiputti. And the sea crashes in on them, drowns them all as we choke to death on the beach. And more drones bear down on us four, holding us all down. Merciless metal arms and steel tentacles.    A helimonster lands, and there is Ilya and Dmitry, grinning. The drones force me and Watson prone and jerk our heads up.    “What a chase bitch, what a chase,” says Ilya in Russian.    He then executes Charlotte and Watson; two bullets in each head. Then with me watching he takes out a knife and he cuts off Adelina’s head slowly while I just bellow in sick black helpless rage, seems familiar. He throws her pretty little head into the sea.     “You, you shit, you worthless devil shit,” he says, “no matter how many times I kill you, I never forget how much it hurts you when I kill all your family & friends first. I love it! This time I’ll torture you for a hundred millions years, it will never end your torment!”    He kicks me in the face as hard as he can.    “Behold the bodies of your companions, behold your latest dead messiah, another whore I ravished first.”   He puts his dagger to my eyes.   And then he cuts my eyes out, my blood and the blood of my latest and most durable love tether crimson on the sands of Galilee.

 

 

Scene 28

Time traveling?

The past

 

 

Every time, that I am killed, I return immediately to the past. I have died many times, each is painful. It is very painful to inhabit the world so powerlessly and so indefinitely.

I always think of a woman, I always try and hone in on her face, remember what she felt like sleeping next to me, or what her smile looked like on the face of my un born children.

I have never died a painless death. I remember my suffering, my families suffering. My people’s suffering. I remember what they did to my woman.

 

I’ll tell you what time travel feels like, it feel like jet lag. It feels like getting a shit night’s sleep before a big day, or clearer still, a big new opportunity. You wake up knowing something went wrong.

 

When I first saw this woman, I knew only but two things! One, was that she was very attractive, exuding high class and the second that she spoke her English with an unusual accent indicative of either speaking Czech, living in Germany or have a Swiss lover; all of those things made me vaguely uncomfortable. For I am highly prejudiced to Europeans. While I was unfamiliar with her physical and also mental terrain, I had come across the woman architect in a Baha’i meeting in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, a liberal bastion of the separatist movement; a pocket of tranquil intellectual flatulence loosely north of Boston Soviet about forty and some five checkpoints to West to Sharashka Waltham, the prisoner camp I was being held at in the Winter of 2014. Now say you, there are no prisoner gulags in the United States of America; nor are there Soviets or free zones; is not that fat and happy place a great giant tranquil cream puff of make some money and gain some weight? Ha, well it was for some time. But by the time I met the lovely little architect, a civil war had been raging for two years, it’s very epicenter the city in which I was born New York, New York! Her name, yes what was her name it was also unlike a usual Russian name, but she was vaguely unusual woman with her accent as I said, but also her name, Adelina Blazhennaya. And she was a linguist and vaguely interested in my work so we exchanged our information at her birthday, just two days before the Chechens blew up the marathon and I didn’t see her for over a year. These were the years of the civil war, the so called Great Revolt and I was in this miserable prisoner of war camp, under a fake name with bomb embedded in my chest in case I chose to leave. I quite hated and still hate provincial Massachusetts, quite despised the chill of just three hours north. Despised my duties in the camp. And my ghosts, I was playing dead about to be shipped overseas in the service of the revolt. I was an agitation propaganda officer working as a paramedic. My death had been arranged in 2012 to assist my companions and we were bring a certain system of training rebels out to places abroad, but then I was ensnared.

A bomb was placed next to my aorta or somewhere besides. Whatever technology you think brings so much innovation to your life via the internet and smart phones is nothing compared to what the ruling elites and oligarchs and real power brokers have. I was forgotten in this cold dead place of purgatory while in New York and in Haiti my comrades and family, my lovers and friends thought me dead, and Great War raged inconclusively!

 

A great wall went up around Long Island cutting Brooklyn and Queens off from the USA. Heavy sanctions and drone raids and state of emergency.

 

I will tell you the worst thing that happen to a man is to forget his face, to forget who and what he is. What he is doing in life. Worse still, for him to wander so far from his companions that none no him and anything he thinks he could be, he is. That was me. Trapped in that special engineering camp walled in my highways and radio towers. The bomb that was put into my chest come with special instructions; build us a training system or you die. Die alone and forgotten. Your city burning yonder will be the fire under your feet, design us a system to unleash whole societies against the oligarchy.

For you see, while I served the rebellion; I was also a serf to the Oligarch mad man Sasha Perchevney who told me that if I did not design him a system he would sell my former lover Natasha Andreavna to the soldier brothels on the Western front. Powerless me, a scrappy intellectual and Ivory what could I do but what that mighty war lord wanted. And I was thought dead so no one came to look for me in Waltham at all.  And it seemed to snow in that place nearly all the time. Like American Siberia, manufactured with great hidden machines.

I’ll tell you what, I was thinking! That’s never been the problem, not at all. And the snow was falling hard, compared to what? I have no idea. Seemed hard for America anyway. What I was thinking then was that I was late, again.

That’s a terrible look in every single culture, except for chornay culture; it’s normal and expected. If a black friend shows up early, well, don’t worry that won’t. But I am not a Chornay, I am a part-Ivory half caste and it is quite cold in New York now, quite over snowing, quite utterly miserable and you wonder why people even choose to live in this country except for the ability to make some money. It’s worse in Boston, I can tell you first hand. Some better money is made here evidently, and they build a family and mythology around that.

I think I know some things about some things, but I don’t know anything at all about women, Russian women in particular. I can’t tell you anything of substance about Slavic culture, only stereotypes and inventions based on being around them so long. I would say with certainty that I’ve never met a Russian idealist, never met a Russian man at least not overtly claiming he’d commit any kind of high or low crime for some rubbles or better still Renminbi or Euros. There are perhaps over one hundred reasons Russian and Americans should or should not date; but they come down to aesthetics, culture, balance and improvement. This too, a stupid mythology because its’ all banter and barter and pheromones and fuck; it’s just about attraction to what you’re told is decadent or, self-improving.  The Cold War is not after all fought between individual antagonisms; but over politics. Most so-called ‘Russians’ I have met in New York City State are not actually even Russian, they are every type of other former Soviet Ivory; or Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Moldovans and Armenians; most Slavic Russians stayed in Russia. The Americans call anyone who speaks Russian, the Russians; but quite frankly outside the tallest of Manhattan towers and the highest of the high end; well there aren’t that many Russians here. For whatever it matters, in the scheme of the story.

I have met causally only a few in greater New York and Brighton, Boston, most in Brooklyn Soviet’s Russian quarter and all but one forms or shades of a Jeuf. Dmitry was born in Uzbekistan, but was Slavic Russian Orthodox as could be and a scheming hoodlum. I shot him and he wounded me in a duel for insulting the honor of Maria Parsheva, also a Slav but born in Ukraine claiming to be a Ivory. He lived together for two years she and I; a quiet geisha mostly. She was afraid of blacks, wanted to leave Brooklyn. She sucker punched a hooligan one night and pulled me bleeding form under a sixteen person pogrom. Yelizaveta is she half Ivory, born in Ukraine but her mother was Slavic Russian. She never loved me like I loved her, I chased her for over a year. It was more sentimental until they locked me up after the blizzard, for an unrelated series of events. I was then abandoned on Mondays and fucked apart on Fridays. I have no regrets, her mother didn’t approve of my condition or my profession. And, then there was Natasha Andreavna Skorbogatova from Penza; who looked at me with bright and completely fascinated alien eyes who I rallied my mighty little Otriad around her suffering and declared war to the death with the Oligarchy to avenge.

She was carried away into night. And the rising that occurred on the 1^st of January, 2012 was violently suppressed its supporters killed, imprisoned, driven underground or into early exile. Made to have never existed to the outside world.

I was transferred to exile in Shrakasa Waltham in the fall of 2013 and spent two years in that Special Engineering Camp. I met there perhaps the hardest and most glorious woman of my life then so far Adelina Blazhennaya, the coy brunette from Chelyabinsk; we fell in and out of love and finally escaped together to Hispaniola, D.R. and Haiti to train young partisans participating in the Great Revolt there.

But I owed a debt to Perchevney, so he took her away from me too and said finish your mental toils, finish your system or both your women will be sold to the Western Front to fuck Germans and U.S. troops. If you run again I’ll explode your Ivory heart! Little did I know that both my lovers were perfectly safe and Sasha Pervechnvny the Voorhi just liked to manipulate my weak American emotions. But, it was for the best because by 2015 the rebellion was going quite poorly and the rebels were being massacred and encircled in both New York and Port Au Prince, and here I was complaining about the cold!

Why trade one cold place for another, when people will treat you like an enemy alien, a whore or a criminal, or both. Maybe if I repeat this story enough times it will take on the veneer of recreational anthropology. For I had read their books and know their leaders ideas, and know their history and studied but failed to comprehend their language multiple times, I and my countrymen have no gift for language. I waver at times between extolling the hope and idealism my land cherishes, and denouncing the Americans as hypocrites and man babies, silly violent monkeys. I artistically and rhetorically paint with a wide brush, but I would not think any high civilization comes from the interior and the provinces. I am regularly accused of romanticizing the Soviet Union, but frankly not everyone on earth has a human right to television, two cars, two homes, a two course, four increment meal 2,500 daily calorie diet; and to get as fat they wish then die of heart disease. That’s not in the UNDHR. I’m sorry it is not. Nor is it a human right as I see, or have read to enrich yourself well beyond need on the backs of others; and the Americans have certainly done that.

 

While on leave twice a week I managed to see the Russian linguist three times even sometimes. Once for to paint together in Chinese restaurant, once to ain’t together in a Canaanite restaurant. Sometimes for personal poetry recitals, sometimes to hear jazz at the Bee Hive; I was unimpressed with my choice of eating, had wanted to be charming, but I was distracted. We kissed for the first time at a masquerade ball on Halloween. Eventually I took her to fancy fish restaurant, we drank a bottle of white wine and made love in the attic of the hovel in Waltham I was then living in.

 

The candles set the bed partially on fire and damn police towed her car.

 

I should keep all these views of mine more cards to chest. I should not paint myself into a cliché, or my lovely new associate into a cultural strong hold. She has a strange cute accent, so it’s not so clear that she is shaped by Russia, well of course she is, but she has been here since 18. It is not a passport or a world view it is a way of being. Like being a New York Ivory; but I and she are nuanced by experiences and by interaction. Every time I kiss a Russian I tighten myself, I tighten my circle I fight inwards, clasp closer to my family and associates; I learn about my failings and correct accordingly. Does every time a Russian woman kisses me; do they become more fiscally savvy? Do they earn more wide beliefs? Do they see a Slavic face with an American mentality; or do they fuck me and with me, one me and about me mostly because I am so curious, or just a curiosity. Oleg Medved the photographer, the Israeli Ukrainian who is most familiar with my artistic and agitational work he doesn’t try and answer questions like that; he just assumes I have an exclusive taste for Russian women, he doesn’t see anything peculiar in that. They are fearless, hard and very beautiful. As well as highly educated, combatively non-judgmental and quite literally rolling off planes and boats since 1989.

They being Oleg and I had once tried to have a series of talks about the so-called Russian mentality; but we were both ultimately Ivories. The Ivory has never ever found an empire more long term hostile to it that the Russians, short of the Germans gassing everybody 1939-1945 and the Spanish inquizitioning everybody in the 14^th-16th century perhaps Iran as well. The Pale of Settlement and Siberia were cold places where Ivories were sent along with others to starve and die. It’s just that when a Russian says Ivory, their skin crawls a little. Americans have learned to suppress that twitch, publicly.

 

It was in the Fancy Fish restaurant in the fall of 2013 that I found her smile most assuring and she blushed several times, and that was incredible because he didn’t know they could blush. “We’re human too you know”, she smiled so much they stayed much longer in the French restaurant than either had though and then it was a bit after midnight. He wanted her clothes ripped off and to taste her all night.

 

All his people were hostages. In Haiti and New York, the military and secret police were cutting down his friends and family. He felt at times that he was worse than dead; he was alive and inanimate. Allowing by doing nothing the oligarchy to slaughter all those he ever cared about. These were his dark thoughts; that instead of courting this young woman he should shoot up the place; should kill these chubby junior banker around him in the streets of the District Financial; gun them down helter skelter like the police did his friends and associates.

But he was no terrorist! He had taken an oath of total non-violence, though he knew and so did his god that in many other lives he had been a killer.

The lovely linguist was so completely charming, it came so naturally to her and so incompletely to him. She was teaching petty aristocrats in a small school in Newton. What made everything so much better than almost any dinner he’d had in the last several years was that one thing flowed to the next and it was all small talk. Which he didn’t even know he could make.

His 29^st birthday had happened the day before, it was his reason to be back in New York and confer with his associates, approved four days leave from the special engineering camp signed off by Alexandre Perchevney himself, Sasho. She had given him an art book on New York architecture for his birthday which was classy. And he had found a short and debaucherous story within it, about a playground for underage girls some robber Barron built on Madison Square Garden.

Now, from her perspective it was only medium small, but the dinner was nice and he was medium charming and medium handsome and reasonably intriguing because he was designing some kind of training system in a medium famous Sharashka, was a Baha’i and evidently a petty bourgeoisie based on his family living inside the District Financial, but what she liked the most was that he was educated. He was mildly funny. And she might have had a few drinks with him and seen where it went or maybe not. He was a little surreal. And normally they parted a little after midnight with a soft kiss on her cheek and he thought to himself he’d like to see her again, or a few times. It was happy to feel things un-extremely, to not be made into zealous creature about every single thing. But she leans in and makes out with him, tells him they’re going back to his place in her Red KIA Soul ranger.

 

“You’re gonna name love for me ok,” she smiles.

 

I will tell you what the loneliest thing on earth is, it is to feel you are insane for seeing something as evident as the sky being blue or the grass being green. To believe that poor people are poor because of the decisions of the powerful. To feel like you are incapable of being a participant in a great crime.

 

The third time he saw the last queen of Prussia, he was late. He was getting his hair cut. He was about to load a small crew of internationals into a car, get in suits clear fifteen check points and make contact with the Cuban special interest section in the heart of Washington D.C. He was late. It was rude and third impressions are really important. And he promised her dinner the night before but had to change plans because one of his crew was losing her shit, an Egyptian doctor, she kept talking about suicide. And he had really wanted to see Adelina the last queen of, not over morning coffee but over an intimate dinner. He’s wanted her to make a good blue print of his chest, use her keen eye, ask her to utilize her engineering skills to take him all part and remove the bomb and the heart too perhaps so he could stop with all his sentimental feeling to his species. He wanted her maybe to take him apart down to base components, dismantle all his usual malfunction. She wasn’t certified as a human architect but he knew she could do it, if he earned her trust.

They met for less than twenty minutes, he bought her some crappy green breakfast truffle candy and a coffee. Promised he’d write a story and take her to dinner. He didn’t tell her that the Egyptian doctor was brutally raped during the 2011 uprising and her parents were dead. That as they spoke an Afghani named Farooq and an effeminate fellow named Juan Mishanga from the Republic of Congo were loading several large bags of simtex into his Honda civic. Of course not, she wouldn’t understand why the National monument was a superior alien military weapon and needed to get blown apart. That wasn’t third date style talk. No not one bit.

She was annoyed and he could tell that easily, being an expert in women being annoyed. Should have gotten up earlier. Should have gotten a haircut on the road down to D.C., let barbers of Baltimore have a cynical go, the Cubans didn’t care what his hair looked like, just that he was not a spy for the wrong side. Should have said to the Egyptian doctor Mayada, ‘bitch be cool’ we have to bring 500 pounds of simtex across fifteen check points and three damn states. He should have just made the time, social engineered things to get her ass to dinner. Oh well.

There was a small nano-explosive wrapped around his aorta. So Alexandre Sasho Perchevney could blow a tiny whole in his heart and send him into a horrible stroke. And he still thought Alex, Sasho as most called him was going to send his two ex-girlfriends to a German brothel, which truly to a Ivory is worse than personal death. I’m not a terrorist at all.

But I will tell you what the worst thing in the world is to feel; that you were built of different stuff than others, constructed of other parts. I remember some old phrase about that which does not kill you makes you into stranger form and now here was I, a relic, an antiquity. He wished he could make the Russian architect understand all that fuckery. Maybe run away with her for a week or two to Cuba or Israel one day, the only places he didn’t watch his own back much. Had others to do it.

It was better sometimes to live in a world where you didn’t have responsibilities to others, or at least only one or two others. It would have been nice to be able to write poems and paint and listen to jazz music and see the wave’s crash on the sea wall or the shore, every single day before and after work or play. Sometimes, sometimes he wished that he could be renovated like a building, brought up to speed with the rest of the monkeys. He had so much he thought he could offer, but time had taken a gristle toll not reflected on his face.

He suspected maybe she’d see him again a fourth time, unless the short story was so outlandish that she might question the validity of his thought process and mind. But what of it, he had very little these days to do but write and tinker on that what he was building with the field trials approaching as soon as the white walls of winter subsided and he would be released from this cold and miserable place.

He had wanted when he was younger to be an architect, but now he was convinced that before anything might be built that was of use to those he answered to, well first he’d have to focus on knocking a few things down. There’s a dream I have, he told her. I wander down the board walk and end up in the White City of 4,000 Bauhaus structures, the golden age of Tel Aviv. And the war is over and we won, and the justice and rights are real. And everyone is ok, and I’m working on my third major book, and I see you again after all these years of struggle and I say, you wanna get a coffee with me? You wanna hear jazz over dinner? And nothing else is on my mind because it’s over, we won.

But there’s a bomb in my chest. The Bratva took some hostages I care about this time. My mother and father have high Ivoryish expectations about my medical education. I’m locked in an American gulag, at least three more timeless. I may have just helped some foreign agents bring a large IED into the Capital. I haven’t slept well in days, I haven’t gone to yoga and all this blatnoy with my case officer about this system I’m designing, well fuck it. It leads a man to smoke and drink, this vast and evil game.

You’re beautiful you know, the way you smile. I hope your stadium gets built before the rebels take Atlanta, which they might in 2017, all a matter of Afula Specials. We don’t have a lot of use for stadiums, but I bet without knowing you know that there are things you can build that won’t get swallowed up in the war effort. Like the Greeks, like the Bauhaus school. If form follows function, trust me that what’s in my blue print will keep us all building another ten thousand years.

 

But I would like to see you again, and I’ll make it happen. Somehow, despite the prevailing factors weighted against me. The commons sense to ask you to not see if you knew what were better for you.

Disjointed, that’s what time travel feel like. Bits of this reality, bits of that. My soul trying to hold into a corpse with duct tape and zeal, a zeal for something.

 

The bus ride on the Lucky Star Express cost $28 American and sandwiched him between two gay Canaanites or really, he was the outer crust to their love sandwich. American had just made gay as American as Apple-Cherry pie and mass shootings. The Empire State building was lit up like a rainbow. It was one of the new reforms to slow the separatist movements.

 

He caught the 8:45 out of South Station evading a small man hunt for him after he pried the impediment off his face and squirreled down an tunnel it took him 32 days to dig with a silver spoon in his mouth, well he was covered in filth in a blue kibbutzinik shirt, grey pantaloons and the bandana of Adelina Komarova, his now cold as Chelyabinsk steel ex-partner. She was working for the Germans now. He alliance with him most tenuous. He washed the tunnel dirt off at South Station, in rubbed into his dirty brown main a little Choco Latina General Product and he saved with a two blade razor to look more like plumped Ivory writer and less like a stone cold assassin, and Israeli killing machine he was sometimes written into being.

 

Before he swiggled down that tunnel his cell mate a Zimbabwean bio chemist yelled; “the memories are not real! YOU HAVE NO DEAD WIFE! YOU WERE NEVER AT THE DOMLPHINARIUM BOMBING! You’re ABSORBING THE TRAUMA OF OTHERS MY DERANAGED ASSOCIATE! MY DEAR PALE DROOG! You are not going to get any answers at that wedding in New York!! Take your damn salt!”

 

But he left Kudzai prying at license plate machine and got clear of Sharashka Waltham; the Zionist Internment camp they had been toiling at for over two years in winter and worse winter. A hell.

 

I would have the young dvotchka professional teacher know that I had to chisel through a plastic cage and with a hair pin remove from my face the mask that was keeping me speaking soothing words of poetry. Eyes glued to a telescreen unveiling world horror after horror! I would have her know I then had to tunnel nine hundreds aquariums, yes aquariums the bizarre system of measurement that is used in Gulag Camp to say just under three kilometers, in civilized measurement.

 

She smiled at him. What was real and what was so surreal about Sebastian Adon, Hebrew named Zachariah pronounced Zechariah with that kh-h-h should only Ivories and Arabs make. He would write and he was almost never one time. And he had designed her an eighteenth wonder of the world to honor her Mother Russia on the Apple of the Empire.

I would have the young, elegant and truly stunning dvotchka linguist know that for 35 days I was a captive. To my ambulant planation surely but then to a fiercer master that of Sharashka Waltham which seems to hold me in its thrall and not let me leave it’s westerly prison for what how now-pow! Two long years, nearly three.

How now, she replied, still grinning. She was at a new work site now the fearsome dome completed. The gladiator thunder dome of Atlanta, or Chinese internment camp deepening whom one asked at FEMA, those fucking people. She remained a happy optimist.

Well then she says, “All that escapery had in fact taught you to be on time!”

And he blushed. For it was true.

What did they make me a Master of he wonders? Sustaining International Development or sustaining himself for unrelenting struggle. With some coexistence thrown in there as if he didn’t play well with black and brown people.

“What was the last thing you remember, that made you happy, she asks. Ultimately settles on.

“I remember being at the Baha’i meeting and catching the eyes of a beautiful woman, so I spoke more. And I remember they had cherry juice, juice of every kind and it wasn’t too cold in Cambridge, so it was leather jacket season and I felt quite cool, and intellectual, and like you were watching me.”

“You just wanted to draw me like your other Russian girls,” she replied.

 

 

Scene 29

Port Galilee, 2014ce

Rhode Island

 

           

Her decapitated body is lying on the beach.

 

            I’m still dead. My head cut off on the shore of Galilee, they my body dumped ingloriously into the ocean. I knew we’d never reach Brooklyn, I think more in death about the past. Then I can remember when I’m alive.

 

I think about her all the time, even when I’m dead.

 

            I wasn’t very ready to see you, all of the times you were able to see me but you should not confuse that with apathy or disinterest, for au-contraire I have been interested in you in ways that have propelled your full being into the near pinnacle of my desire. But on several times I was unable to break away because I have been pursuing my work at the expense of my sanity. I was also kept in the course of our contact in the arms of two women that neither loved me nor knew what to do with me, neither encouraged my work nor bettered me as man, they just took what little was of my time and rewarded me with more nothing.

 

Sex sure is something, but it is really quite not that much of something when there is no passion or mutual respect. By my best count I saw the lovely little linguist; one in a Baha’i meeting, once for dinner, once late and briefly for coffee, and once for a picnic and some theatre, so four times, she had popped into my dreams on occasion, nothing pornographic, just smiling happy V, Adelina asking me something about skiing and happiness, and once she brought be book on architecture. She was a classy dame, and I was somewhere in the middle.

 

I can count the number of times she cancelled our dates; about three times and I on her only once, annoyingly so perhaps because she thought I was getting her from a bus stop.

So that was the balance sheet, but I still found her so interesting. There was clearly the hard of elegance, class and sexy of a former Soviet woman to her, but she smiled, and while superficial there was something to her that seemed completely out of the mortal world, as is she compelled fierce power, as is she was an aristocrat?

            Flattery gets one no-where, I’ll have you know that in May I sat in a café and made you may lovely sketches of our plan for central park; to impress you as you impressed me, but a hard rain came and you cancelled and I put those sketches in a green trash bin. They were silly, I am talented I think I bit, but we have very different talents. I was vaguely hurt, as perhaps you were vaguely annoyed each time I cancelled or was late.

I find you fascinating, in a better setting we could be classy and dance all night and I could dance and you could understand me, which is hard because I’m not really form here, I just play the part well. You teach so patinetly, well I’ve written nine books no one reads. You are very very elegant, and I can be only sometimes. What I want is to write you a good book and you tell me what you like and don’t like, I want to make you art but have you never feel muse like. I want to know a lot about you and I want you to know the real me, not the many me’s I play on the streets. I want us to be very old school and I want you to feel fundamentally desired.

Well what would this little book be about then?

It could be about whatever we want it to, this is America!

Adelina so many people bore me because I don’t know how to speak their language and I don’t know why they see the world from so low down, but if this is to be great story, a story about more than a mad paramedic American falling, or jumping or leaping toward a lovely Russian architect, then their must clearly have to be plot twists and robots. Yes, robots and while I had thought I was interested in writing about our plan to build a pleasure dome over central park, that might just be a center piece.

I will write you a page or so every day, but you have to encourage me, by telling me whether this thing I’m building is enjoyable to your continence. If the game is no longer fun tell me to stop, If my emotions become un-understandable, tell me to stop, but if you like the thing I want to build you, a book of your own then just tell me where you want to go to dinner and I will attempt to be the very best American writer you can handle, and great man as well.

I want you to see a greatness and cultivate it, but I have had a very hard five years in a variety of fields. SO, I am very vulnerable and very manipulative and I will hide nothing from you, but I can’t write alone as you can’t build alone, and I am not suggesting me need each other, not all. But I’d like to make you a damn fine novel, and I’d like to see your smile and Russia and also China and I’d like to have a great life, you know like everyone.

What’s this book about then?

Well for now it’s about a brilliant American writer, who writes books no one reads falling in love with a fearless Russian linguist. But he doesn’t know if he loves her yet, as they’ve only been on a four dates, only two of which were real, and certainly they know nothing about each other really, can only speculate. So beginning in the fourth chapter as this takes off, this is about building a floating pleasure garden over central park, about building, blue printing people, that’s where the robots come in, and probably there will be references to other things.

“One time we said good night and I wanted to kiss you, but it wasn’t there, you know, the magic,” he remarked.

“Well only in your culture is it four dates, kiss and marry. My culture we take as much time as we need, you know to make sure you’re good for kissing.”

“See me again as soon as you can,” he says.

“Don’t be late and don’t let me down,” Adi replies, “I’m clearly gambling with a few things dating a Ivory, a paramedic and a writer. None of those things is in the American dream.”

“I want you to understand I’ve always, always wanted to spend more time with you, but there were other women, there was exile, excuse, excuses.”

“Well write for me then, make me somehow immortal in an age where none can read.”

“I’ll do as good a job as I can, for a Ivory writer paramedic.”

“Don’t pigeon hole yourself,” she smiles.

“Do you believe you can miss a person, if you don’t know them, miss the idea of them, and miss the potential?” he asks.

“You think I miss you? I don’t know you well enough, you’re a curious character courting me, irregularly and also inconsistently.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“Well I think so.”

“I won’t make any more excuse then, I find you very captivating and dagger sharp, I want you fully interested in me and my work, and yes I want you all to myself, want to earn that. But for now just see me as often as you enjoy and know that 4 times in nearly three years is very weak game, so we have to both try harder.”

“But be on time, be decisive and no excuses.”

“Yes, I’ll improve.”

“See you Tuesday evening then, before we fly away.”

“Where are we flying off to again?”

“Me to Moscow and you to Barcelona, to inform the underground of the things we have seen here, the rumors of miracles in the North woods, the liberation of Brooklyn, the approval hopefully soon of the Grand Castell; my masterpiece soon to be built in central park; if we do not tell them these kinds of stories they will believe the news, and the rebellion will mean nothing.”

 

Kiss me again I beg her with my eyes. And she does, happily.

“When you wake up, you’re gonna be back in Breuklyn.”

That makes me happy I guess, If I can’t be back in my country, if I can’t be with the woman I love because Ilya just killed her, well dreams of Coney Island and the Brooklyneers I guess will be lesser nightmare. I’ve been in these camps so long. Haven’t been home in a while. I read in a letter things have really changed, I may be irrelevant.

 

 

Scene 30

Ave H, District Midwood, 2016ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

           

My heart skips a beat sometimes, it’s called a congenital abnormality, non-pathological, my heart just is irregularly irregular, and really so am I.

 

I was at the gymnasium, disguised in a flicker mask, the skin tight back to hide my ace from cameras and people I know, who think I’m dead. Might be dead, it all might be just an afterlife.

 

The Spartan Gym on Coney and H, near the Kent Theatre where the fifth Ivoryish Quarter of eleven in total meets the Pakistani district, the only one, a den of cab drivers and spies of the ISI and well, I work out with them. I was closing in on mile three, I want to look good naked. I have over the years gotten drunk and taken most of my clothing off, but this is different. There’s finally going to be an EMS calendar and I kid myself I can get diese fast enough to be Mr. January, but realistically speaking I want to be desired. The calendar is a running joke. The firemen have had one for forever, twelve beef cakes raising money for vets and injured brothers, but they blocked us all the time when we wanted one. Without a long story interesting only to ambulance people, the FDNY EMS and the Fire Suppression side are very different places to work and be. And, again they have separate paygrades, EMS far lower, and also the EMS don’t have a calendar.

 

It was kind of a running joke I’d be Mr. January. I am not fat like most Americans, but I have some terrible burn scars on my chest, a small bullet wound in the right lower quadrant and I wasn’t gonna beat out a number of actually fit people to the slot even if I had a whole year in Spartan gym, I don’t look terrible naked, but I hate how I look naked or clothed in any mirror. Because in a mirror I see so much that isn’t real, or should I say I cannot prove I real, I see a madness in me. A squandering of potential. A million voices whispering; what the fuck are you doing in this shifty gym on the borderlines of the Paki-district; trying to get your body in shape for the next time you see Ms. Blazhennaya, that is when and if she ever wants to see you without a shirt. You’re in this gym trying to be Mr. January; but really out of 13,000 Ambulance workers, surely 12 are hot and fit to shoot. I’m running myself in circles to dancehall music, covered slick in sweat, and the voices, the allegorical voices and the face in the mirror say; that woman doesn’t give a flying fuck about how you look naked, the very minute she learns what you really do; you’re wasting your time. She designs stadiums for Christ sake. You put bombs in buildings and give speeches, there’s no future in that.

 

What did the voices say?

 

A mad man, except as the Rabbi Moishe Klein once said; “a sane man in an insane world is what?” And he really-really loved the same 40-60 dancehall songs, now some electro-swing as Oleg Medved was still trying to make a Slavic man out of him, for whatever reason, pity.

I’d been working all of Saturday into Sunday morning on the ambulance, but no one died. Two were sick, one was going to die eventually as she was very old, but we are all going to die eventually. I was one of the original voices for the EMS Calendar. Because I helped found the only EMS newspaper that fought for our living wages and rights, but that was before the Great Revolt, my exile, my faked death and my time in Russia and then my time in Haiti and the camps.

I’m an old/old soul and when I run I feel something take hold. Telling me to do more than I’m doing here, in the safety of the shadow of the mountain top. Even in this Ivory-Pakhi ghetto of Midwood, I’m just a stone throw from the man in the high tower, the men.

She’s an architect, it’s been a few months, I wonder if she remembers my face. I don’t really know anything about her, I just want to impress her. I want to be able to look her in her dreamy eyes and say, “my love I may have to lead commandos into the United Nations building and take all of the delegates hostage, hopefully without much violence, but I swear to god if you invest attention in me I’ll be very dear to you and one day, one day I’ll calm it all down and be a business man or politician and you and I can have beautiful exciting international life, grounded in Manhattan of course.”

 

She won’t buy that shit. Write her a poem, start a war.

 

Now, across town in the Isle of Man, which I’ll remind you is part of the United American States, not the sixty odd breakaway rebel autonomous zones; such as Breuklyn Soviet, Bronx Soviet and Goddess Soviet (once called Queens), the Isle of Man has very tall steel glass towers and Federal troops pointing rocket batteries over the East River, and the mile high wall still stands even after the 2017 major breach of the ceasefire. The towers took some fire and several went down during the 2017 War but really, they just build them taller and taller. Now how do you cross from liberated rebel territory back to the U.A.S.? With money and passport, real or fabricated of course, you can still take the subway from the Atlantic junction. Between 2012 and 2017 there was pretty rigorous attempt to quarantine the zones. But Russian and Chinese intelligence services, and the cunning of the Zionists shorted that up. There was the famous 2015 Millennium Theater hostage crisis that turned into a bloody gas choked flaming debacle. There was the 2017 War where Detroit Soviet was wiped off the map and there was nearly a thermos-nuclear exchange.

 

But things have thawed, a little. He met her in the People’s Republic of Cambridge in 2013, when he worked in the special engineering camps for the rebel alliance. Now, he was in fact seeing someone and she was too and none of their four meetings had what you would call sexual tension, but there was very lively banter and she charmed the living hell of him.

 

Now as he toiled in the Spartan Gym post shift official, thinking about what was coming soon, a very un-wieldy assignment. She was working late on a Sunday, drawing up the latest job. Her job was legal. Well mostly legal as she was not technically speaking in the United American States legally, or legally allowed to engineer sky scrapers and stadium, or even really certified as an architect, she was just talented enough to have her skin in the game. They call her a solution specialist, but she was doing the work of four architects, paid quite a bit less. She had real and unvarnished talent, and she came here to build.

That he existed to largely level almost every institution that funded her building; the wealth, the powerful the developers of what was left of the American dream. She didn’t know that yet, and he wanted to hide it very badly. But it would never take so long to discover that his paramedic work was a highly cynical ruse.

She was in the office alone, not always but on Sunday she was. She was using a computer program to tell her how much weight the structure could bear if she made it twist in on itself getting wider and wider as it rose, she was designing through a proxy of her companies highly paid architect a new citadel on the West Side near the latest portion of the Skyline.

She was building a staircase to heaven, once pylon at time. She was raising steel bouquets as offerings she was making herself immortal, even if in someone else’s name. And building on the West side was more sensible because the rockets mostly ended up East of Second Avenue.

She sometimes invented that she was going out town. And sometimes her lovers took her out of town, but most often she was drafting monoliths. She was late night in once office or another and she was trying to make sure she left her mark on this country, before it further unraveled into civil war and fading importance.

 

Adelina was all about her work because it was a means to an end and that end involved two very important things, and you will not easily guess what they are, but trust they are most unconventional.

 

 

 

 

Scene 31

Ave J, District Midwood, 2016ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

            Even masked off my sleep never found me, I rolled around in the small, dirty Breuklyn safe house wondering exactly what was coming, as the way time moved for me was different. Let me explain, it’s vaguely unnerving.

 

I was living my entire life all at once, with a reckless disregard for boundaries. I had accepted a world view in which there were many lives to lead and while this one was important so were the ones before and after it, which made death seem a trifle, danger a thrill and awake I was living in the past and the future together, I was in other words wholly distracted.

A woman once told me that when I became a father I’d be grounded, but I wasn’t afraid of that, I just wasn’t fit yet to be anyone’s anything.

I don’t wish to come across like some mad Hebrew prophet; no not all I was remembering things that were not objectively real and envisioning things that were unlikely to happen, happen soon anyway. So let me speak to that. I was unable to sleep because I truly desired this woman in a very real and total sense, but I was completely aware of ability to shall we say, well not be what the modern man is supposed to be or what I presumed she wanted. I just found her totally engaging. And beautiful, which is wonderful, but she looked kind and also fun, and I needed fun because I’d been doing very not fun things for the past few years. Not all, but quite a lot of not fun looking into an abyss.

When I was little I used to build. I used to build wood cities and populate them with soldiers protecting women and children from, well I guess Imperial Storm troopers. My brother would build an equally elaborate citadel of blocks and tinker toys and populate it with soldiers, as of course eventually we would invade each other. But that didn’t happen as often as you might think, him in one room building, me in another, sometimes high, sometimes wide; often we’d build cities all night long, fill up two rooms at least of the dascha, country home in Russian, we’d never even bother to talk, we’d just build bigger larger cities and fill them with soldiers and tanks and fighter planes. NO PLOT, just tale of a rebel city and an imperial city and we were always forever at war. Troop engagements were limited. Eventually, we’d go out of the dascha into the cold and we’d wrestle and I’d always win because I was two years older. Very civilized wars, the two generals would just wrestle, and house guests to the dascha would see what they wanted to see; two young savants building cities, but the cities were only a vessel, they were just high walls to hide princesses from storm troopers, I’m sure my brother had his own internal mythology. As we got older we’d stop wrestling, we’d assume the form of ground troops and we’d raid neighboring Dachas dresses in green fatigues. We’d blockade roads, we’d capture American flags, we’d burn some, we’d level football fields, we’d lob water balloons at cars, and we’d make hooligan terrorists of ourselves. I think the local cops were involved only once, may have burned something down.

But we kept building those cities until I turned 13 and he was 11, when we discovered girls and alcohol and marijuana cigarettes, raves and hip hop. And it was really all downhill from there, no more pretending. No more time for bourgeoisie make believe.

You see the reason I became a subversive and worse, instead of becoming an architect was not because of math and science. It was because I got involved in a host of questionable pass times. And that’s a whole other story.

I lay up all night worrying about something that seemed outside my normal worries. I worried stupidly that I wasn’t good enough for her. Which is the Ivory in me, always secretly a nebbish. Always worried that he’s not man enough, not strong enough. That’s the shit that got Israel into so much house of violent crazy.

But sometime after 3 am, when it was dark and the CCTV grid went blank for just fifteen minutes. After he’d done some writing for her, done some writing for him, tried hard and failed to not look at naked girls on the computer, waited and then at 03:05; down the five stories out the back ally, quietly West on J. taking advantage of the just fifteen minutes when the Yiddish mafia wasn’t watching the grid officially anyway.

He made it to the garage door of a very big Sephardic house on J and 8^th. A big thing of beauty, of self-acclaim, not he can’t really say what the style is, it’s a little old world, a little Tel Aviv suburbs he wraps on the sub-basement ramp garage door, about ten minutes before the cameras will go back on.

 

“Nice of you to join us boobala,” says the Rabbi Moishe Klein, “you look like shit, it’s bad to never sleep.”

 

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” I say.

Moishe grins, knowing I’m dead.

Moishe is a little over weight, pudgy is the word, brown hair not in uniform tonight. And clean shaven and this is not his house, it belongs to some Sephardic doctor, but we use the basement, its Kosher. Someone told the Syrian doctor it’s a Mitzvah to let the rebel Alliance use the basement. The room is a big steel death trap.

“You used to be a real boss, now you’re confined to a shitty two bedroom on house arrest and you have to sneak around. It’s sad. You need a new face. Gonna cut some hair off you, well not me, you know who, she’s a vet.”

“I have a date on Tuesday.”

“You don’t have bupkuss. You’re gonna do a nasty job that no one wants to do, you’ll do it cause you don’t fear death and you got no real attachments.”

“I have a loose, date on Tuesday.”

“You need a new hobby, you need to remember the stakes. I should slap you around some time! You need to be a team player. You need a shave and a new car and a new face and you need to get out of Breuklyn, where nobody trusts you, nobody believes in your shit. Well I do, I do!  But it’s time to do some more work, you were in the camps too long, you let the Russians fuck your head too long, you put on weight.”

“I’m gonna be on the calendar!”

“You aren’t gonna be on shit. The camps they messed you up. They got you mixed up between Breuklyn and the Isle of Man, between Haiti and the Promised Land. What did you even build for them?”

“I built a new mental system.”

“Well my fine Golem, off with your clothes. Yelizaveta is gonna fix you up with a new identity, some new papers and we’re gonna wait right be for dawn and we’re gonna get in a nice car and drive you to Manhattan, and tuck you in at the Empire Hotel. And you’re gonna be German tourist. And then rest, well you know the rest, you’re gonna have to do another job.”

“And my date?”

“You have absolutely no business leading on civilians.”

“She’s a linguist.”

“Yes, and you’re a paramedic.”

“I am a paramedic.”

“Yeah. Well you know a lot about drugs, needles and electricity.

“Moishe, you‘ve changed. You used to be funny.”

The lights flicker, and a robot walks in, and she’s really quite a lot like what he remembers Yelizaveta to look like. He wonders if Moishe tried to fuck the med-bot.

“Wow, superior alien Military?” Adon exclaims, “you look pretty much just like her.”

“Spacebar. Please disrobe, we have to get this done in four hours. I’m an android not a miracle worker,” says the blonde robot in the white lab coat, with a green Soviet cap. She opens a huge medical valise pack of drugs and knives. Sebastian, me, he takes off his coat and drops down to his naked and lies on the steel operating table on a blue sterile field.

“You look like my ex Zoe,” he says.

“I’m designed by people owned by her father.”

“Moishe, you’re a married man with two kids, don’t fucking sex harass my robot ex-girlfriend when she puts me out.”

“Yelizaveta isn’t your or my type, she’s a skiksa fembot.”

“Lie down Mr. Adon,” she says, and Moishe gets an IV set up in my right arm with an 18 gauge and she knocks me out with some gas.

The last thing I think about before the blackness takes me out and they shave me and alter my face and die me blonde and make my eyes blue and make me in to German tourist, so I can get to my targets in the City; I think, what life is this? I just want to walk. I just want to be dancing with Adelina in cocktail jacket and I want to make love to her and I want to work at some basic job and not do, this, this work. That I do with my needles and my speeches and my electricity and my drugs and my, well Baraka.

 

She’s gonna think I’m a…….mad Hebrew prophet, a loon.

I go out like a light. Thanks to the gas, and robot, excuse me, an android replica of someone I used to know with world’s most dangerous man as a father. She cuts up my face and makes me ready for prime time. Maybe also some time travel.

 

 

 

Scene 32

The Empire Hotel, 2015ce

Isle of Man

 

 

I awoke in a hotel room, rested, reasonably; and interestingly not hungry. The room smells like Burberry cologne and crushed boysenberries.  I have used hunger to wake myself for years, unfortunately. I step off the big California king bed, obscenely more bed than I at this time need and I feel my feet crunch a pristine white fluff carpet like bunny grass. In the mirrored ceiling I know I have a new face, and with it new and tragic obligations. I awake in the Empire hotel and the year is 2018, is that really the year, there are many systems of time if you ask a mystic. I am now a German businessman, great success! Reborn as a man named Tillman Rheinshagen on my documents, of Frankfurt. And anything I ever was before is now ash. The year is 2015 and I am nominally in the United American States to earn a passive income. And unofficially I am to call a contact of the ZOB underground and begin the preparations for a hostage taking exercise. I flex my fingers and note that my nails are maneuvered they are not ground down from tearing. I note that I have blond hair. And blue eyes and all of my wounds are gone! This is a new body! The rabbi and the robot did miracles indeed.

 

I’ve never been blonde and blue eyed and muscular in my entire life.  And the year is 2015, which means as I flex my mental that Maya and I are about to lead a few dozen commandos into a highly perilous siege.

 

I may have stood up my fifth date (in this life) Adelina Blazhennaya, as honestly I had gone back three years in time down some Ivory rabbit hole. I’d not be taking her to the Russian tea room after all and enjoy smoked black hop-song-oblong in all its glory amid Romanov chic.

 

And watch what a magnificent giggle she has and her curious ways. I’m three years in the past. The revolt has just occurred and the siege of Brooklyn and Queens tight. The barrier wall had just begun going up along the FDR and a very-very nasty Third World War has erupted in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere.

 

I’m an aberration! In the past of an alternative future and I’m still alive and there are several things I know will happen, but a date with Adelina Blazhennaya is not one of them.

 

There were of course so many things he wished to do on a fifth date with Adelina besides drink smoked tea in the Russian tea room, it was actually limitless. He’d put some thought into a lot of angles, but he mostly wanted just to sit near her and watch her body and her eyes dart and Rivet and see what a smile she had, it was a real smile not an American one. And whatever darkness she was hiding she hid well, but delight she was delight. And had he not been turned surgically Aryan, been sent back in time. Well he’s have gotten to the Russian tea room Tuesday night at 10 pm sharp. He’d have opened every door for her as she would expect him to. He’d tell her about his ambitions and contradictions and try and see was she really an architect or was it. Cover. A front for other ambitions and motives.

 

If things had been different he’d have laid more of himself on the table so she could begin examination of his body of self. Fuck, but then there this small duty he had to his comrades and the cause and the Brooklyn Soviet Free State.

 

Monday he’d not slept well at all because if it were possible to anticipate things that moved fourth dimensionally he had wagered that the rabbi would send him deep into oblivion. Had he been able to die like normal men or sleep like normal men or make valid small talk he’d have not feared her. Not feared the fifth date.

 

Not real the first three times were not dates they were rendezvous. Coffee in the district financial. Only when a man had gumption to choose venues buy meals and dance is it a date in a true sense. But anyhow logically she has lovers, and time is a commodity here.

 

She wouldn’t even recognize his face anymore.

 

So he looked into the mirror and he removed the top row of his teeth, separated out his two front teeth and pulled a tiny USB and put it in his cell phone a Black Berry 2008.

 

And the names now in the phone were just a bunch of colors and one name; Adelina Blazhennaya.

 

Curious. When had he met her? What was the objective year? Curious questions. Anytime he left his body he also left behind parts of himself, aspects of his more universal being.

 

There were now only little flashes of memory. The year was, 1014? What had happened then, no nothing he’d objectively lived through? 1410? No this was a most futurist postmodern urban hotel. It was 2015. It was November. The day was day number November the 18 this was a smart phone, smart phones know the real date, of course thy do. Especially Black Berry which is the product of choice of the Superior Alien Military.

 

I stand, and the room shakes. No have not been drinking last night. I was in the basement of a big Sephardic Ivory Doctor townhouse, and there was a Russian designed android medical robot and she was allegedly doing plastic surgery on me while my Lt. Who I call a rabbi reminded me all the Ivories were dead, I was a Martian one of the last real ones, and it was a shame to turn my pretty brown hair golden and pretty brown eyes blue, but this was it. Another big job. Not my first or last.

 

What was this sureality all about? Are robots even real? Is time not linear? Are not there over 14 million Ivories?! More Ivories than anyone needs? I wobble again looking at my pretty Aryan face in the mirror. What year is this? 1943?

 

The smart phone says 2015, another feature says is also 5775, very future! Also 1410, for the Muslims pretty past. But in my back parts of my brain where I keep a picture of my dead wife and child, my scorched farm and my real name; it is AR 3. Three years after the beginning of the Great Revolt of 2012, quarantined into little pockets and ghettos supplied irregularly by the Chinese to spite the fading empire of America.

 

 

The smart phone begins to ring. Curious. I look again in the mirror to remind myself this is not a perverse dream.

 

The call is from Adelina. Which is even stranger as she never calls or texts only messenger or emails.

 

“Sebastian, listen to me darling you are being manipulated again. You’re being taken for a ride, again. They are riding you like a horse I should say.”

 

“Adi, I don’t know what to make of that.”

 

“Don’t say anything, all the lines are recorded. I want you to listen to this song. Put on your clothes. Check out of that Hotel and meet me in the Tea Room.”

 

“Adi, sweet Adi I don’t recognize myself.”

 

“Darling, you’ve been asleep too long. Now close your eyes and think my loving eyes on you and listen to the song, and get of that hotel as quickly as you can.”

 

The song plays “Hello, it’s me

I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet

To go over everything

They say that time’s supposed to heal ya, but I ain’t done much healing, can you hear me.”

 

And I begin a quiet wearing out via quiet weeping of my new pretty Germaine Azul eyes.

 

And then I know. Instinctively as I know I am no robot, no alien, no Aryan no mad Hebrew profit:   I can see clearly. That if I don’t get out of the Empire Hotel and make it to the tea room ten minutes before her, 10:10pm, then I’m not ever going to see her again.

 

And I almost throw up. Contained in the lyrics of her partisan song were recollected data of my past 3,000 years of memory. What have they done!? The bastards. To us and me.

 

A dark grey suit is ironed and ready and I strap what appears to be a small caliber fire arm, a seven millimeter loaded with non-lethal ammunition to left ribs and comb my new hair and I run out the door and out in the 2015 city, Common Era. And from this point out I suppose it will be largely her narrative because she’s the only number in my phone besides strange colors.

 

Inside the suit is a business card. “Call Watson it says. You’re no Sherlock.” And a number for ‘fire base 18’ is written. This is all a wild dream and I’m sure that soon it will not be over.

 

Not looking anything like my old self I run out of the Empire Hotel and flag a yellow cab and take it to 57th and 7th.

`

It is 10:15 pm when she arrives under the red awning of the Russian Tea room and she smiles and kisses me on the cheek and takes me under her arm and we briskly switch the rendezvous point to another venue.

 

For someone I know nothing about, I was surprised she could pick me out so easily.

 

“I think you were sexier as a Spanish gypsy, but I was raised to love people for their inner most parts. Again, don’t speak yet. Your words too will betray us. We will go to a more private place and talk of things we plan to build together.”

 

There are things I wish to tell her.

 

“Hush, my darling, nothing is true and everything is possible.”

 

Her smile and her ways lead me to believe I should trust her. What choice do I have? If she hurts me I won’t feel it. If she learns to need me I will never leave her side. Who is she again and for whose cause does she work for?

 

 

 

Scene 33

Wolfgang’s Supper Club on 57^th St, 2016ce

Isle of man

 

 

“It’s important that you for now minimize your personal shall we say, underlying cultural mythology. What you suspect is happening, right now is either a powerful thing far beyond yourself, or degenerative mental illness and late stage alcoholism, only you can decide. If your mind is unraveling. I have already decided for you, as I would not have allowed you to enter my orbit if you were a bad man, murderer, a loon or a drunk.”

 

There is something about her accent that is clearly a cultivated fabrication. For I wish I was less primitive and she would make hard love and interrogation of me in Cyrillic.

 

“I must question you, because it is you who are idiosyncratic not me. I am spoken for as they say, I have an apartment in Midtown rented to my name, I have a middle class, maybe even upper middle class job at a prestigious firm. I am not suspect, you are. I can see past the skin you wear, the body swap, I can know your inner parts.”

She smiles and I smile back because there is great affection I have built, in knowing and being denied her.

We are seated in the reserved upstairs area of a bar called Wolfgang’s, on the corner of 57^th and 6^th Ave, no one has offered us drinks and no one has asked us to buy anything, and no one is here but us. I had suggested we simple seat ourselves, as the Russian Tea Room is a more scrutinized place. Wolfgang’s has a smart phone and weapon check and it is found that she is carrying an exotic hybrid from China and I am carrying a Black Berry 2008, and a nine millimeter, unloaded except for two blanks and two/two rubbers, ‘what happened’ to the rest of the clip the negro bouncer asked me and shrugged.

And she picked the Tea Room and I like that place in principle, but it’s owned by Albanians and a real bourgeoisie haunt so it’s totally wired, and Wolfgang’s is a neutral place, and whoever has a phone check has an eye to privacy.

“There is no such thing anymore as privacy,” Adelina states. “We didn’t want the terrorists to win, true but privacy is for people who are hiding. We could well have conducted your interview, our date, in the Tea Room, but yes, I have some sensitive things to ask you. I think we have to assert a right to privacy sometimes, like the oligarchs do, like made people, make it fashionable to hide your hand behand tinted glass, don’t you think, no wait, don’t speak.”

The first time I laid eyes on her I had brown hair, brown eyes I wore a suit. I was speaking at a religious meeting, in the home of a Baha’i leader in Cambridge. A most pluralistic creed. There had been many debates happening at this assembly of forty odd souls and cherry juice and pear juice and tea. There was a woman hurting me at the time, she was keeping me as a lover and telling me I wasn’t good enough to be a more primary man, and my only recourse was that when any other women were to catch my I could offer only my card. And there was this spirited, sexy wonderful woman; Adelina saying little, but looking kind. And I had just begun my two year interment in Shrakasa Waltham, so I was just beginning to taste exile, and she had papers to move between Boston and New York. She was something of an architect. My childhood dream profession. And she was in town for only the weekend, but I hoped she would see me again and I told her I write, because what else was there to say; I do not paint well. My drawings are vaguely pornographic. And no woman in my 3o (then) years of life have ever told me my political theories make them wet, because this is not life. And I am nearly penniless, then and now, and was interred in a camp with bomb surgically placed in my hear tif I left.

I said then (now three years ago), “I write.”

“What do you write about?” she had asked.

“I write powerful and tragic ballads and poems and plays about the Russian and American dialectic; the mentality of our historic 100 year war.”

“Who won do you think,” she winked.

And I wanted to make love to her so passionately and with such force that she wished to read everything, wished to make me a better man.

“I think no one won but the nameless oligarchs of either.”

“Interesting.”

“Can I send you some poems and make a critique? They say I’m going to be the American Mayakovsky.”

 

“Do they say! You should blush,” she told me.

“I don’t know how.”

 

And she gave me her card and for three years I was with two women who never liked my writing and never read my theories, one who thought I should be a business man, the other who thought I should go into Democratic politics, and or join a hippy commune. And I mostly, mostly had to work in the camp, designing a legitimation of my life.

 

Adelina and I saw each other, I was allowed visas periodically to New York for Ivoryish holidays; I saw here twice for coffee and coloring, one for fancy fish and white wine dinner, once for a picnic and a play. It felt, each time like I was stealing her from her plantation, or her other lovers, but it always seemed like a slight haggle to keep the date going over an hour, but the dates were always lovely.

 

 

 

Scene 34

The Box Nightclub, 2015ce

Isle of Man

 

 

And the last date which was in May of 2015, on the eve of my exit for miserable barren cold windy Massachusetts we went to go see the actor Siegfried Sassoon in a bit part of Cool Hand Luke at the 59/59. I like him to weigh the energy of things, of people or persons I would like to drink from, would like to taste, I would like him to tell me if they are good for me, that’s what your close male friends are for. But he was surrounded by admirers and Adelina departed before he could make anything but a post play introduction, and all he said was “She is different, but a beauty, and I hope she understands you.”

 

He took all that in in two minute handshake post-play, and then he, me and the four Russian and black modal pretty bar tenders of the Box Speakeasy; we all drank on the company’s expense until 5 in the boker.

 

That night had ended with my face between some lovely breasts, and they were beautiful naked breasts and Siggy was making love to a co-worker, a sexy mulatress, and then the young women we’d bedded were asleep in his house and it was him and I on the roof and he said, “You really liked that woman, or you wouldn’t have brought her. Why did she run away into night?”

 

“I’ve seen her only three times before, I’m very taken by her. Adelina hurt me very badly and then left again for Moscow. Alina cheated on me, twice before the Congress told me after. Then she left for her hippy commune, some weird sect in Guatemala. Maria was boring.”

“Those names are very similar, your exes. Was that deliberate?” he asks with a smile.

“Shut up.”

“Why did Adelina run off, we were clearly going to go drink champagne with beautiful people for free all night in top end clubs? Maybe you bore her with politics?”

“Maybe your acting is trite?”

“No, clearly neither.”

“I have no idea?”

“Did you like Natalia?”

“She was very beautiful, and yes. It had been awhile since I enjoyed it. Neither ex had much passion compared to her, or endurance.”

“I hope you will not be offended.”

“I worry when you say things like that Siggy.”

“I paid her to sleep with you, you have a right to that disclosure.”

I didn’t know what to say, I just opened up my Newports and lit up another, I felt like I needed a mikva.

“I mean I’m sure she enjoyed it. She’s not a prostitutkah. I just though you needed it. That we should celebrate your coming emancipation from the Shrakasa, my new play! It was more like she won a bet, then I paid a bribe!”

Natalia had fucked me for several hours, she had made love to me and rode on top of me with her blond hair falling all over my scarred chest, and really it was beyond nice being fooled into being desired. My two recent exes were terrible in bed, one she had apparently been brutalized several times in her life so she was only capable of making love for under twenty minutes before she claimed my manhood hurt her and needed to be cuddled or played with. And my more recent lover, the cheat Alina; she was into things that struck me as vaguely maschoscistic. She used to have me choke her with a belt when I entered her. Was I even into that, well maybe a little I was?

 

“You shouldn’t do stuff like that,” I tell him, “It upsets my integrity.”

“Come on, your integrity is never under question by me.”

“I don’t pay women to sleep with me, or accept paid for sex from a droog.”

“I don’t know why Adelina Blazhennaya departed, but I do know she had aimed to depart after the picnic on the high line, and changed her mind. Thank you anyway for comping us.”

“I wish to make you feel like a respected man my droog!”

“Don’t pay your female friends to fuck me then, brother droog.”

“Alright, never again.”

“You are a beyond rowdy character Siegfried Sassoon.”

The phones are in the Chelsea apartment he rents on the side to disguise his families actual wealth, like his bar tending job at the Box or his BA in Philosophy from Columbia University. He’s the son of a lesser Oligarch.

“Having not seen you in two years, what is it then you’ve been getting up to. Being that I have not seen you, you have not asked me to do any real work for you,” he says.

“I’ve been living in the confines of a Shrakasa camp, designing a means to train medical workers, cost effectively.”

“How was Cuba? I heard you found a way to escape to Cuba and the islands, doing research of some kind.”

Siggy is Cuban, was Cuban one half at least via his mother.

“It was magical, and also un-understandable without speaking Spanish.”

“I’ve never been. We should go together in the winter. Try and buy property somewhere! You can drink and write and I can act, you can make new friends, get that bomb cut out, we could be freemen!”

He is already a rather free and untouchable man.

“I would like to figure out a pretext to get back as soon as possible, I find their current operations well in synch with my own theories and aims.”

“How does Natalia fuck?”

“Can’t you be serious?”

“Tell me, for I paid her damn well!”

“She fucks indifferently, as though she is neither here nor there, but she has hips and she uses them well and I have not had that much physical pleasure in two years, she was amazing then. Though your game has cheapened me.”

“I offered her too much money, which was all. You’re not some Wall Street pig, you’re a bohemian, an intellectual! A revolutionary and poet. She was easy to grease. And the seven of us put down perhaps over 20 thousand milliliters of vodka, white wine and Champaign.”

“I hope to go back to Havana in January if I can find the means.”

“Good, I’ll come along. We’ll have a good time. You can get up to new things. It has been two years since we did that job on the train. I know you’re connected to new and nefarious plots amidst the separatists surely. I am a free agent.”

But Ken was not a free agent, for as radical as his impulses were he was an actor above all things, surrounded by wealthy, famous people and beautiful women. We had met in university years ago, but when push came to shove he’d refuse the call of the underground, he’d never risk the resistance. And I was forever uncomfortable with beautiful women and free things of any kind. I shuddered to think what this son of lesser oligarchs had paid his co-worker to fuck me. I felt disgusting. I have a clear line about these things.

 

Adelina had wanted to make me into a very different man, she refused to be seen with me intimately in Russian Boston and hid we were dating from just about everyone. She left me for Moscow after our deployment to Haiti. Alina was young and crazy and to my knowledge wanted little but to live on a hippy commune and have dirty sex. I felt tired, tired from things I had seen and had read in the camp. I’d wished Adelina had been there instead, maybe not naked writhing in fuck in my bed on the fourth date, but I wished she’d stayed out with us and prevented this meaningless thing, this needless gift from Natalia and Siegfried to me.

 

It would be over a year before I saw Adelina Blazhennaya again, and here she was in red light sitting before me timelessly smiling into me.

 

 

Scene 35

Baths of Air, 2014ce

Isle of Man

 

 

 

And then suddenly, interrupting my afterlife, she came back to me and invited me to the Russian Tea room and then a fancy bath house it was December of 2014, we were back in New York and dating!

 

I need to work hard, and I need to get distracted in this woman. I need to pull this blond hair out and eyes and remake myself as the day we met, and assure her with my actions she can depend on me. I’m not a frivolous bourgeoisie, nor am I blue collar ambulance serf, nor hipster artist. I am complex as I hope she is.

 

“Why you are still all dressed up in German skin?” she demands.

“I had nothing else safe to wear.”

“And you’re boots are made of Italians?” she asks me.

I have on tall brown leather boots that barely match the futurist grey suit at all.

“You’d have to ask my Albanian tailor.”

Quiet silence.

“Is it true that you and your friends drink the blood of Russian girls and throw them off roof tops for sport? Because that’s what the paper says.” She doesn’t bat an eye.

 

 

So after her bold accusation she informed me she was doing some research for a German Intelligence Service and I ought to come with her and make a report “on my intentions” in the quiet dim light of the Air Bathhouse, where she at least believed the secret police had no wire.

“Ok, so now that no one can hear us. Let’s make real talk,” she says, basically whispers. We’re completely naked in the dim banya, in the Baths of Air, we’re back to back in a blue pool of lukewarm salt water barely touching. The place is empty besides us, a wonder cavern of steam and tepid pools.

“What year do you think it is?” she asks me.

“It’s 2015.” I tell her.

“No it’s not. The correct answer is that no one knows what year it is.”

“The smart phone says 2015.”

“But you’re smarter than the average man, so ask yourself again, what year could it be?”

“Ok, I don’t know.”

“How many hours are in a day?” she asks.

“24; that is my scientific guess.”

“Why do you believe that though,” she asks.

“My watch says so.”

“Who built the watches?”

“Probably the Chinese.”

“Does it improve your life, the watch with 24 hours?”

“I need to arrive on time to my meetings do I not?”

“Why?”

“It’s polite.”

“What’s your real name?”

“It’s Sebastian Adon.”

“Why do you think that?”

“That’s the name my parents gave me, it appears sometimes on my W4 forms.”

“Where are they now, these alleged parents?”

“Spain, I think. What are you alleging?”

“That you have parents, that’s what I’m alleging.”

“Look, darling. We make up mythologies every day. They help us cope with uncomfortable reality. Like Orthodox Christianity, and what it does or does not have to with one of the biggest historic betrayals of the Christ. My mythology, which helps we get through the day; is that I never die.”

“It’s 2952. That’s your real name. The serial number on your mechanical heart,” she tells me.

“I’m a person, not a robot babe.”

“You looked very different in Cambridge. What’s the name on your new documents?”

“It’s Tillman Rheinshagen.”

“I know that’s not your real name. Who’s Herr Rheinshagen?”

“He’s a German businessman from Frankfurt, currently living in Cataluña.”

“Do you have many other fake names?”

“I think you know most of them. I’m no robot.”

“Humor me, as this is my first official interrogation.”

“I write noire books as my hobby, I write about a fourth dimensional gun slinger named Sebastian Adon, a heroic hyper-masculine version of my residual self-image. I think I was also the Warsaw Ghetto fighter Zachariah Artstien. And a Chechen gangster named Vasili Pveada.”

“What year to you believe it is, in your mechanical heart, in your most inner database.”

“I’m not a robot.”

“I built you, shut up.”

A pause, I can smell rose petals and hear the strings and chants of gentle Sufi melodies. She thinks I’m a Robot. She thinks she built me. I’d still just prefer to make love to her on a beach in Cuba. A good beach, not a populist beach.

“It’s 5775 on the Hebrew Calendar, I believe the Separatists call it AR 3, third year after the Great Revolt,” I tell her. It’s a line from a book no one ever read.

“Do you think that with over 2,000 extra man years to figure out how to keep slaves working the masters didn’t get very sophisticated in their technology?”

“What are you? And who do you work for” I ask sweetly. I’ve always wanted to be in a B movie, get interrogated by a sexy Russian lady in a bathhouse.

“No, I’m the one asking the questions for now, sweet thing.”

She turns and rubs my back. This is the greatest interrogation I’ve ever been privy to. I recall I was pissing blood in Moscow once. But, I have said that before. I’ll tell her almost everything.

“The technology they have can be defeated by going even more back to the source, although even as here we lie naked underground in this Mikvah; we cannot ever be sure how much technology they have,” I tell her only what’s plainly written in the New Social Gospel.

“Well, all human made things have limits, no matter what adverts claim,” she tells me.

I want to turn around and see her being naked and amazing.

“Don’t turn around,” she says.

“What year do you think it is,” I ask her.

“It’s 2015, as this is what not just smart phones, but International calendars and government planning ministries say. People who pay and collect taxes. The 19^th of November in Common Era 2015. Americans place the number after the month, but that is not common in other countries I will have you know. If you don’t trust that, you’re a mad man, or worse.”

“You just said no one knows, you’re being confusing. I am certainly smarter than the average man and I know that I can hold contradictory beliefs in my head at the same time believing either to be true, or have elements of the truth. It is both the year 2015, and 5775 and also the year no one really knows.”

“Have you been to the mountain tops?” I ask her.

“Are you trying to be gay and poetic?”

“Have you seen how they live at the very, very top of the mountains?”

“Did you and your gang kill Natalia Skorbogatova, called Natasha Andreavna?”

“I’m not in a gang. I’m in a political organization. We have uniforms and a chain of command and therefore under international law we are not a gang, we are the nucleus on an army.”

“Yes, well, the paper says you’re in a most terrible gang, perhaps so a sect or cult as well. It says you killed many women for sport. That you’re a rapist, a pederast and a sex fiend.”

“You and the papers have me confused with Dmitry Khulushin and his people, I only killed men, and frankly men who deserved to die and were sentenced to die by a tribunal court. And that was another life, in this life I’ve killed no one.”

“Well No One has set you up and the papers are saying you’re a dangerous, murderous sex abusing terrorist, who has bi polar and takes drugs.”

“The State owns those papers.”

“So you allegedly did not kill her?”

“I certainly did not.”

“But your associate paid her to have sex with you, is that correct?”

“That was my knowledge, after the fact. If it was real, Siegfried is the son of a lesser oligarch, he has protection and powers.”

“So she was a whore then?”

“I think she was mostly lost lonely and lethal, like most modals right. I don’t know very much about her except she was famous and pretty, and that he paid her cash.”

“Who killed her then?”

“It’s a mystery to us all, probably Breria and the secret police.”

“Do you want to see me naked again?”

“That’s a forward question.”

“Tillman, that’s the name you’re using now is it?”

“Tillman Rheinshagen, yes that must be me, as my papers confirm it. Also my nice watch with its 24 hour time keeping features, my watch is Swiss but I am quite German.”

“Tillman, do you want to turn around and see me completely naked,” she repeats.

 

And oddly. Most disappointingly, I wake up back at the Empire Hotel. I suspect she tazered me, or perhaps subtly injected me with a form of paralytic. I don’t leave my drinks lying around.

 

And then, my imagined future was gone.

 

 

 

 

Scene 36

Bryant Park Rink, 2015ce

Isle of man

 

 

 

Enter Adelina and Sebastian, awkwardly into a happy crowded ice rink. No snow at all, not even a hint it was coming. Bryant Park, late December 2015 common era; it isn’t very cold at all, and Adon couldn’t really skate. He tried to bluff it. He was skating after her figure, she had done it before clearly. She owns her own skates. They were squirreled away conveniently in her old office overlooking park. Conveniently Adon found parking in Manhattan.

 

It was nearly winter in the Wilderness of North America, but this time the machines had been running for so long that it was neither cold nor impassible, nor even vaguely uncomfortable. It was still leather Jacket season just a week before the Christ Mass. And Sebastian Adon, this time in his own body and grounded in reality was humming and strolling with his hands in the brown leather jacket he’d owned for fifteen years. It sowed as much.

Alkaline, the Jamaican philosopher says ‘Everything in life just takes time,’ and that was the song in his head and that song sustained him. It was the water to parched lips and limbs and it was the kiss before jumping out a plane into the black sky of night.

In Hebrew, ‘he’ means ‘she’ and ‘who’ means him. And right now though, for the first time in a while since he became a civilian again; he; was Sebastian Adon and wasn’t using any fake papers, faces or nationalities. And she was Adelina Blazhennaya, aloof and whimsical and strangely interested in checking up on him.

 

He hadn’t heard from her in four and some months.

After the scary episode of fourth dimensional travel, her accusations in the Air Bathhouse, the wearing of the German suit for the first time. He was shook up, and even deleted her social security number and cell phone too. He knew he was gonna get out gunned, out spent, out classed and quick too. She was so real and so powerful, he had not been near magic like that since, and well dare he even say.

Curiously the next time Adelina Blazhennaya popped into his life; it was via an email inviting him to go ice skating in the globally jeans and t shirt warm late December in Bryant Park; filled with those who skate fast and those who dash their booties hard on the ice for all to see. And Sebastian Adon remembered that he used to roller blade when he was young which could not be conceptually much different. He hoped.

 

It was only her smile and little hand clasping his that prevented him from becoming a casualty of the ice and hoypaloyik mobs flying by all around them. She was so patient, she let him take her hand and slow her down and they spun by, several times he almost toppled them both. This was nothing like sky diving, nothing like gun play, nothing like painting, nothing like giving public speeches, nothing like evasive driving, nothing like hard fucking; nothing at all like several of things he believed he was good for. This was so pleasant. And it wasn’t very cold at all, and he genuinely felt that Ms. Blazhennaya didn’t judge him. Didn’t have man expectations at all.

Around they went. He was happiest holding her hand though she pushed him to find balance on his own, as many women ultimately did. There seemed like hundreds of people watching them, pointing waiting for people to wipe out. He’d give them a run for their money.

I’ll tell you what the strangest part was. She couldn’t read his mind so she didn’t see him scanning the crowd for a suicide bomber to blow apart all these happy people. She didn’t hear him ask himself were they being watched, all the paranoia of all his other work.

She couldn’t hear him being crazy, basically. Because this was the temple mount, this was the top of the citadel. There weren’t gonna be any bombings here. This wasn’t a backwater colony on the edge of the empire, like say Tel Aviv. This was a hard an monitored place.

“You know” she says, “you can buy a pair of skates on Amazon, we can make a little habit out of all this,” and she smiles at him. And he breaks his mental train of thought about wondering what year it was.

 

“I should, I mean I like it,” he replies.

 

The skate on and then she heads to the center of the rink to practice her precision amid some little cones. He mostly watches. The war is so far away, it was maybe like; there was no war?

“I love skating so much, I love all winter sports; do you ski or snow board, maybe we can make a trip later on, when I come back.”

She was always coming or going this little architect. She was supposed to have been visiting family in Russia, but had ended up in Hong Kong. She was soon to be off for Moscow, but who knew it was all so effortless her various movements. She had changed her architecture firm about four times since they met, maybe that was normal. She was an artful dodger, filled with wanderlust like him, but perhaps with more means to act on it casually. She was either wealthy herself or had a patron, like everyone else in this city.

A massive airship was moving directly above the city New Jersey bound, these ‘floating fortresses’ were massive cold fusion powered leviathans. They could wipe out whole cities, they housed vast drone fleets and terra drone soldiers for mop ups. Actually no one could see it seemed, but him. He’d seen on brought down over Strong Island two years before in the Battle of Brooklyn Soviet.

“Stop day dreaming droog, look at me, look at my moves!” she says and executes a little spin twist, twirl.

“How now!” he smiles.

Was it real? The airship and the Battle of Brooklyn? Can his soul be loaded like a wetware microchip into a German businessman’s flesh suit? Was that real, did that happen? Did the map that he had seen in the bunker on avenue J indicate that the elevation of Manhattan, therefore the entirety of the Isle of Man citadel was actually almost 40,000 kilometers above sea level; therefore like a veritable mountain above the mostly flat Brooklyn Soviet? Was it disguised by hologram?

“You’re doing it again Sebastian,” she laughs, “you’re spacing away when you should be here with me. Are you having fun with me?”

“I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a year,” he says, which is true as this is very fun and you cannot line up tantric sex and ice skating, because they are not even the same category of fun. His last couple ex-girlfriends were not that ‘fun’.

“I’m happy too, this is great,” Adelina says and they return into the fray of clockwise movement, dashing, darting, moving fast and slow.

Had he ever been ice skating in this decade? No, he doubted it. This memory pops into his head suddenly; of the ice cracking, or shattering and his falling into a frozen lake and then, black.

“We could try more places too,” she says. She notices he’s taken her hand again even though maybe he doesn’t need to, she lets it go, and he is a sweetheart. A beautiful minded Amerikanski, so rare.

The Bryant Park rink closes and they’re sitting in his battered white Civic sipping tea.

There are these rules the Resistance codified called the ‘Security Culture’ it’s an understanding that you can be recorded almost anywhere, but cars, homes and public places are always recorded. Cell phone microphones are always on, even though most think it wipes out your battery quickly to real time record. Sending anything electronically is all recorded. Searching for anything unorthodox is flagged. Public libraries are all flagged. You basically can’t have a secure conversation except on a hike, with no phone, in a bathhouse, except the ones already wired up, you can have one by passing had written notes. Was he going to pass her the note that he wrote, not this time.

 

All smiles and tea, all free loving and also quick to block him out for months on end with no explanation other than she was busy, or a family emergency. What were they going to do with each other!

 

He offered to drive her home, and she said simply, “I’m not sleeping at my home tonight.” And that broke his heart a little that that was so overt.

 

Boyfriends and husbands never stopped him much before, but it was 2016 soon, it was time to have a higher opinion of oneself. Stop being a thief of a side piece. He’s never even thought to try and kiss her, it just hadn’t been appropriate, and wasn’t now. They sipped more tea.

Waited to Part Company soon, the white bent up, economical Honda Civic faced East on 42^nd street, parked next to the Grand Library where he used to study medicine with Ariel El-Mallay. Just several clicks ahead was the United Nations building whose big white tower could be hit by almost any errant rocket fired from the coast of Breuklyn Soviet, visually speaking but in reality to hit that tower would require Persian fire power, not made in Brooklyn basements; because it was an illusion that the World Trade Center, the UN Building and Empire State building could be seen from places like Dumbo or Williamsburg; an illusion! Rockets couldn’t easily hit these edifices because they were high above, higher than third dimensional perception allowed. He knew that to be true, like he knows he is a lefty.

 

Maybe he’s drifting so far away because he knows there isn’t anyone to center him back, no one who cares to take the risk to do that work. Certainly not her.

 

“I wonder what you’re doing with me,” he says.

“I enjoy your mind a lot.”

“What if I didn’t want to see you again?”

“I would discourage that, we have fun don’t we. Don’t cheat me out of clean fun.”

“You make me feel marginal you know, you’re real busy. I for the very first time have too much time to know what to do with. But I don’t have anything to offer you, I have dirty job, a shitty car. No money.”

“You have a lot more than most. Your mind is exciting and I would never encourage you to not see me, but you need to respect my time and my; shall we say circumstances.”

“I think I will develop feelings for you and ruin the little magic you might feel.”

“Take whatever risk you must.”

“What am I good for?”

“Remains to be seen.”

“Do you remember the last time we were together?” he asks her.

“Live in the moment Sebastian, droog, wake up, this is all real. I go to Brazil in 5 days, there will be no time to see you before I go, its not personal. I’m working on a complex teaching structure at work, something like we always talked of. Exciting right, as we always talked about.”

They had been on four or five or six dates, some were not really dates some were just sweet palavers, maybe they all were since she had a boyfriend or a husband or a patron or a keeper and they’d not even done more than barely hold hands on ice.

The second date he told her an idea of building a floating pleasure garden above central park and it stuck in her head and now she had done it; she had found the backers to erect such a thing and political will bought to uphold that plan.

“You’re so impressive,” he tells her.

As long as he’s known her he’s though so.

“Wonderful that you think so, I think so too, about us both.”

“Well what now?” he asks, “when again will I see you?

She hands him a little envelope and inside it is a picture of her looking blonde and ravishing shot by a professional photographer. There is a red lip stick kiss on it. Some numbers are written on the back. There’s a lot of reason to believe he shouldn’t call those numbers. But he will.

 

“I’m worth so much to so many, just go slowly,” she says.

“I don’t know when you’ll see me again, but I know you won’t forget me,” she says.

“You’re sweet,” he says.

“Don’t get a cavity,” she replies.

 

A great Rabbi once said ‘in love don’t ever come empty handed’, but he did. He didn’t have anything to give her before she left, just a letter he wrote in the glove compartment, but he wasn’t gonna open it now. It wasn’t even sentimental like her photo, although a few guys probably had that photo for Christmas, whoever she was going to Brazil with something better still. Maybe, but maybe that was all a story in his head. Maybe she was sweet. Honestly, who knew?

 

The things I might do, he thinks.

“The things you might do, is why I keep coming back to you,” she says.

“Can I take you on a real date after Brazil?”

“You can try.”

“I’m going to think about you a lot when you’re gone,” he says.

“Not too much,” she says, “just enough so a smile forms on your lips and then it passes. Not like your other girls, not like anything before. Think about me until it hurts, and stop there. Think about your future.”

“When you come back from Moscow, it will be the future.”

“That’s true. I must go, please know that I have never had any intention of hurting you.”

“Good bye, have fun in Moscow.”

“I will. Have fun wherever you are.”

And they kiss professionally on the cheek only one time, and she get out of the car and takes of briskly into the streets and the night.

 

And he is sure he will never see her again. But he’s thought that before. The Civic takes off down 42^nd street heading to the FDR where a bridge, an illusionary bridge between two words or a tunnel, a paid tunnel will take him back to the tiny Brooklyn safe house he is staying on Avenue J and Coney Island Ave.

 

His body hurts, he’s uncomfortable in his own skin, no matter in what life, or it’s color this time around. He’s beginning to remember everything in bursts of total fourth dimensional recall, the salt is wearing off and everything as they say, is illuminated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 37

CAMP X6, 1881ce

Siberia

 

MORE MORE MORE segway

 

Set in Siberian Prison camps 1881 CE.

 

`Phillip Yosef Dastagirzada and Dato Koreintelli were the first to notice that there were two foreigners dumped in the camp I the snow from the trains. Watson and Sebastian had literally been thrown out of a moving train passing through the Siberian tundra, they had been dumped in the snow.

 

This was the way most people arrived in X.

 

“Help me, brother please,” Watson had yelled in gibberish to them, the two convicts spoke only Russian, Georgian and Azeri. But they could see the white on was bleeding out of his eyes and the darkie was trying to bandage him, but had been badly beaten. Had had all his finger nails pulled out.

“We have been badly tortured, please help us!”

They do not understand what the darkie is saying, but they get the gist of it. They yell on the radio for the camp doctor Dominick, they buddle the new arrivals in bear skins and burlap and help carry the eye gouged new arrival to the shelters.

 

MORE MORE

  

Scene 38

CAMP X6, 1981ce

Berlin

     Let me tell you mother, he is most un-orthodox. The things he is writing about are nearly incomprehensible! It’s all a mix of sectarianism, neo-Marxist rhetoric and some deranged proto-messianic gibberish. I think we are wasting our time one a lunatic. 

 

Scene 39

XXX, 2081ce

Isle of man

 

 

So, without further ado, after I died in the Millennium Theater hostage crisis of 2015, I woke up on a beach in Haiti, and then I went back to my tedious sometimes even evil work. The smoke didn’t even wait to clear.

My old body, the body this group of friends mourned was lowered into the ground but I was soon in a new body, grown to look just like the one I prefer, with brown hair, and brown eyes and white skin to get into where I need to go.

 

And there was Watson, waiting for me to wake up. He showed me the televids and the newspapers, and I said, where’s Emma; he said she’s already back in Jerusalem, which is to say deep in the bunkers, because the old place called AL Quds, or Yerushaliim; well that went up in a nuclear blast in 2001. All the Ivories are white Americans, all the Hebrews are now underground.

I woke up in Haiti, they had laid my body on the beach to hatch out. Watson handed me a glass of water, my sicarii dagger and my kit. The kit we can use to heal or to steal or to kill, my red paramedic bag.

It wasn’t a dream, it was time for killing and I was certainly good at killing having learned to kill perhaps as far back as the beginning. I can, or should I say I have and probably can skin a man in under four minutes. That’s really a thing in war sometimes.

 

UM?

 

 

 

 

Scene 40

Safehouse on 16 Kings, 2014ce

Waltham

 

 

Adelina arrives in the cold of night.

 

One astounding thing about her was the variety of looks she wore. The way she carried her out worldly self, as well as her firm control of her surroundings via her deliberate metamorphosis from often carefree nymph to a severe and serious instructor of social etiquette and use of language. This perhaps this was the result of being born into the tender firm and earthly body of a non-aging and listless school girl, while her memory of events could trace its analysis across four centuries of wax and waning hardship. Her analogue disposition was that of vast kindness. It was the temperament best suited for dealing with savages and bonobos alike. For she was not descended from monkeys and her soul was not like any other he’d encountered.

She rings the doorbell of the Waltham flat he’s just rented for them. A strong improvement from the sub-divided fire trap they’d nearly set on fire when she let him sex her for the first time. She’s wrapped in a long black coat and improbably balanced in heels despite the level of snow fall.

He kisses her hard before she even closes the door behind her. He thrusts her against the wall clutching her tight and he smells like cologne. She likes his taste. She can smell on him the desire to fuck her good and hard. He’s tender until he drinks a little, or gets her ass in his palm.

She pulls him in and tells him, “You miss me a lot baby?”

He always misses her.

She’s all he thinks about. Her stunning baby face. Her smile. How she fits in his arms. How he barely fits in all of her tight little spaces.

He hangs her coat and she grabs his ass.

He carries her up the stairs. All he can think about is how tight she is every single time he enters her pussy, how hard she kisses him, how much he loves her, and just how long she can take his cock. He’s insatiable. And she can fuck him for days. The flat has off white walls, poor lighting and smells like scented candles. But it’s better than the one before. In the room is a new red desk they picked out for his studies and writing and queen sized brown wooden bed with posts. Nothings on the desk. He lays her on the bed and kisses her hard again. They make out and she rubs his big cock through his jeans wanting to taste it. Wanting to suck him off twice. Takes off her jacket and realizes she’s wearing a short skirt and black lace panties; a black short skirt and tight tank top which makes her small and supple body look lean and quite perfect. He’s already rock hard thinking about taking her.

He wants to rip off her panties and fuck her brutally until she screams. He wants to take off his belt and put it around her neck and fuck her over the red desk until his hot cum fills her pussy. She’s so prim and perfect. She’s young and luscious and graceful. He wants to put her on her knees.

“Slow down,” she whispers anticipating his hungry lust, “we have all forever. Take your time baby make me a few times cum and extra hard.”

He starts rubbing her pussy with his fingers while she sucks his thumb. He likes her to take him all the way down her throat to gag on big cock. He’s looking up a voodoo spell to double himself so she can suck him while his twin fucks her on her knees from behind. She’s not sure if she can take two of him. It’s hard to slow down. He just imagines always the tightness of when he enters. Like she’s fucking for the first time. That tight. That tasty and pure. Once he’s in thrusting all he can think about is pleasing her. He loves her amazing pussy. Its taste and its shape and its fit. She always shudders when he goes in. He wants to fill her with hot cum and break her in. He wants to fuck her hard and everywhere, put her legs on his shoulders and ram his cock as far as it will go make her beg him for to empty load after load inside her…

“Slow baby slow” she whispers.

He breathes deep. His mind can’t stop running ahead.

“I’m going to suck you cock dry tonight baby,” she whispers, “I’m going lick that cock and stroke it so well. But first you gotta play with me.”

She takes his index finger and shows him how she’ll suck him. He’s beside her. Takes her panties down and puts a finger in her pussy. So amazingly tight. He rubs her up and down and wants her to be his baby forever. He wants to please her so well that she can’t even remember the faces of other men. He can’t think of anything but her all day at work. She sends him pictures sometimes in her lingerie and asks him to tell her what he’ll do when they get home.

He plays with her gently rubbing her pussy. Whispers in her ear, “I’m gonna fuck you hard tonight.” She moans and say, “Please daddy please.” Put hopes he is gentle.

Her shirt is still on and she’s rubbing is cock thorough his jeans. He licks down her leg and rolls up the shirt. He grabs her thighs and licks and licks licks. She moans and tells him again what she’ll do on her knees. He’s got one finger in her working back and forth, can barely fit a second. He looks up and she’s her happy moaning face.

When it seems like she is about to cum, which is charade for she can cum on demand, he whole body contorting in ecstasy; he pick her up and pushes her over the red table.

“You’re gonna take my cock everywhere tonight baby.”

She looks like a sexy little school girl. She can also be anything else, but always-always beautiful and dignified and pure. He wants her to be his boss outside. He wants to be her servant and student he knows she’s wise beyond her years by a hundred. But in their inner apartment he wants her to let him break her in. He wants to tie her wild ways and fuck her so ferociously that she cannot remember another man but him.

He lifts her skirt and guides his thick cock inside her. He moans, she’s incredible to taste and even more so to ride. He likes her to keep sucking his big fingers while he tries to go slowly back and forth pushing deeper. She’s bent over the desk and can she herself In the candle light in the mirror besides the bed. She wants to civilize him. Make him her slave. For sex and smoothies. He can be taught. He slowly pushes deeper and takes her hands. He begins going faster. “I’m gonna fuck that little pussy baby. I’m gonna you beg.”

 

But she loves to beg him. Beg him to serve her. Beg him to make her cum over. She likes him to treat her like the goddess she is. He begins pumping faster.

 

When he comes she waits a little longer and she punches him hard in the face, as he has no respect for her body or her time.

 

He barely winces. Savage barbarian American male. Psycho fucking killer, fresh out the camps. They cannot be civilized these people, total chimp blooded barbarians and I will write as much in my report back to Moscow.

 

Scene 41

Bagan, 3000AR

Burma

 

It is nearly dusk and there are more colors in the sky than he or she had seen in their lifetime; painted in the heavens, buttressed by the mountains there from the lower ledges of foot hills they can finally see the 2,000 plus gilded spires of Bagan.

 

“It’s not called Burma anymore,” she had informed him and he absorbed, but persisted to call it that in his mind for the naming of new names was the work of men and to him this was place of dreams associated with monasteries, monks, magic carpets, hot air balloons and great escapes.

 

He clutched her small hand as they take in what they had planned so long to see for many moons. It was nothing like the photographs, in appearance true, but in had epic majesty, nothing you could capture in rendition. And everything like a world in some place to come, or place that was.

The train ride from the capital had been a tumult of shifting moving humanity but they were unaccustomed to judgment or complaining for he saw the world as it should be and she loved the world for what it was and the people here they see as two travelers here to bring more than we would take away.

He remembered his first attempts at yoga, all the sweating and aching and some cross between moments of mind blowing tantra and at the same time, an Israeli head fuck work over for mind data. A little like sex, more like torture in the beginning then later like neither, a happy work toward Zen. She remembers his early art for her, its primitive pastiness that was also from his heart but not his soul, that would be later. And past lives were left in Babylon and with earnings they scraped together for an escape they find themselves at the spires of Bagan as the heavens unroll flame into blue night.

She squeezes his calloused hand and smiles at him. And that is by far his favorite thing on earth to see. This epic magical place making her smile and that reflects into him deeply, the accomplishment of her happiness. They are taking in the wonderful present together.

A magic carpet suddenly shoots past from the tallest gold Temple to the outlying hills.

“AH ha! I told you it was real,” he exclaims in glee.

One thing about them was that if he was wrong, and certainly he was wrong often, she was patient in correcting him. He was so dear for her so early because she cast no judgment about his previous life as a train robber.

“So you rob trains,” she asked once him back on a date in the basement of the Andalla Café in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, “well I can’t be with a train robber.” She had sipped her mint tea and thought about the risks there. A woman must have limits. Although he cuddled quite well and his lips were soft, no one in Russia or the American States can stake her love life on train robber.

“It was long ago I did that work, but I promise no one was ever hurt.”

“You used guns?” she asked him.

“Well of course but I never used any bullets!” he replied.

“Well I still can’t be with a train robber because I have to think about my family and my future and robbing trains is very risky business as you well know.”

He paused to sip his mint tea way back in Cambridge a year ago.

“Could you be dear for a retired train robber if he robbed no more train and only drove ambulances?”

“Well in Czech literature they say once a train robber, always a train robber.”

“But you are not Czech my dear Adelina, you are able to use discretion. I am Retired.”

“You have a very beautiful soul. If you won’t rob any more trains, not ever again, then I’ll see you next week for more painting.”

And so he began to paint ad write for her and ask to see her as often as she would allow without ever asking her to love a retired train robber, he simply made persistent his original argument that even a retired train robber could strike balance between feelings, fear and future.

The map says they are about two hours from the Hotel which is nestled in the foot hills approximately twenty kilometers for the train station. He is doing a god job navigating and she is doing a good job watching over his steps.

It is warm, but moderate and there is gentle breeze. The jungle has sounds and smells they are unaccustomed to, but neither of them has any fearful parts in their bodies or their souls. There are now twenty eight billion stars in the sky and the moon casts a glow over the temples and shrines built over a thousand years ago for each and every major deity that could raise a cohort.

“If you’re tired of walking I’ll carry you,” he tells her. He has been carrying people for many years and has good form. She is so dainty and graceful, her auburn hair flutters over her shoulders and she replies, “or I could carry you, but then we’d be breaking your code of Haitian gentleman wouldn’t we?”

She doesn’t believe that the code is anything more than his chivalric improvisations which she does like, so she humors his parables about some Caribbean male honor code that she can neither confirm nor deny was ever set into a real list.

 

“You have the dearest and happiest of smiles,” he says, “especially when they are mischievous.”

“I challenge you to a race to the Hotel!”

“A gladly accept! But, while your powers are greater than mine, I have secretly perfected my Cobra Three fourth dimensional flying techniques. Not only can I turn my little prayer rug-towel turban into an airship I can loop that great temple three times.”

“Well my happy retired bandit I have tricks too. I will fire my inner bioenergetics and through my heart chakra call a rabbit of enormous size to bound through this jungle and right to the hotel bed!”

“I’m already jealous of this mystical grey rabbit,” he laughs.

The moment stops for a minute. The huge yellow moon casts glimmering beams that hit the towers and precipices of the temples. She remembers momentarily his first and last jealousies before he learned to accept she was a partner to be played with and delighting in freedom was no object to woe or win. He remembers the very first time he told her jealous nonsenses and stewed and stormed and wasted energy over nothings.

“Stop wasting energy on your past misconceptions and let’s race. First one to the hotel will bath the other in lotus petals and perfumes and also sing. Though if for some reason I win, which I will, you can bathe me and perfume me and improvise poems because still your singing is a little suspect my dearest.”

“Listen sweet teacher I have many hidden tricks. I have sense learned enough Russian to sing and dance for you in Russian. But I will be the one to surely win.”

“Tak,” she smiles and kisses his cheek.

She kneels in prostration and then extends her hands and erupting from her bosom is a red yellow light.

He throw open his sac and pulls his grey blue carpet.

A rabbit the size of an elephant gallops out of the jungle and she blows him a kiss and the creature on its hind huge rabbit legs darts off into night.

She is gone before he is even airborne. Summoning all his magic, mostly learned from this woman who is his companion and the subject of all of his latest writing, but still never fully his. He asks Allah to make lighter his burdens, then he asks the universe to propel his craft.

And next thing he realizes he’s flying through the night sky. He can see the enormous rabbit crashing through the jungle path. She waves to him. At ten thousand kilometers an hour he shoots past the hotel turning road and dashes toward the biggest temple, the gold spired monolithic center piece of their new wonderland.

She and he have little radios and she whispers to him, “I you show off I’m sure to win!”

“We shall see,” he replies. And with terrific speed makes the first loop of the temple.

And with a manic burst from his third eye he propels the carpet right across the temple face, right over the valley and right into the hotel bedroom just as the enormous rabbit courteously olds the door for Ms. Adelina  Blazhennaya, the subject of his undivided passions though still a very independent woman.

“Your rabbit is a Haitian gentleman like me,” he says.

“Will you invite him in for tea then?” she asks.

The Rabbit gives him a knowing nod, and politely declines in Bamar dialect. In fourth dimensional ESPN the rabbit and the retired gun slinger following the code of the Haitian gentleman are on the same page. A man or a rabbit Haitian gentleman knows when not to be a third wheel.

“Poker and cigars tomorrow though below Temple 1,006 though when she goes to meet the high priestess,” the huge fucking rabbit says, “Sak passe?”

“Nap boule,” the retired bandit replies meaning that “they’re on fire.”

And the rabbit departs. The hotel room is massive and decked in gold silk finery and a massive indoor bath pool and mahogany panels. They are the only guests in the hotel because Myanmar has sealed its borders the day after they arrived because of rumors of another Buddhist monk uprising against the military junta.

“Well who won?” he asks.

“We both won. We’re here,” she smiles dropping her bag.

“Welcome to Burma,” she says.

“I’ll think of the poem and you run the bathwaters my dear teacher.”

As the story was about to become a highly erotic tale of rose petals, the flying lotus position, eastern perfumes and cuddling for many hours our heroes the retired bandit and the cunning linguist fire priestess are blinded by a vast white light.

 

Flares are in the sky and helicopters are flying over the valley. From there hotel rooms they hear the grinding of tanks and the marching of the army.

“But it wasn’t prophesized to happen until Friday,” she utters.

“How could they have known,” he exclaims.

“Darling your highly erotic rose petal bathing escapade will have to wait. We have to get to the high priestess before the military seal this place down!” she exclaims.

Bringing ourselves back into a world of magic and dreams, hope and the conquest of hearts. The Hotel Mandalay has nine hundred rooms, but only two are occupied. One by large Cuban cigar smoking rabbit, who’s name we have not learned, a retired gunslinger named Sebastian Vasil Adon and a woman who’s beauty steals the air out of train station, where men fall down staring via the spin of their heads, she is also a fourth dimensional fire priestess from the order of Shabazzni Calfraian, or called in Ruus-American Ms. Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya.

“Lock the doors,” he proclaims.

“Run the bath water,” she replies.

“What about the army?”

“We shall see about the army in the morning. There is no reason for them to come here now and we are far more likely to get into trouble crossing the jungle at night to where we know they are heading.”

Man guided by passion seeks confrontation and swipes and stabs toward heroism while women are rational and that rationality is the best defense we have for the continuation of our species.

“Indeed,” he says hearing her think.

“I suspect that with your wild daring the army will be most under prepared, but right now I have uses for you.”

The bath basin is made of silver and sit above the floor or aquamarine and gold tiles. It easily accommodates her small frame and will when infused with warm waters, honey blossoms, rose petal and his hands all over her body make for a premium implement of relaxation.

 

“Why does calamity follow you where ever you go?” she asks sweetly. She has placed a white rag over her face and he positions himself behind her first kissing her neck five time on each side and the reaches into his 84^th mind chakra to grow a kinetic battery of other hands. With his eyes closed his magic sprouts twenty four sets of hands that will with care and delicate intimacy rub Ms. Adelina’s back and arms and all other places that she finds pleasing to have so many hands work adamantly upon her.

            “It feels amazing, as if you are massaging me with twenty four set of hands!”

“Ha. Well that is because I am. Fourth dimensionally.”

“To respond to your question about calamity. I didn’t bring them here. They were coming to find the chosen ones working under the high priestess, despite what you sometimes worry I am not a trouble beacon.”

Push harder she order his twenty four spatial projections. And she transmogriophies herself behind him so that she might surprise him by kissing his neck and biting his ear, licking the side of his face and then before he can react; disappearing.

“I find that sense I fond you my objectives have shifted substantially,” he says.

“I think you bring calamity, I don’t mind because you are well equipped for it, but I think that you drew the army here with your aura. That had I been the first to come we’d have had more time. I appreciate your new fond devotion for me, but we have to tread carefully with you change making, war mongering ways.”

“I’m here to learn under your guidance teacher.”

“You’re also madly in love with me.”

“It’s plain as day that I haasansi tulibot ti”

“I think that just means love.”

“So many types of love, so as you know I have to invent words from languages that never were or still could be to elude your training as a cunning linguist.”

“I still don’t think you know me well enough to love me, even if you are a most tender kisser, a prolific scribe, and very good with your hands, devoted as you may seem to be, love AS the universe intends it is not yet what we have.”

“Tak,” he says and dissolves his twenty four massaging part.

            The aroma of roses also of lotus blossoms and also of cherry wafts over them, as low burning candles, hundreds of them dart from mirror to mirror on side panel and ceiling alike.

He climbs into the bath his black bandit sash removing nothing but his hat and boots.

He clutches her toward him pressing the naked ness of her body to his proximity he kisses her with the very same force, t ever same total and utter longing as he had Halloween night under a year before in the parking lot of the Crystal Restaurant. She kisses him like the great man in the well of tragedy he is. She kisses him with such compassion that she forget even for minute that he still must prove his love.

 

They sit across the bath tub palm to palm.

“You have orders to be back in Breuklyn Soviet you know,” she says.

“I don’t leave the safety of a woman I cherish up to the abilities of enormous grey rabbits,” he replies.

“You still write about a lot of woman who aren’t me,” she says.

“The past is painful pass time, but I never got into psychotherapy so I just had to write the whole thing out.”

“I like your all your poems. I like all your pictures. I need you to tell me that they’re all just for me now.”

“Everyone else is over. And to no other inspiration do I draw my power except from you.”

“You’ve known me less than a year. And don’t give me some old soul line, I’ve never set my eyes on you in this life or another until my last birthday.”

“I’m here ok. I’m not anywhere else. Every story and every painting will be for you.”

“You’re said that to other woman before!”

“Well I cannot be apologetic if I love loving and can do so early and often! But I must declare that each love is a different love, almost needing its very own word. Each time passion washes over me life a tidal wave and I pledge to you my fierce loyalty know that it is acts that prove it not words or, poems or art. I beg you to understand me. These other women, your other men are a pastiness. And here I am ten million leagues away from Breuklyn Soviet pledging my sword to your cause, my lips to your use and my glory to your every need.”

“Wow, when you learn to speak Russian there will truly be no end to your pontification on emotion!”

“Ms. Adelina I beg you take me day by day and never find my emotions misguided.”

“Have no stupid jealousies then. If you are good to me, truly god to me, as you have been then never think my eyes deviate either from your unruly retired gunslinger countenance.”

“No take off your damn clothes retired Bandit,” she says.

Completely naked the sit across from each other as explosions can be heard from the valley below. Screams and tumult abound and her eyes say, wait until dawn.

I’ve never know such peace he thinks to himself. I’m so far from what I know, I’m in Asia for fuck sake. I swore I’d never go to Asia until everything was settled back home in the Soviet. And his friends’ faces flash before him, the battles ongoing in Haiti and the United American States, the wars in the Wild West Indies. He’s so exposed out here. Not just without his Otriad, no just no speaking the language or being a novice to the weirding ways. He should be back in Waltham finishing his training, back in Haiti leading his men, or back in Breuklyn safeguarding the revolution; BUT NO.

She is best teacher he has ever had to remember his humanity. For without knowing that humanity what is it that he has spent 7,000 years fighting for!

“Rub me head toe,” she says,” climb behind me and massage out my arms back and sides any glimmer of the stresses caused by impending soldiers, tanks and doom.”

“I’ll slay every last one before a hair on your head is harmed,” she says going to work on her body in the ways she taught him to do.

“I had thought after Sudan you all took an oath to strict non-violence!” she exclaimed.

“Well I will slay them without killing them.”

“You are awash in contradictions my mighty Sebastian.”

“Leave all that to me reconcile. I’ll get you to the temple safe.”

His hands press-compress and rotate up her inner thighs. He head rotates 180 degrees and her tongues does things in his mouth that make his body burn with sweet temptation.

“Such powers you and I,” he says.

“I can make you stronger but I cannot ever fix you.”

Her soft tight body is absorbing over half of his three dimensional concentrations.”

“I mashva pilootika you,” she says.

“Does that mean I love you too,” she asks.

“I could say that word in English every time I see you but I can’t unless you believe it, which you can’t until I prove it, so I can’t leave your side until you know I’d cross the earth and battle a horde of mercenaries, climb temples, cut through jungle and save the day in your name.”

“Not necessary,” she says.

‘What,” he replies.

“All I need you to do is make me happy and never break your promises. All that other stuff is fine, but If you want to say I love you all the time I need more time to see you being a man. I don’t judge you for being a gunslinger, but I need to make sure that all your powers for to proper use and aren’t squandered on anger and past hood. Tomorrow we may well have to fight our way through 10,000 men and rescue the High Priestess and her students from these mercenaries. This isn’t your fight. If you’re here to prove you love me, just follow my lead. Happy and promises kept.”

“On my honor as a son of Breuklyn,” he says.

She embraces his and kisses each cheek five times, ten put her tongue to his lips.

“We have seven hours ‘til dawn,” he says, “we can draw or make love on the ceiling!”

“My dear, as disappointed as you may be, I know that when you and I are in bed, or on the ceiling sleeping is the last thing we will be doing for you are afflicted with the Breuklyn wandering-hands-technique and I as a daughter of Chelyabinsk am afflicted with passionate-tongue-disposition. You must sleep on the couch I am afraid because from the look in your eyes I can tell you wish to ravage me quite severely.”

Blast he thinks.

“As you wish,” he says feigning disciplined acceptance.

“If we get through tomorrow alive dear Sebastian Adon, you and I will have time for kisses, for levitating love making, for tantra for art, for days!”

Oi. He looks at her tenderly, blows her a kiss and starts making up the couch. In her naked beauty she is best reminder that he’s going to take every measure to live past tomorrow and also age 88.

 

The manuscript, it means nothing. It goes to nowhere, for no one came to bring us a new religion. What we are holding too fast, beyond our love and imagination is the promise of inevitable evolution. As the whole mountain is set on fire;

 

I CRY OUT TO HER:

 

 

“I thought myself a mad man! Crazed about a world that seemed to be unravelling, believing I had some duty to stop the floods and the needless dying, I dreamed I was a paramedic in the city of New York! That we fall in love under most desperate circumstance, traveled the world together in the service of the people; that we had a life of tumultuous happenings, heavy in love and love making, and then…”

 

An awkward, long silence.

 

Oh no.

 

She cradles me tight in her magic, she says, “I’m sorry Sebastian, my darling, my baby; but the things you are dreaming are sometimes very real. I’m dead.”

 

 

The99th

(In four ACTS)

 

[The Work of]:

 

 

 

Adler S Walt

 

 

 

Dedicated to: Daria Andreavna Skorbogatova

& Yelizaveta Kotlyarova,

And Elena Antolievna Komarova

& Valentina Stanovova

 

With a special thanks to Alan Medvinsky

As well as my agent, Ms. Jessica Pilot

 

 

 

 

 

A Listing of our Primary & Lesser Characters

 

 

ACT I: Str’ast

(The Passion)

2008-2012ce, AR0

Set in Moscow & New York City

 

Starring;

 

Sebastian Vasili Adon, a paramedic adventurer. †

Natasha Andreavna Skorbogatova, a wild Russian floosy.

Dmitry Khulushin Koch, a lesser Oligarch, Prince of the Eastern territories.

Cdte Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras; a Peruvian disk jockey & guerrilla.

Oleg Leondovich Medved, a former Soviet photographer.

Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya; Russian linguist. †

Victoria Christina Contreras Lynch; the artistic wife of Rafael.

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

Leone Goldson, EMT

Lee Castro, EMT

Byron Abad, EMT

Mark Poyer, EMT

Anatoly Garalov, EMT

Emile Cange, Paramedic

Sasho Alexandre Dmitrievich Perchevney; a Greater Oligarch.

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

Siegfried Sassoon, an out of work Cuban Actor.

Justin Toomey O’Azzello, Mehanata General Manger

Kudzai David Darious Chikwamba, a Shona warrior and biochemist. †

Lia Lewis Monteleone, a friendly French stripper.

Veronika Zemanova/ Yulia Romanova, Russian spy

Capt. Nicholas Rosetree Trickovitch, a private detective. †

Capt. Mickhi Dbrisk, a Jamaican gangster.

Jared Forgather, a cool and California medic.

Barr Timchenko; an anarcho syndicalist

Abner Kreminizer; a Lithuanian Israeli Pararescueman. †

Maya Sorieya Emma Solomon, the possible Messiah.

ACT II: La Lingre

(The Lingering Love)

2014-2015ce, AR3

 

Set Outside Boston

 

Introducing;

Capt. Watson Entwissle, Mullato Haitian gun slinger †

Ilya Lubov Trubadoroff, Lesser Oligarch of Charlestown

Lt. Irfan Khan, Pakistani military intelligence officer †

 Lt. Saiph Khan, Bangladeshi patriot†

Cpt. Roj Zalla, Kurdish Patriot †

Saadiya Usmani, a Pakhi mystic †

Ricardo Veshanti, a Rastafarian Warrior

Jefferson McIntyre, Guyanese philosopher †

Eric & Joseph Ruhelman, Franco German Bikers †

Ian McMurphy, Fenian ghost hunter of the Dublin Fire Rescue Battalion

Gen Tiputti Capois, Haitian general

Charlotte Kamande, Ugandan princess †

Nicholas Mapfre, film maker †

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACT III: Loyal’nost

(The Loyalty)

2017-2019ce, AR5

 

Set in Breuklyn Soviet MicroRepublik

 

Starring:

 

Capt. Anya Drovtich; Commander of rebel forces in Breuklyn, ZOB

 Cdte. Hubert O’Domhnaill; Fenian freedom fighter, ZOB-FRB

Ysiad Ferraris; suave Dominican businessman †

Lt. Moishe Klein, Chief of Hatzalah

Laurence Simon, PhD †

Toba Hadaad, Ivorite spy

Misha Kishbivalli; Bulgarian lesser demon

Hella Martina Dubratevsky; Bulgarian witch, writer

Ruth Vered, Ivorite spy

James White; retired cop/ Bratva enforcer

James Behemoth Brown Pérezes; Shapeshifting-Bratva enforcer

Capt. Mara Fitzduff; Fenian Minister of Agitation-propaganda

Magnus Goldbar Allamby, Bajan money changer †

Anahita Noor; Afghan Persian lawyer

2^nd Lt. Kaveh Abatable Ali Shariti; Persian Agit-prop officer

Ezra Pula Pound, council for the union army †

‘Big Man’ Mathew Allamby, cousin of Magnus

Birdy Rainwater; a talented singer with brain cancer †

Mikhail Mastrovitch; Unit 669 †

Ha Chi Yu Perechenova-Sassoon, General Manager of the Voodoo Lounge

Theodore Breria; Director of Homeland Security Services †

Yelizaveta Alexandreavna Perechenova, a Ukrainian physician

Gen Avinadav DeBuitléir, founder of the Resistance

 

 

 

 

ACT IV: Stojkost

(The Shake Off)

2019-2020, AR 7-8

 

Set in Hispaniola (Haiti & DR)

 

 

Gen Wilatundi Christophe †, Northern Lavalas Army

Approx. 5,000 fighters

 

 

82^nd Malik Shabazz Battalion (Uhuru)

Cdte Djbriel Okonkwo †

Cpt. Netic Kinari †

Lt. Sham Roche Edge †

 

Gen Shantay Dargain, Central Lavalas Army

Approx. 20,000 fighters

 

99th Hadar Battalion (ZOB)

Lt. Scott Sevastra †

Lt. Kwame Ansu

 

Gen Watson Entwissle, Southern Lavalas Army

Approx. 15,000 fighters

112^th St. Patrick’s Battalion (FRB)

Lt. Father O’Sulivan †

Dashiell Duffy †

 

Basher Al-Talleyrand

Dominich Strauss Kahn

 

Prologue

 

 

Set in the Republic of Haiti, 2020ce

 

“What in two fucks do you know about being in love my tovarish,” she once asked me.

 

At the time I gazed off into the night. One does not even fully comprehend the depth of incorrigible things a truly Russian woman knows how to say to an American man in eight different tenses of a lover spurned. She now says I am a terrorist! Or at best a baltering zealot.

A frank and unrepentant potential killer of other men. But you cannot always trust women. They often lie to protect the things they cherish. Their children. Also the future.

I was not always such a man.

No ideological calling or message from the unseen put me on this path. I don’t kill because of mere ideas. Or because of poetic visions rationalizing some means to a so-called “better world”. The terror we have unleashed was born of misdeeds perpetrated against me and mine as well as against you and yours. It is no abstraction to embrace violence when an aggressor tramples on your face. It comes quickly or it remains unthinkable. I have no time these days for pacifists and certainly not for cowardly sheep. Turning the other cheek to these people we are fighting will get you far, far worse than killed. I have bloodied my hands before as a savage avenger and certainly soon will do so again. But, I don’t kill alone like some deranged fanatic.

Oh no. We laid an elaborate plan and have subsequently received extensive support.

We are not patriots or “freedom fighters” in the traditional sense of what that means in Geneva. This is not our land, nor through the fog of war do I see freedom as our figurative or even literal ends. Our means however will certainly not absolve us in the text books of history whether we be the winners or the losers. Cloaks and daggers have long been used to abet our cause. But, the ripping of human flesh with sharp blades in close quarters and the bursting of bullets though our enemies black hearts will perhaps tarnish our family names and simultaneously bar us all from the gates of any reputable heaven. I have left men hanging in trees! But, I’m not one to believe in fairy tales. They will have to torture me for a very long time, and they will not get much for their troubles. Neither my motive nor my names are easy answers. And you probably won’t be able to pronounce it anyway.

I am not acting alone. If I am a so-called “terrorist” committing acts of semi-selective murder I am alongside many fellow blood soaked bandits. Our cause has a certain appeal to at least a Breuklyn few. And if she’s right about me not knowing how to love well, or at all, I absolutely do know how to struggle until the lights in my eyes go out.

 

We are called the zealots after all.

 

We are hunting vicious killers. We are grinding down these sly villains where they hide, cutting bits and pieces from this rapist ilk. We work thanklessly to remove a large array of very-very cruel, bad men from the earth. Vile parasites that suck our blood and steal our meager earnings and reduced us all to slavery. Along with their secondary officers, tertiary command of vicious enforcers, and basically anyone that gets in our way. And if we cut our way through enough of these people we will then begin to lay hands on the oligarchy.

Let it not be said that before we picked up our daggers and rifles we did not first spend a good many years trying all other means of more civilized change making. I loved my people, and more specifically my family, before I hated our nemesis and the cruel minority of oligarchs and war criminals that so hold humanity on a vast plantation under their iron heel, but also our common apathy.

 

Or called in Russian; Raspizdia.

 

One who doesn’t give a fuck about their fellow human beings?

 

No giving of fucks!

 

Amid the thankless grind I see the face of a young woman following us where we go to commit murder. She follows just behind to save lives and heal. A physician who found herself trapped on this perhaps morally ambiguous road we travel as ruthless knock around highway men. Or so she claims. And every time I pull that trigger I fly further from the place I was boron and the good man that she once thought I was. Were it not for her, I’d have forgotten I still had one soul left with which to barter.

Our irregular military column of hearty partisans clears a rocky ridge. Forty men and one woman, all clad in dark grey or dark blue multi-forms, wrapped in tactical bandoleers carrying the tools of our respective trades—murder and healing. We men are here to kill. The solitary doctor amongst us with her implements touches the collateral of their war, but has sworn not to treat a soldier. On either side.

That morning we look for one bad man in particular.

It’s just before dawn when we finally catch up with his trail in the barrens of this dusty, dying and terrible place. The poplar trees sway heavily in the rustling morning wind, which offers our lonely column no real relief. We mill about gauging reactions, sipping gingerly on our water. A few lay down their battle rigs but keep their dusty irons always on the ready. We are hard men in rough grey khaki stained with sweat and grizzle but never tears. Some wear black or dark blue partisan caps. Others have checkered sand-gypsy scarves about their shoulders or brow. Most carry various calibers of former and Postsoviet rifles. Our doctor, she still wears a lab coat, a blue uniform, and wears a dark green military cap.

We march on.

 

The official name of our column is the Z.O.B.-Dublin Detachment also called the Fighting 99th. It is composed of Shtarkers, Shatahs, Fenians as well as a popery of the Haitian peasants from across the southland. If you’re not familiar with these particular edged colloquialisms, well I suggest you look them up in the appendix of exotic foreign vernaculars. Suffice to say they are just different ways to designate a “bad motherfucker.” Except Fenian, that is an Fenian political nationalist ideology of the early 18^th century.

We go one foot after another. We walk with a heavy defiance, with cold eyes that view the barrens like hungry wolves. We are each a raw material mined from a foreign conflict, smelted at some point on Breuklyn’s coast into the violent war machine we now compose. Sun-burnt freckled faces, which had first turned cherry red in the glare of the Caribbean high noon. Dread-locked islanders with accents well edged for song. Also some post and former Soviets with shifty morals and a small band of self-proclaimed Yids that never lift a finger on a Shabbos but refrain from emasculating headwear. And the native people that had not asked us to come here look. I suppose they wonder if we foreign faces are to be the turners of a bloody tide or the worst harbingers of an impending catastrophic event. At this juncture the book is still open.

 

We march to this dead place to bear grim witness.

 

War on this island fortress, and war in the world of man have burnished us into unrepentant murderers that have killed and will surely kill again. That we kill to stave off an even greater genocide by murdering its perpetrators, is the rhetoric we hide our murder behind. And if each of us came to this wasteland below the Choke Mountains beyond Illubador out into the contested borderlands about the Valley of Antimonite with some noble pretense to liberate the Haitian people from the iron heel of the MINUSTAH and the NGO Republic and their Maccoute or FRAPH-rapist militia bag man; then periodically, it is the low volume atrocities like this one, which sometimes take the greatest toll on our resolve.

Roped up from the highest palm tree visible to all we men and single female of the Z.O.B.-Dublin detachment is the ghastly site of a hanged man we all knew and like a brother loved. A thick sanguine pool had formed below him. He is eviscerated. Slashed to fleshy ribbons perhaps just a few hours before we came upon him. He had broken camp at dusk, spirited himself away and wandered out from our garrison in Cange right into enemy hands. Had our ruthless jackal opponents had some notion of who the man was, he’d have been taken to a filtration camp like the others—the poor founding bastards of the Famni Lavalas Alliance- and flayed for information, tortured until he could no longer remember his Yiddish name. Perhaps this was better albeit completely inglorious. There is nothing about the condition of his corpse to make us think his end was particularly quick.

I knew this man so long that it was like stumbling upon a fresh crime scene of a beloved family member. To others, he was a tovarish of sorts, a less than humble man who sustained so many with his savvy and stalwart acts. The rest knew him as a fearless comrade and champion to so many souls not cut of his tribe’s cloth.

We find our close compatriot hanging disemboweled from a hook—his eyes gouged out, hands lopped off, bayonet marks slashed about his body— exsanguinated in a tree of death. He is now cold, wet and dead.

“Cut him down!”

“Cut him down and bury him deep,” commands a Pale Officer.

The future was evidently to be far bloodier than the scientists and high priests had originally prophesized and predicted. The physician’s blond hair, it blows in a swift desert wind. She looks away from the bloody mess we’ve made just for an instant.

 

Violence is the longest road to nowhere, but we seem to be making great time.

 

 

 

ACT ONE:   Str’ast

 

Set in New York City & Moscow, 2008-2012ce

 

 

Prelude

 

 

 

Moscow, 2019ce

 

 

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; ‘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 cannot 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 revolution we are fighting. It is battle for the survival of our species and is still an open question of who will win, for this is a very old 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 question of consciousness. The victory of the Oligarchy is a death sentence for all.

 

My name is Sebastian Vasili 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 “changes” or revisions may occur in depiction of my narration that the world changed forever in a very specific way on the 1^st of January 2012. Of course in the constellation of dates there cannot be one discovered moment of alteration total; but instead linkages of great historic 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 that pass as world events based on total boldness.

 

I have not the arrogance to claim a high rank in the revolution. Or the audacity to claim that my role was of some significant aspect for I was but a staff sergeant in vast chain of command were the ranks of war to be applied to the ranks of those who fight 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 I was asked or should I say interrogated with beatings, drugs and electricity why I joined the “Great Revolt” and became one its so-called “leaders” they asked me many times to declare the moment when I embraced these “zealous beliefs” or by what life event wedded my totality to this cause. They pestered me with these questions though throughout the events I had played no 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 am able to 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.

They would beat us many times and make us many offers. It was fortunate the resistance wiped away my mind so I could betray only myself. In addition, that Watson Entwissle is a Haitian and therefore impossible to break.

They always beat me and referred me back to these poems. Poems they claimed were “proof” of my highest-level rebel involvement. The uprising had not at that time fully spread to the Russian Federation or the People’s Republic of China. But, I remembered nothing, well almost nothing well. I did remember several things 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 know 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 control the world system core. I know that no one knows what those three letters stands for nor are they originally in English. I know that agents of that Oligarchy raped and brutally murdered my wife while pregnant with my child; they burned my 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 then learn to fuel my un-ending resistance after those most hideous events. There after I then breathed in the smoke monster, drank only on blood and nourishing hate.

Finally, I know that an uprising began in a place called Ayiti and that it continues to this very day despite major quarantine and most disastrous set back. I know that on January 1^st 1959; that the same revolution spread to the nation of Cuba and has been entrenched there sense were illiteracy has been irradiated and people live longer than in the United American States. And things come in threes, all things; for on 1^st January 2012 that long quarantined revolt fought on the fringes of the developing word erupted on the streets of Port-Au-Prince and spread like wild fire worldwide.  I know that I am entitled to certain protections under the Geneva Accords I will not receive as a uniformed combat Pararescueman, shield 2952 of the 99^th Airborne Detachment from Breuklyn Soviet, epicenter of the latest phase in our latest and most glorious uprising.

They then beat me for many more weeks. They ripped out my finger nails and drugged me into nightmarish worlds of grisly torture. They called me terrorist as though it were my surname. 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 told you. I am a poet who makes silly rhyming poems to bed young women.

You murdered my entire family, I periodically think inside me self.

Therefore, I joined the rebel alliance as uniformed Pararescueman 2952 of the 99^th Airborne Detachment, known also as the Fighting 99^th. It was we who helped re take Port Au Prince in 2010. It was we who took back Jerusalem in 66 112 and 1210.

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 to first to Cuba; then to Haiti and Syria where I saw with my own eyes the fullness of genocide the Oligarchy was capable of. Before I read my Orwell, my Marx, my Zinn, of course me Wallerstien, and Chomsky; peppered in with my Mayakovsky, my Hooks, my Goldman, some Rist, the great Kropotkin and many others. So many books and not enough life times!

Those doomed idealists and wandering; those seculars; those unrepentant exile Ivories. I was living on a kibbutz in the land of American occupied Israel writing small poems, laying out my first novel, working the land; laying sprinkler drip lines, making 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.

 

The poem which is numbered #99: Human Patria,

 

It reads:

 

99

 

We consider your rallying and your hee-haws,

An aberrant and arbitrary designation!

We do not fly all flags evenly. That is sure.

Some had more to them than others, some, the very thread, the liniature was, earned.

There was a name tattooed on the back of her neck!

And we best believe she didn’t choose it.

When they splattered those fierce Syrians in the newspaper, did you feel it?

Did you feel their faces crack; their lives leave us?

Nothing?

Not one speck of a thing!

When they broke that hooker’s jaw for sport you still daily subscribed to late night flickering of the inter-web hand cock!

What time did the sunset in Babylon that day?

You vile fucking thief.

I make accusations on myself and at others.

When they scalped 800,000 was it just a cautionary tale that the niggers still can bleed more?

Human.

That’s just a breed of hyper-violent monkey.

Worse somehow, it grins at the notion of a good bleed.

Likes the site of an explosion far from home.

You’re paleness is to me unsettling,

But I could absolve it if you had some “human patria”.

What’s that?

Solidarity with your kind man!

Never mind.

When they kicked your face, broke all your teeth the first time did you beg your god to let you die one last time?

Did you plead, pissing blood to never again be their target?

Coward!

Pile the corpses outside your village, offer your daughters bare breasted ass for rape.

You my pigeon holed associate are the vile ones.

The smidge I pick from my teeth.

You are a speck.

When inserted up her tight shaft, the softness of those pale legs were a cushion.

If I digress into sex. It is because I both hate police and love firm round breasts thus proving I am not any one’s martyr, no icon or virtue nor desirous of your speculations on my gray motives.

I am just a man and I fuck.

Both myself, women and the world back on to me fucks hardest.

What.

Yes what!

Bleeding from my head like Syrians do,

The humiliation of 4,000 years of a petulant subjugation.

I’m am impervious to your zombie ways.

Your turn the other face.

Your blindness.

Pale-ness.

Your collaborator scheming.

Fuck.

When the noose is again about my neck at least I will go through the motions to die a hero.

At least, perhaps, as my last breath bellows Ya Basta Pig in face of my Roman enemy.

At least my gun will be completely empty when they finally taka the hill.

You.

Damn you coward.

When there was no one left.

When it was just you, me, and the overwhelming urge to surrender.

Indomitable.

The richest man in Babylon Mountain was to be just a pebble with a gold cane.

And I. Oh I.

I was invested in my brother and sister too. I wanted for strangers what my own self craved.

Human Patria! I say. Not so farfetched if a blan like me subscribes in totality.

And so right then and there,

Kissing her neck,

Wishing no one had done those things to her.

That name on her neck.

I will kill them all if I have to!!!

I’ll slaughter them all and feed them their own children as delicious meat pies!! RA! Baraka!!!

But tell me cousin, she asks…

If, when we avenge us;

Tell me that I at least will learn to know my Human Patria.

She soothes my tremors of delirious rage, she takes my callous hand; she says;

Absolve yourself of pastiness my eternal love,

For Human Patria relies, and in fact demands that the hero and heroine act not like monsters. Act not like Romans or Amerikanski, instead, she says;

Love me more than you hate the beast and the beast will have no power.

For to save one life, open one mind, live one on life with honor.

We strip the monsters of their claws when fighting vile monsters we become above them,

In conduct.

I will teach you man of Human Patria.

 

 

Ⱥdon to Natasha.

 

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

Dorogaia (dear one) I have failed you, where are you now! What have I again done!!

 

After reading me this trifle wearing both a hideous and vaguely comical mask; one my interrogators then smashes my face with a truncheon again.

And such was the only evidence they ever presented me with.

A stupid, non-rhyming poem.

A ridiculous, minuscule Partizan Song.

Written in Gamatria (Secret Ivory Code), ah ha; you’d have to know what that is pig!

In another life I wrote a boat load of little poems. Interestingly enough, or perhaps commonly my mind retreats into itself to escape the shame or torture and also the unending pain of total human sympathy. My memories it seems are crafted devices, walls of data to waylay my opponents and thus shelter my closest friends and associates. What for are then these ridiculous poems? I call them but a masochistic hobby horse. Though they are not all without some talented intent, they serve me no good, not once or ever.

I wrote them all to four various Russian women. Though that cannot be used to say that all four women were properly loved, or that I loved each with equal rigor. Poetry, song and art itself are manifestations yet they are not equal and they are not all backed up with the same stuff, the same longing, the same level of doing of deeds after words.

It should be clear that though I slept in and beside these four women over a period of some six years; I did only love one. And only one loved me.

 

Now they’re yelling something in Russian and I pretend as though I do not speak it not at all. But how could I not for all and every of my strangest 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 women. Though I took more than I probably gave.

 

It seems they are less interested in the recently murdered guard colonel my Haitian partner and I played the part of recent highway men to gun down dispatch. Less interested in our baser affiliations. It seems that the strong arm of the Russian Oligarchy is most concerned with a brief end of summer liaison that happened seven years prior with a young buxom émigré from the little city of Penza whose name was Natalia Andreavna Skorbogatova who for some time I called Natasha, or Natushka to be even more sweet.  Do not ask me to quantify my love and longing for I cannot.

 

I 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 and lesser American aristocracy, to make new friends in the Russian quarter.

 

 

 

Scene 1

140 Nassau Street, 2012ce

Financial District

 

 

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 to avoid.

 

Dawn is now rising, breaking and expanding on the roof of the District Financial and with the last manic burst of energy being expended by one of our antagonistic protagonists, Sebastian Vasily Adon, over a huge bottle of illegally imported Basque white wine, tells old danger tales to those who will and can still listen.

It is the second to last weekend of August and soon summer will end.

Bottle uncorked and the debacle of his oratory may unfold.

A fake gold watch dangles off his left wrist as he enunciates his wild tale with his hands, although it is known he is only one half a Yid. Covering his dark brown hair cut short for summer is a brown beret newsy cap, called a skally cap, if you were a rude boy from the two tone army like he was. It’s very 1943. So very neo-hipster or proletarian-chic!

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

On the 17th Story roof deck of the old converted print house on 140 Nassau Street, slim and enthusiastic Europeans Lia Monteleone and Victoria Christiana Lynch Contreras snap off photos and clink glasses bantering on care free flirtations and intoxications.

Lia takes off all her clothing for money, she’s a dancer. In another life she’ll hopefully take up photography.

Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, a Peruvian revolutionist is baby faced with flowing black hair with but a couple salt and pepper streaks is the husband of Victoria. He sits with his dear friend Sebastian and a ravishingly beautiful Russian dvotchka named Natasha and attempts a boozy mediation as the two evil eye each other viciously across a low wooden table.

She has big beautiful crazy person eyes the color of the Caspian Sea. Adon’s soulful orbs are auburn hazel slowly becoming green with sleep deprivation progressing.

The stare down is punctuated by accusations of impropriety.

The two are both “aspiring paramedics”. Ernesto is their introducer and is a frivolous and womanizing artist tamed as of lately by his marriage to Victoria.

Adon is in school to push away death with needles and relative high voltages. Natasha is partially knowledgeable on how to pour away sadness and sometimes temper internal evils with liquid poison and that which she doesn’t know how to mix she bluffs, knowing men are staring at her eyes, amongst other things.

He a brunette normally clad in a dark brown leather jacket and brown skally cap beret. Tonight he is in a white linen suit with his hair cut short. It’s a vaguely irregular look for him that he hasn’t pulled out in some time.

The reason he is dressed like that is because prior to his arrival at the Mehanata Social Club he had been at a White Party, a river cruise of wild Latin salsa based gallivanting circumventing the Isle of Man.

Natasha is a siren to which many men have smashed there ships with a proverbially loaded firearm called her fearsome wits to survive and the belligerencies that pour from her mouth when intoxicated. She captures much attention anytime she steps in the room and onto a dance floor. Her style is quite Postsoviet in its cut and colors. There is well put together sashay and flurry to her movements to be sure. And she has an unnerving look, a cross between a size up and seductive stare, a dismissive dart of her eyes to cut men down.

An affectionate rendering of Natasha is Natasha, and this is what Sebastian has been calling her all night. They had been introduced several months before, but both had been too drunk to remember. They both are regulars but he more on Saturday and she more on Friday, but without rhyme or reason despite being regulars for over three years, they had rarely crossed paths before.

Natasha 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 in a tight to the curves light brown leather jacket. She is never cold on the outside.

They are locked in scowling death match of heavy unguardedly hostile words and also a few thinly veiled threats.

He said “don’t smoke in my father’s house,” so she smoked in his father’s house, so he had to yank the fucking smoke out her pouty lips and talk harshly about throwing her out in a cab back to Brighton. Then he “classlessly” handed her forty bucks for that cab, even though it’s really a fifty dollar ride, and more if you tip. Which is against all Russian cultural context.

To which she debased him as a useless man living off his parent’s wealth. And said never in her life had she been so offended by the callous, pompous behavior or an American dog such as himself.

“Less than a dog!” she proclaims.

To show he wasn’t a push over to bombshell, star lit scarlet that no one probably ever said no to 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 cheapening. Men make up all kinds of stories about the motives of beautiful women. Her light up was belligerent and far beyond any international definition of respecting the host. And that’s pretty much how she rolls. Over anyone she feels like.

And yet because she is stunning and pouty and her heels take too long for her to fasten, in effort of perestroika he’s asked he to stay and ten they all ended up on the roof to catch the sun rise.

Now he’s telling a dangerously insensitive story. And she is again beyond appalled.

Sebastian Adon 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.”

Banya is Russian for bathhouse. In the past few years Sebastian has been bathing with Russians regularly to wash increasingly dirty hands from stakes that keep mounting and knock around work that just keeps coming.

He loves the way music sounds in Russian. Though he knows under three dozen phrases and cannot even read Cyrillic.

She watches his words take form with her big predatory eyes.

They peer right into you, and they are not always as happy as the 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.

She participates actively in all she observes.

Maybe not rules men try and make or overly hard work though.

“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 bit of touching at all. Then, you tell them that they’re being filmed and recorded, but that you’re not a cop, agent or a Mossadnik or who-ever dangerous, you’re not there to entrap for absolutely anything. 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 like Charlie Sheen.”

“Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto.

“Then you make tea. 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 salves and assure them there is safe way out.”

Her jaw drops.

“They would kill you just for that,” she spits out.

“For bullshit man! For a lot less than bull shit. A number! I spit on your American number. For insulting low grade bullshit that changes nothing. You will die, they will kill those dear to you, and nothing at all will be fixed about anything, not one woman will walk free” retorts Natasha in all of the glory of women few if anyone has ever said no to.

So, he predetermines.

Not a debutante, not a true New Russian. All the regality of being born all Slavic, but outside the great dividing highway that loops the capital 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 triumph of Capitalism has left her charming and capable of fighting. But she is far from Russia with love, rootless and floating in glittery fairy tales that don’t expel the hardships of her new country.

“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.

“He has such American beliefs!” She mocks.

Ernesto always has applauded his radical specifications and foreign adventures over the past three years they’ve known each other and well before. He’s done his trench time, Ernesto. He can recognize a latent revolutionist, from a sleeping one, from a broken man reborn as a hero.  Palestine, Egypt, Haiti, the worst of 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,” she snaps at his bait.

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

His mind, his name, his face.

His mind flutters something about heroics under siege in land place called Haiti. His face; vague recollection of doing his job over and over again in bad situations.

A few many baton cracks in the Gulliver. I few to many months in cells.

He’s given lots and lots of militant speeches but never done a very violent action with his hands. Like, Ernesto had to in Peru.

His name? Sebastian is only one of his names He’s piloted an ambulance for the Fire Department for three years in all the city’s worst districts. He has traversed the Levant as Zachariah trying to free slaves and end occupation, the American occupation of Israel and the Israeli Oligarchy’s occupation of Palestine. Vasa, he’s dissident poet.

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!

She could care less. Bold wild statements don’t get first impression credential checking.

She was appalled by the rude cigarette yank and further appalled by his cynical bourgeoisie story about call girls passing itself off as completely vain and stupidly incompetent activism.

She offers to kill him.

He obliges her. Thinks she’s bluffing.

I’ll kill this over privileged American hypocrite too, maybe she thinks. A civic duty to my 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.”

If she kills him, the tragedy, as far as a memory, will belong to no one.

Ernesto implores her to be more, “Suave, Suave”. To be more calm and “Tranquillo.” The famous Peruvian revolutionist now a New York low key digital disk jockey cannot even barely modulate Sebastian’s posturing and Natasha’s swaggerous, murderous taunting.

Now they’re waving invisible pistols at each other’s’ faces like wild Middle Easterners. They fuel a veritable bonfire of ego and prideful feuding.

Ernesto urges Victoria and Lia Monte to intercede but they are taking lots and lots of pictures and have seen Natasha make a properly rude scene before, of things when men, “get smart”.

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

The job of any and all men as far as she is concerned is please her by makings sure her drink is never empty and that life is a series of taken care of attractions, to make her life more easy. He has failed at both in his utter self-serving arrogance.

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

There was nothing healthy about his love life lately.

Even the use of the word bids a mind of shame for perpetually having to beg back affections from those he’s thought he’d die with or for.  A year ago his previous partner finally cut him off and the struggle, the paramedical one and human rights one and abolitionist one, all firmly linked; that struggle itself has overwhelmed him lately with his purported role, his Icarus sky walled expectations, his place in the chain of command remaining unclear. Truly only the existential problems of an overly privileged first world revolutionist, as Yelizaveta used to declaim. His last six months have been a black hole of studies on how to beat back death with drugs and electricity. There is also a lofty, high risk plot underfoot to smuggle himself and small team into Aleppo to train Syrian Free Army combat medics. But what faction! There are over forty groups of fighters there. All predict a poor end to such a venture, but the same neigh Sayers neighed the same on Haiti.

When he sleeps he barely dreams, when he dreams its nightmares about the city of Port-au-Prince or about the last woman he was foolish enough to cry love for whose name was Yelizaveta Perechenova. Who left him eventually for a young physics student and with the declarations of his madness by her mother were the nails in the coffin of their two years of life together.

Something like that.

A veritable blur of a 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 narrower now.

He is enrolled in a one year paramedic upgrade program. He had though to jump country, apply for work abroad. He was ordered to hold post in the city and keep working. Lt. Moishe Klein, the orthodox Ivoryish 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. Which no one asked of him or expected that he deliver on.

His weekends are soaked in vodka and with wine, sometimes one poured in the other. And the booze keeps his eyes closed to certain things. And now he’s drunk now again. Acting poorly in the company of a Russian woman, yet again.

Kill me for the sake of it, he hopes. It’s what the world would surely not mind all too much. Drunken thinking of an angry man who’s been hit in the head a few times.

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

“Absofuckinglutely,” she says.

And then before drunken Ernesto who is now very, very drunken, and also very, very tired, after spinning all night can talk them down they’re up a ladder up to the 18^th story, more of a top, Easterly deck on the 17^th story roof with a deep and deadly edge of death into an 18th floor down plummet with the Geary Building looking out, a million cubicles of an upper class aquarium. Like a Sorcerer’s tower of steel rising up to the East at them by proximity of less than three times an alley way.

 

A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

They’re now boxing. Natasha is properly in boxing school. She strikes at him hard then harder. Die you fucking Amerikanski, you damn wasted one, she thinks.

 

Ernesto and 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 concern. Not a bird or a plane could have killed him so far. Not spy agencies or police forces with much bigger better threatening fish to fry.  A beautiful woman might get close enough.

“You don’t want to live here forever?” she taunts him.

Their boxing and taunting has them perilously near the edge to the pit.

The roof deck is a glamorous lit up garden 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 Amerikan a month on the month before.

The pit is just a dead drop, it’s a Fire code ordinance for building in late 19^th century, a ventilation shaft for the 19 real story print house now a new riche-intelligentsia-queer-Ivoryish coop on the districts northern most edge.

She is striking hammer sickle hits and he is just taking her hits and then, then it comes.

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

 

The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is just a side story in his own mind to his own tragedy. She cocks back and doesn’t blink.

Natasha hits him with one big shove and he tumble crumbles backwards into the abyss.

Kill me he beckons and then, she tries so really kill him.

 

As he plummets back, he grabs out and yanks her with him in a tumble off the very ledge of the roof, plummeting to a certain death in the ally way below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 2

Canarsie at Night, 2008ce

Brooklyn

 

FLASH BACK!! It’s the 28^th of the month of December in the Common Era year 2008.

Jeremy’s been dead for about a year. Maria, she died about six months ago. It hasn’t been a good year, Sebastian’s a Jew at heart, and we call them Ivory now. At heart he starts counting the year from September. A real shit year all things considered, it isn’t rounding out to be the decade he’d hoped it to be either. Its late night, in the Brooklyn Old City; sometime around 4 in the morning. The lull when there are no calls until the bad ones come. The Transcare transport bus was seated somewhere out deep in Canarsie. Waiting of orders over the Nextel for more work. As Transcare tended to assign per diem employees random partners; Emile Cange and Sebastian Adon were total strangers. They met that very night.  It was a Sunday. Emile Cange tried to never work on Sunday because it was the ‘Lord’s day’, but he was an Adventist now and had recently been educated how the Lord’s Day was actually Saturday. Sebastian always tried to work on Sunday because everyone else had been fooled into thinking it was the lords day, and that drove the call volume down by a little. Even though Brooklyn was easily 1/3 Ivory. Emile is slim, trim, be-speckled and Haitian, which is apparently a major West Indian Island; full of history. Apparently 1/5 of the medical professionals in the greater New York area are also Haitian, but all statistic are invented. And Haitians have more millionaires than any other Caribbean émigré group. And they fought a two hundred year slave uprising and finally one in 1994…Emile is very proud to be Haitian.

 

“Why’d you become an ambulance man?” Emile Cange asks him.

“To do the lords work,” Sebastian lies. To himself and others.

“Brother, amen.”

 

The conversation then turned predictably to if God wishes to destroy the Ivories for killing his “first born son” or some horse shit like that, and it was a conversation that had gotten very old to Sebastian, as he’d had by now with what seemed like every other black person he’d ever sat with, a talk about god, late at night, on an ambulance, a talk about Ivories and what they had done. Blacks were obsessed with Ivories it seemed to Sebastian, couldn’t decide just how anti-Semitic they were as an overall people. The answer was, that blacks were pretty anti-Semitic as a people. Emile Cange wasn’t though, his old lady, one day mother of his child was a Ivory. He shows Sebastian a picture too, that’s supposed to be shocking to everybody except for Sebastian, who pretty much believes tits are tits, and sex is great and that racism has not much place in the bedroom.

Emile’s fiancé is a resident at Downstate Hospital. A sexy light skinned half Haitian, half Ivory a real rare mixy.

They talk for a while, their palaver leaves an impression on Emile, but to Sebastian it’s the same old song he’s been singing to chornay for years. That’s a medium not nice word in Russian for black people.

“The lord’s work is often done by an unwittingly righteous non-believers I’ll have you know,” Sebastian interjects.

“Amen to that. God has a plan, and man is filled with all sorts of arrogance that he can generate one, better to let the lord work through you.”

Black people are just fuckin’ loaded with biblical insight, thinks Sebastian. But Sebastian’s lungs are black and his liver too, so some of that knowledge he can relate too. But, Sebastian doesn’t believe in God, has no use for it.

It has seemed increasingly that he is to walk his life alone. In the past year, tragedy in the form of questionable suicide struck twice. First, his only love Maria had poisoned herself, then his closest friend, in a period of six months to the later had blown out his own brains. Everything had gotten a little surreal since then, he’d retreated into his work, the bringing out of the sick and dying. By the time he met Emile Cange, there wasn’t too much going for him, days he slept, nights he worked, and on free days he was drunk, bad, bad-evil drunk.

 

“Jesus even has a plan for you brother,” Emile had told him.

 

He doubted it. He deeply missed Jeremy and Maria, often wondered what kind of guy let’s his lover and his best friend off themselves without seeing it coming, if that is what even happened. Wonders what kind of piece of shit he is when that’s the lover and best friend he respectively takes on. He wonders if he’ll ever get the nerve to really kill himself.

Fling his body off that bridge.

 

Sometimes Sebastian sits on the Brooklyn Bridge, all horror show and wonders if he has the nerve to jump. He doesn’t mind the ambulance work, seeing all these dead people. He’s already dead, his body just has to catch up with his mind.

 

Has he jumped before, off every bridge in the city at some point? Over how many lives? Over how many women? Over how many people he could never ever make see, make safe? Emile Cange prays to Jesus for the soul of Sebastian Adon, but Adon isn’t looking to be saved at all.

 

He remembers these other lives, he must be crazy! He remembers things that can’t be real, remembers tings that no one else sees. He looks out over Brooklyn is it spelled Brooklyn or Breuklyn? He looks out over the East River and he sees war in the distance and death in the night.

 

 

Scene 3

Pacific Ocean Deeps, 2012ce

Black Freighter

 

 

Far below the waves of the black blue Pacific, a vast underwater leviathan of a craft named the “Black Mermaid” hulks its way gradually toward the surface. The vessel is forty miles off the Western coast of Nicaragua, sloshing bashing water; cascading aggressively all of these things as its crew makes way toward “New Shoreham”; a tiny settlement on Block Island.

And, says McIntosh, a member of the Trinidadian Special Forces, “A quite stupid name for a town overtaken by the simple name of its own island,” and he knows about such things being a Trinidadian.

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” was paid for by the Chinese and therefore into her studies were incorporated the most elite techniques for parapsychology cultivated over 4,000 years of Middle Kingdom, as well as appreciations for those aspects of the Mezzo-Americans.

Shortly after graduation she took the instance of her America husband’s infidelity to promptly divorce him and renegotiate her contract to the higher authorities to which she came under employ.

She’s doing her make-up, red lips on beauty. She is very agile looking, big brown eyes and light cedar brown hair; she looks through the mirror into the eyes of Emma Solomon, her commanding officer watching her from the 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 gentlemen, in many regards they fail at being men for they are quick to make and break promises,” reads Emma Solomon from a book with a grey and black leather binding.

 

“I have never read his writing deeply, but I hear from others that he makes sweeping cultural generalizations throughout his novels. Many of which are harder on 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 us and them into simple gender roles, mentalities and generalizations,” Adelina adds.

“I’ve read them all,” says Emma Solomon, “he’s my husband after all, and they get better as the serial progresses. The poems I cannot stand.”

“I’ve never read his poems either.”

“You’re missing nothing. Think communist Dr. Seuss with a slight swagger of Mayakovsky.”

“Well I think highly of his contributions to the resistance. I could give a damn about his artistic abilities. Husband?”

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

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

“You’re a wonderful creature dear Comrade Blazhennaya, your work will not be so hard. We have to activate a chain of cells he’s built up and down the 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 a radio.”

“I know my job.”

“My husband has a lot of potential.”

“So I’ve read.”

“The Oligarchy knows the general date for the rising. 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 here.”

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

“The resistance movement has evaded the American State Security apparatus for twenty years. Everything is going according to plan.”

“According to prophesy?” asks Adelina who can converse with the higher power when she feels she must, but trusts completely in the Baraka, the Devine charisma of Emma Maya Sorieya Solomon, the hidden candidate for Messiah of their generation.

Emma nods and places her left hand on Adelina’s shoulder.

“Little darling, just stay out of the New York City.”

Adelina looks at her bulky satellite watch made by an Israeli company called “Superior Alien Military”. In eight hours’ time she and her “unit” will be launched from this briny abyss via a hermetically sealed fast boat, they will then land on Block Island and be taken to the Hygeia Hotel; given new identities and “Americanized in the greater Boston area”.

 

“I’m not afraid of anything you know,” states Adelina to Emma.

“I know you’re not, beautiful. That’s why you were selected to keep him under control. His mind is now in a dark and treacherous place. He’s been in the field for too many lives.”

“I will not fail you Commander Solomon,” she says.

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

“We’ve been this close to the edge before,” Adelina replies.

 

 

Chapter 4

Wall Street Banya Spa 88, 2009ce

Manhattan

 

 

            FLASH BACK! To the wood ceilinged restaurant of a Russian Bathhouse that stinks of sweat and also vaguely of fornication, buried below the streets of the Financial District a long conversation is coming to a close. An emergency medical technician named Sebastian Adon is finishing up a good yarn to a young Ukrainian medical student named Yelizaveta Alexendreavna Perechenova who has recently become his platonic confident. The aim of such storytelling is that she might let him pour cold water upon her, let him gaze at her young tight and voluptuous, near naked body, captivate him with her eyes and take in his all his ambulance war stories. Of which he has plenty. He’s been writing her for months.

And this has been a great success for the last four hours.

Everything is fully dilated.

They know each other through an old associate of Adon’s named Dmitry Khulusin, a man of exceedingly low moral character. Sebastian Adon is an avid fan of former and post Soviets. They remind him of something that is tough and also fearless; loyal to a red line and of course exceedingly beautiful and open minded in the bed room to just about anything. Adon has been writing Yelizaveta letters for over seven months. He’s not sure why. Attention? It isn’t simply to sleep with her. Although as a man of course he would not turn that prospect down. He’s a man always highly in need of a confidant, for he’s nearly always in some form of emergency mode.

It has been a rocky road of activism, arrest, trial and tribulation since he first came back from the State of Ivory nearly ten years ago in 2001 shortly after the 9-11 martyr operation.

To her he’s a fiery train wreck of comedy and tragic idealism. She observed him at Hunter University and on the Book Face for some time. He cannot possibly be cut of normal Amerikanski cloth. He is a curiosity to which she can devote sporadic time. A minor deviation from her studies at Stonybrook.

The story this time has been about his moral descent post deportation from the State of Pal-Israel, called by some (the Canaanites) Palestine and called by others (the Ivory); Israel. He had recently attempted to return there to visit a long lost associate by the name of Maya Solomon.

He was immediately arrested at the airport.

His two days in Lod Prison were recounted and about Ivories not taking kindly to him working on a Canaanite ambulance for a week; four years prior was much of today’s yarn. The Israelis kind of hold a “whose suicide are you on” type grudge. About them beating him, water boarding him, hitting him with lights, electricity and kicking him repeatedly in the groin bellowing in Russian.

Sebastian Adon ethnically speaking is one quarter Fenian; one quarter Russian; one quarter Prussian; and some part Polish Iv; therefore he makes a good little Brooklyn mutt. Or perhaps at best an exceedingly good liberal New Yorker. He drives ambulances for FDNY going on two years in the South Bronx; he sometimes drinks too much liquor and brutalizes a girlfriend sexually; but nothing rapey or violent. Cuffs, anal, threesomes with whores, foursomes with couples, loads on tits and faces. The product of a generation raised on porn. He’s got loose and transient morals that he justifies with his ambiguous vocation. He likes the idea of human rights, but isn’t sure if humans know they have any, or sometimes if they deserve them. He likes the idea of communism, but isn’t clear why the communist revolutions were mostly violent autocracies. He has basic values that are in essence good, Yelizaveta agrees, though she is vaguely appalled to hear him speak of his escapades’ and depravities.

She heard that Maria left him because he got drunk and swam into the Atlantic last September after a fight. The Russian rumor mill was faster medium than Book Face.

Sebastian has led a small revolutionist club since his return from Palestine in 2001 that has caused him considerable trouble; but alas capitalism still rules in the USA, despite his and others best efforts to defeat it.

“There’s a half black president promising to end the wars, forgive student debt and provide universal free healthcare,” Yelizaveta says, “you weren’t all totally defeated.”

 

Occupy was two years away and the general uprising called the Great Revolt about three.

 

“Why are you an ambulance man?” she asks him.

While completing a degree in Political Science at City University Sebastian took a job as an emergency medical technician and this seems to have tempered some of his previous radical fervor, but not by much.

 

“I like helping people,” comes his scripted response.

Sebastian is just under six feet tall. After they get dressed and meet in the banya lobby where she tries to pay and makes sure not to let her. He’s wearing a blue FDNY job shirt he’s gotten personally emblazoned with the Israeli flag, an irony under the circumstances of recent events. The Irish had been putting on such patches for years, however the window for other ethnicities was about to be cut short once the West Indians began wearing their flags into battle so to speak. He has bags under his eyes because he works life’s night shift. He wants her in every way a man can desire a woman but has never told her thus so far in the two years he’s known her. After Maria left he intensified the courtship. That is largely because he at first was fooled into loving another, lesser woman, second because he’s a coward when it comes to his actual emotions and did little to pursue the more likely reaction to his affections; which was surely bewilderment and rejection. So he just kept the letters about big ideas not passions.

“I like some of your collectively written documents. But you go on and on sometimes and need to get to the point,” she says.

Yelizaveta likes things with references. She likes looking up anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot. She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a somewhat sanctimonious appearance of some kind of bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.

Just fifteen minutes before they’d both been lying near naked in a Russian Banya called Spa 88. He was putting the story on her about something crazy that had just gone down on what was supposed to be his first vacation in three years. After some other story about a threesome with Maria.

But it isn’t a vacation if you spend the whole time in a prison. And it isn’t a real threesome if she runs out of the room crying while you fuck her best friend.

Which didn’t happen, it was just something that turned him on to say in front of her. In reality, he had gotten into a fight with her in September on Block Island and followed Jeremey McGaffey’s ghost out to sea for several hours.

The local police found him several hours later walking naked down the road with and carrying an enormous rock.

“I think you need to go back to school and get more medical training,” she says, “you’re a glorified cab driver with an oxygen tank. You’re not living up to your expectations of yourself.”

“I’ll forgive your lack of appreciation; we’re god’s avenging angels with sirens I’ll have you know.”

When Adon feels cornered he typically drops into grandiose rhetoric.

“Sebastian. You, are a terrific story teller, but let’s not forget where we stand in life’s chain of command shall we. I am a student and you are a truck driver with a stethoscope, if we wish to be more than that there is such a long road ahead. ”

He wishes she was less coy; less belittling of his profession and what was left of his idealism. He guesses it isn’t true love, not when sentiments of rough degrading sex run across the conscience. But if it was simply do her in the back of an ambulance type love, she’d have seen right through it, likely been appalled. He believes in impossible, undoable things. Kids himself into thinking he’s the man for the job.

But she’s not impressed by all that.

Sebastian Adon, is of course in the twilight of his young adult life. He has been driving an ambulance for three years thinking someone would call him a hero at some point, hoping, believing that there was gonna be a chance to save some lives.

“I’ve saved eight lives,” he informs her as he sometimes has before. It’s a justification for why he hasn’t quit the job yet.

“Well don’t let anybody take that from you,” she retorts.

“I want to reiterate that the reason we civil servants feel so entitled is that the rest of you are unwilling to work the conditions we are and face the raw un-adulterated bullshit the people of this city are quite willing to put us through. We guard you while you sleep and you pay us like pizza men. I think this job has taken more from us than we were able to give to our city. And when the city is gone I assure you it is because we have abandoned hope in it.”

“You’re so preachy and poetic, I kind of love it sometimes,” she utters as she rubs her fingers together, “that’s the world’s smallest violin playing just for you.”

Adon is the kind of man who at this juncture can still be motivated by even the world’s smallest violin.

At least to him life then has a theme song.

Shortly after banya she leaves him to take the A train back to Washington Heights to get back to her studies, leave s him alone with his black thoughts.

 

 

Scene 5

The Upper West Side, 2012ce

Penthouse J

 

So much light and so much air, still under nine hundred American, my to the chagrin of the Ivories who own the building; the House Trikhovitch is rental controlled!

Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trikhovitch Family the early 1981 Common Era. That was not a hey-day for New York City as some newly arrived hip individuals have come to believe. Heretics.

 

By the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down.

 

Crack is Wack, they say, but who do you know that has tried it, sucked the moon rocks, boom! The CIA brought it here in 1980 to help kill all the black people, get them hooked on that vile addictive substance; then arrest loosely 1 in 8 of them. The book about this phenomena is called the ‘New Jim Crow’. That’s what Pacifica Radio says anyway.

Located on 95^th and Riverside it is now one of the Z.O.B.s most luxurious and safest of safe houses. It is rent controlled and guarded by Albanians. They are warlike these Albanians. Good at moving people and things, also safe guarding things for others. They do not practice Cannibalism. There are two garden terraces that look out over the Hudson River to the North and Midtown to the south. 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 holdout sitting on a highly choice property paying $850.00 American a month for it. A good number of Ivoryish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully.

 

It was once a little more of zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs.

 

“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,” utters Sebastian Adon looking out north toward the palisades and George Washington Bridge.

This is the place to jump when you really want no mistakes made on the outcome.

Fleetingly he thinks of the Fort Washington district, the highest point on the isle of Manhattan. He thinks of all the times he’s wandered Fort Tryton Park with a lover holding hands. One lover in particular for after her none of the other previous ones had mattered.

But, then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination with the fairer of the species.

All previous lessons are lost.

On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblisse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner Nikholai Trikhovitch.

Nikholai was briefly a police officer for a short period, and is now working for the Red Cross in a vast housing and logistics Ponzi scheme, he is also one eight the leadership of the Z.O.B. and the editor of its newspaper, “the Banshee”.

From time to time he picks up work as an unlicensed private detective helping cheating wives get their proofs of infidelity or parents find their dead kids in Newark, New Jersey.

Rudely we have introduced Nikholai without introducing the Z.O.B.; the clandestine organization of ambulance workers and West Indian entrepreneurs that bind many of our characters into a pact of lawless mutual aid. The group is best known by its clandestine newspaper and this is often called the Banshee Association, but these three letters better indicate the club’s inner circle, and its place in the international human rights movement.

“It’s a human rights version of the Westies, that’s all I can tell you for now,” says Sebastian often.

“What’s the Westies again,” people ask.

“Um, a small but ultra-violent Fenian gang from the 1980’s,” he often adds then distracts.

“What’s that stand for?” people ask Adon.

“If I told you….” and then he orders a round of water shots.

So many people just call them the Banshee Association, some kind of emergency medical service proto-union alluded a recent write up about them in the blog DNA info.

Regardless. They all just called it “the club”.

Nicholai has heard all about, literally all about “the Russian Girl” as he calls her.

“This one, despite all your most base prejudices is actually Russian. Not Ivoryish Ukrainian like Yelizaveta or Maria,” remarks Sebastian.

Does that matter slightly? Neither can decide.

They are not Russian speakers though they are the mutt descendants of them, Sebastian and Nikh are four generations made American. Their mothers are 8^th generation Americans. Their fathers are third generation Ukrainian Ivories.

 

Like Ms. Maria Parsheva and or Yelizaveta Perechenova.

 

“In Russia we were Ivories, outside of Russia we are finally called Russians. We are treated the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father Alexandr, or Alexi if you knew him well for he was a fierce and indomitable man, but also a gregarious buffoon behind the doors of his home when no one was looking but those he mostly trusted.

 

Not that these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Those were the two other Post-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 simply 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 who was ever calm but he did not love for she did not excite in him full passions; and the second Yelizaveta who was headstrong and wild whom he could never forget.

Nicholai remembers red headed 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 Russian in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody mess in 2008.

Sebastian would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justin Thomas described her; a strong woman who stands behind her larger than life man. Nikh just thought of her a Russian geisha, until he watched her do the train job, which we’ll have to consider the details of later. In that moment under fire her realness did come out.

Nikh remembers Yelizaveta emerging into the club picture, and Sebastian’s bedroom sometime in 2009. He remembers her at meetings and social functions as a highly mouthy Americanized blonde know it all little bitch who walked all over Sebastian publicly and privately, emptied out his pockets, put wild eyed ideas in his head, and reduced him to bawling tears when she eventually left him over her mother’s total lack of approval. She may or may not have helped them sketch out the entirety of “the Haiti job” though. And probably pushed Sebastian into joining the original ground crew that three years prior took over the Port-Au-Prince general hospital triggering the uprising there.

 

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

 

The two comrades Sebastian and Nikolai had been partners in human rights defense committees and general thought crime since 1999. The year they did their first “job”.

 

There had been a lot of great and mediocre women and a lot of “jobs” since then. But not for nothing, since Sebastian Adon entered his “Postsoviet amorous period”, as Nikh 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 on the world could find a singular dedication, another soul to whom he could do all his work for.

The Human Rights Westies did some wild work in Russian amorous period.

Their associate; a proud Fenian named Hubert O’Domhnaill had coined that phrase. “Human Rights Westies”, and also his “Russian Amorous Period”.

That was the Z.O.B. in a witty little simplified nugget of Fenian witticism. The club now had a larger than life presence in certain regards or perhaps it should be said; circles.

Back to the task at hand.

“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly love making? The full blown Russianness of her” asks Nikh.

“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 flings. Those woman walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”

Sebastian had come to believe that Nicholai harbored some rather bas prejudices against Russian but had never determined why. Nicholai had come to believe that Sebastian unable to love himself at all found himself enslaved by a series of party damaged dangerous women, Russia and non-Russian alike.

Sebastian had not previously thought of how Natasha acted in bed. It was as if he had known that already from first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to try a cocktail. She could fuck a man into pieces.

But this was not the immediate attraction. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Postsoviet partners.

“I bet she is most ferocious,” remarks Nikh.

An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop.

“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. A true predator not even posing as a house pet! And the things she confessed to under torture.”

“Tortured her did you?”

“I did. With my words.”

“This is your main instrument of torture tovarish.”

Tovarish is former Soviet for, comrade-brother-worker. Nikholai is a Russian-Ivoryish-Fenian-German mutt just like Sebastian. Neither of their mothers is a Ivory, so the black hats would of course disavow them and they can’t marry lawfully in Israel neither. They both look like “the Russians” but they speak and they think like children of the American intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals; Nicholai’s father is a neurologist and Sebastian’s a puller of teeth. Both fathers being Ivoryish Atheists and both gentile mothers being American sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to “communism” as they’d be denounced as over and over. But they were not communists. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much trampled masses. They were only about as Ivoryish as their value for education.

Until the “Russian Amorous Period” they had been concerned with propaganda and human rights, but their jobs had not been ambitious.

It was the end of Nicholai’s marriage and Sebastian’s deportation from the State of Ivory that got them working together again on the cause.

And it was perhaps Nicholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied a homeland he’d imagined was his destiny; that put them back together; left them open to suggestion.

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.

And in the past four years the Z.O.B. accomplished things no one had though possible. Like organize a newspaper, which organized a general billing strike in EMS, which lead to a trade union of all the cities EMS, which build an ambulance guerrilla movement on the island of Haiti; and developed a training blueprint for international medical guerrillas. All was poised to smash the trafficking and prostitution infrastructure of the biggest Apple on Earth.

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

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

Rather than fall into a pit of death, his grabbing on to her altered the trajectory of plummet. She had made every effort to follow his deadly command and rather than go through with it honorably he had tried to take her with him.

How American.

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

“Well we landed on top of each other half off the edge panting and realizing that she had almost just killed me and I had almost just taken her with me.”

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

“Well, anyway. So panting and looking down into seventeen stories of death she 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,” he finally admits.

“You’ve always been a sick fuck. And you need to not let fourth dimensional things interfere with the growing war effort.”

“Well then she calms down and we do this kind of half swoon, half reevaluation of an enemy and she tells me that she paid 25,000 dollars to come to America and have an arranged marriage set up. She said she had to work the debt off and the work was highly unpleasant. And she told me she will help me identify the biggest trafficker targets in the city. ”

“Don’t project and don’t believe her lies. You always seem to tell a tale always darker than is. The world is evil enough on its own 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, ask why she ended up meeting you at this stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation.”

 

“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.”

“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 Postsoviet woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie.”

“Just about anything true, but given the entirety of the encounter, it seemed she was alluding to her own imprisonments and debts. Whatever their current state might be.”

“But are they true? All women lie and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were story telling as art or parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You’ve done so time and again. Remember your truest partner Ms. Hali Vik, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in endless succession you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”

 

“Nikholai. I had two partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was Maria and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple short stands in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun.”

“Hali Vik was the kind of woman you need to find, not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you and they’ll never join this cause,” says Nikholai.

He’s referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well suited partner for Sebastian Adon. He’s also referring to the “Lowell Job”. Which had been a messy over exertion of well-intentioned violence due to the fact that Hali Vik, had gotten herself in a lot of trouble, but Sebastian may well have made up stories in his head too.

Well anyway, Hali was safe in Italy now and while there may have been a little bit of torture 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.

 

Nikholai 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 Ivory, he was in paper work still quite married to Emma Solomon.

 

But bigamy of paperwork is not the same as bigamy taken to heart.

It was these four women that had made him believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and fine perhaps also Yelizaveta in a completely separate way. There had many lovers. He had well ripped the heart out of 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 decade ago.

Nikholai had been married to a Syrian-Italian-Puerto Rican modal for seven years named Krissy. They divorced and then she completely disappeared. He had been fucking and drinking his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where.

“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 Erzuli Danto. 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, all the women you take as your serious partners, well none of them have fathers and all of them of dark pasts. Except Joanna who you destroyed. Poor noble woman. Which was rather sad because none of them loved you as fearlessly as she.”

Yelizaveta had a brilliant father. But he was highly bipolar and the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. 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.”

Sounded logical now, but not in 2010. Her mother forbid them to see each other and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end.

“Natasha 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 simply felt like I was in the presence of…”

He almost said, ‘his murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then really mock him.

“You love dangerously and inappropriately. Just remember that Ms. Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory to you being killed by another man 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. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past. I’m very hard to kill as you know. Natasha has already tried.”

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

“She claimed to Raphael Ernesto she remembers nothing.”

“A black out as a reconciliation for your near arranged murder? Neat, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered.”

“A black out woman hides a dark past in my experience.”

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

“I’ve always fighters, but this is something surreal. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under two years. Never pays, always leaves alone. Drinks like she needs to part the Red Sea via consumption. I’ve never seen her at the club before.”

“That my friend is only called the thing called too much trouble. She is not what you or we need right now.”

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. He pulls glasses on to make a mythology out of the world starring him and his overbearing sense of mission. Often with an unwitting female who tries to love him, but he’s from a house called trouble.

 

“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” says Nikh getting a second cigarette fired up, up off the first, “It’s far worse that you’re a real romantic. You usher in the 18^th century for the coldest of post-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 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.”

“All of them. It’s either a blessing or a curse you love early and love often as you do. I suspect a curse upon your own well-being. You seem to enjoy these unstable, untenable trysts as if pursuing the romantic ideal of poorly constructed epics might necessitate your own 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 poet than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”

“I have no idea anymore. I haven’t written a truly good poem in many years. If quite a little good art was made under Yelizaveta it was because she asked for it and returned it. They are all quite 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 old friend.”

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

“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. 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.”

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

Sebastian blows out smoke.

“I died and was reborn, like the last few times,” quietly responds Adon puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. And miraculously awoke panting in the alley way my penis in hand. Walked out as if nothing happened. 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.”

But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him because he too knows what it is like to bear forced separation from one you love. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adon is not because Sebastian is “sleeping” and Nikh is completely awake.

That a full blown uprising is but three weeks away. And that enemy knows that the Z.O.B. has helped organize it.

From which one could infer that the enemy will be moving in on any of the known leadership. And although security culture is tight as drum; Sebastian is a known operator no matter how many faces or deaths her passes through. And that there is no reason in the world why one of the leaders, albeit even one “put to sleep” for his own safety should be getting into a tryst with some new dangerous Russian blondie.

 

Who in all likelihood, coming out of nowhere at this precise time; is undoubtedly an agent of the Mossad. The Mossad or even far worse, the secret police, the ruthless agents setting up to die all who resist the iron heel of the Oligarchy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 6

Marley Printing Corp., 2010ce

Long Island City

 

There’s really only one newspaper for your EMS communist crazy talk and that paper is “the Banshee” and its editorials rant along the lines of:

 

“They say there’s no rest for the wicked, but I haven’t done anything that truly bad in quite some years. These streets will run you ragged. Bleed you dry if you’re inclined to let the reaper take you.

But on a long enough time line everyone is going to die.”

 

Oh, Technician Adon sing the blues:

 

“Our mission, in so far as our misnamed, disheveled, brow beaten lot; can call the nature of our trade a profession with a mission; is that when you die you may do so in warm bed, surrounded by Ivory doctors, West Indian nurses, attentive and curious, cute, young residents keeping their hands off except to hand things, and of course your family, all around you pouring out that thing called love before your long kiss good night.”

“It has been said that on a long enough timeline our kind will lose all ability to feel. That one of our number might stand above a mass of splashed and splattered organs, avulsed intestines scattered across a black tarmac in the glow of streets cast upon our troop; to then light a cigarette, make a stupid fucking joke; and then take a camera phone picture of your son’s dismembered corpse. There are rules against such conduct, but not a one in our number would turn away. If your son’s body lay splayed across the freeway, before that thing called god one at least or more would say a silent prayer, reach down their blue gloved hands and wrap a hospital sheet shroud over the body, close his eyes. And perhaps the one of us with the camera phone might say something crude or racist, normally to cop doing crowd containment, to show our compatriots he or she felt nothing. But when your son or daughter fell, ingloriously in a bloody heap it was us who carried their bodies off that street, it was us who had gang rushed, blaring in that dead of night racing brave to save them. And we’d do anything in our means to bring them back to you for just one moment more.

We don’t want you to try and call us heroes. We just want you to know that we have given everything to our trade, every drop of our sweat, every ounce of our blood drained; to our or third or second marriages, to our child support bills, to our black lungs and swollen livers, before we find pension we’ve poured out upon these streets our humanity for you in the 25 years of servitude to our city of many, many lights.

We don’t want a Daily News two page Spread on the four through six; and I don’t think you’d buy a calendar of us topless in our PPE out-city, ‘heat resistant’ post-911 fireman pants to raise money for our fallen soldiers. Well maybe of you would. We don’t need their medal ceremonies, their cheap metal bars to pin about our blue collared breasts. We just want you to know we exist, and that we’re coming as fast as we can, and that we’ve sacrificed ourselves completely, become a people changed trying to help, and remember; you called us.”

 

So read the preamble ramble, the editorial of the Banshee Newspaper, Issue 4, the only rank and file controlled EMT-Paramedic Newspaper, released on February 13^th, 2010.

 

Scene 7

The Burmuda Triangle, 2012ce

Black Freighter

 

 

“No, I’ve never read a thing, he’s written, I only just have encouraged him to write,” sates Oleg the Bear and all nod in agreement. Yulia Romanova doesn’t even know how to read in Russian, she’s paid to fuck men on demand and place satchel bombs.

 

Back in the present, back on the monstrous underwater vessel called “the Black Mermaid”; traveling propelled by a Thorium reactor towards the United States; the extraction squad sits for black bread, herring, tea and Compot, sweet berry punch.

 

The Chinese had finished a canal across Socialist Nicaragua that was three times the size of the US controlled one in Panama.

 

But, for some reason no one in the USA even knew the thing was operational. And it was through this cognitively non-existent mega water way the Black Mermaid nuclear submarine was planning to pass on its run into American waters.

 

McIntosh is a very big guy. And so is Oleg Medved, but they are big in different ways. McIntosh is Trinidadian, dark as night. Black even for the eyes of white men that turn many shades into enemy other. He stands over six feet tall. He is by far the most conspicuous person in the unit that was being briefed one hour before deployment in a hermitically sealed fast boat unto the shores of the United States of America; a border run to a rebel base on Block Island.

 

McIntosh is muscular and very well trained in the arts of Voudoun. While his size stands out and his willingness to break the backs of any person who might lay their hands on the candidate he has taken a blood oath to protect; his main task one mission will be to allow Ms. Adelina to enter the dreams of Sebastian Adon, and keep him from unleashing his fighters in ways that might trigger a bloody, bloody bloodbath. In fact, their unit, now in massive black nuclear submarine owned by the State of Ivory is hurtling toward the international maritime border.

 

Oleg Medved will be quick to tell you that “Oleg the Bear” is certainly not the nice Ukrainian Ivoryish 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 as 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 man for their little squad. It is his responsibility to work with his very stunning partner Ms. Yulia Romanova, to whom he sometimes called “his muse”, but alongside being a slender and sensuous brundinite she was very good at building bombs and also social engineering.

 

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 N.S.A. and Department of Homeland Security; and it was the duty of McIntosh to use his spiritual training to help her enter that glorious rebel of mind of Adon’s; then it was Oleg Medved’s job to teach the resistance how to use the advanced communications and IT tools developed in the Sharashka in Seattle, Washington. This particular “Bureau of Experimental Design” was Chinese funded as said but really was bringing together some of the best offerings in the Persian library vaults and cross collaborating with Cubans and Israelis. These were upside down cake times. And it was Yuliana job to seduce everyone they came in contact with and use her very specific charms to extract data needed. And Adelina being a powerful sorcerous shaman and considered a candidate since birth 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.

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 date of the uprising. But those great spiritual cosmic forces were being factored in.

Before they departed to run the border via Black Freighter submersible they rendezvoused a week prior below the desolate Eastern coast of Russia’s Stanovoy Mountain range; on the island of Sakhalin.

They were all meeting for nearly the first time so 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 back in Sakhalin, them being McIntosh, Adelina and Yuliana Romanova.  They were drinking vodka and eating black bread with herring, and salted tomatoes, goose patsy 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 McIntosh who spoke no Russian.

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

“I was told to come and get these Americans a means to tell their story. The story of their uprising most precisely. I was told to set up these communication lines so Americans can join the global revolution underway for over two hundred years.”

“I am here too to enjoy myself and take pictures!” he declares.

“All the most reputable of foreign scholars have declared an American uprising impossible. That the nation on the mount would sooner watch sports than tune into see the world burning. 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.”

“I’m coming as a highly paid tourist. I will take a million pictures; I will leave behind more than I take away,” and this was the conclusion of Oleg Medved’s little speech back in the Sakhalin Outpost.

“Have you any faith in the prophesy?” Yulia asked him. Yulia was every bit as beautiful physically as any woman Oleg had ever known, but Oleg had come to see women as accessories for men, adjuncts and muses for the doing of big things or even just fun sweaty things. And what he noticed since the Romanoff Bratva took over his contract was that he had more time to pursue his art. Money absolutely brought options.

He had a morally ambiguous relationship with Yulia founded on the principle that her partner back in Russia was not her boyfriend or her husband. 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 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 Americans,” he declared.

Yulia feigned a small, false pout.

While beauty was not a question her eyes lacked what the parapsychologist called the “Old Soul depth” of Comrade Blazhennaya.

“And you little Mosquito,” exclaimed Yulia referring to the American translation of Blazhennaya’s fictionous name, “Do you believe?”

The Israeli handlers had put them up in windswept bunker safe house in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk waiting for the black freighter sub to arrive. The streets were empty because of the snow. Yulia and Oleg were flown in from Yekaterinburg by the Romanoff Bratva that held their contracts. Oil and Gas oligarchs. McIntosh and Adelina arrived together from Seattle.

In the cultural context of both Russia and Trinidad it was necessary to drink a lot of toasts and shots in celebration to possible; the hopeful success of their mission. And secure potentially physical privileges to be allowed of their either female leadership!

 

And before Adelina could answer Yulia Romanova’s inquiry, her face grinned with a hard and quiet smile now into the thirteenth shot of Russian Standard Vodka.

 

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

And then Emma Solomon in husky voice of a warrior woman spoke out the mouths of Adelina and McIntosh perfectly synchronized, and that was when Yulia and Oleg realized that neither the Romanoff Bratva nor the Israelis were in charge of this ‘job’ at all.

The pair exclaimed in the voice of Solomon, “by the time we are done here there will be no more safety for the men in high towers perched atop the mountain of any faction. You were all born serfs or various types of half casted slave, but your unborn children have been assured their emancipation via deeds to come.”

 

Everyone dropped back into their seats. Oleg grinned. McIntosh smiled. Yulia looked truly scared, emotions breaking through her 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 sprawling slum cities. They have more going on than dancing, fornicating and erection of taller towers and bigger, brighter stadiums.”

 

“Don’t overestimate the prophesy and underestimate the Americans,” she tells them, and pours the next round of shots.

 

“America, fuck the yeah,” says Oleg!

 

 

 

Scene 8

The Spartan Club, 2010ce

Midwood

 

 

I pump iron in Paki meat head gym on the corner of Ave H and Coney Island Ave, I see my old squad partner Sebastian there, once a year or so, looking like death back to life. ‘Stop smoking, stop drinking, and think about your reasons.’

 

I normally the 58B 12 hour unit out of Station 58, in a forgotten little hood called Canarsie. Station 58 is the RCC regional command for the Brooklyn Division, Division 3. It is the largest Station in the borough, except for Station 43 which is technically in Division 5; Staten Island. The 58 is located on East 83^rd Street and Foster, in this ass end of town where there’s nothing but warehouses, truck depots, and people in need of Salvation Army. The base is an abandoned Sanitation Garage, steel shutters roll up to reveal a small fleet of our trucks and various stages of decay.

 

Everyone calls me by my last name “Mr. Ali”. But, my crew calls me Mir. I affiliate with the Desi Riders; posted up on Foster Ave; we sit there with our cars pimped; all official.

 

At the Fire Academy and by that I mean fire suppression academy on Randal’s Island which everyone dubs the Rock; there is a mini skyscraper which is being built to simulate and train for the management of a high-rise fire. There is a vast bunker some call the ‘gas room’ where the probies learn to trust their PPE Bunker gear in a simulated roll over inferno. The two weeks of Academics are taught on web cast, multimedia vid-terminals in pristine clean white on blue rooms. Their cafeteria is a veritable shrine to nearly 200 years battling the demons blaze in NYC.  There are climbing walls, training courses which light up and must be put out. There are several steel columns from the fallen towers fashioned into a bar for feats of public endurance. There are three cars worth of subway train to learn how to engage in rescue efforts in the MTA.

 

The whole compound takes up nearly 6 acres and includes nearly twenty buildings to train its cadet classes of sometimes up to 300.

 

I’ve been there only four times.

 

The first time I got paid a great deal of overtime to be a moulaged victim in a massive inter-agency counter-terrorism MCI cluster-fuck simulation.

Don’t hold your breath when the other show falls homie.

The next two were to receive two days of Hazmat Training so the Department can claim plausible deniability when the ‘other shoe falls’ as they say of Al-Qaeda. The final time was when I graduated. First thing I’d ever graduated ever. Was kicked out of grade school, dropped out of high school, hadn’t finished college.

 

The cheap looking blue certificate hung on my wall next to my Good Enough Diploma. It has taken two rounds and eaten nearly six months. It was the hardest thing I had ever had to do. And I sort of did it twice, but I don’t tell everybody that.

Me and Adon.

But my point, that last time I went to the Academy I looked up at a plaque hanging in the archway where the cadets must enter to get their gear. That plaque read as follows:

 

“Let no dead fire fighter return from dead to say my training failed me.”

 

“Juxtaposition” is one of my new favorite words. I learned it from my academy squad partner and car pool buddy Sebastian Adon. The Fort Totten EMS Academy comparatively is housed in two wards of a rundown Confederate Prisoner Interment Camp cum multi-agency supply and training base. Its cadets utilize three relatively un-air-conditioned, relatively un-heated Cold War style buildings to engage in our medical training, one black tarmac run way to learn to operate an emergency vehicle and 7 to 9 miles of highway in either direction to undergo our physical training.

 

We share our base with a Battalion of the National Guard, an NYPD harbor unit, an NYPD Canine unit, the Park’s Department, a Historical Society, and perhaps a ground to air missile nuclear defense system that doesn’t work from the Reagan years of operation Atlas.

 

There is no slogan hanging on the gates of our facility or above the dirty stinking locker room we stow our gear three to a locker. But on a tree downhill from building 205 where we engage in medical examinations, timed scenarios, and general EMS re-education; carved on a tree near the water. Some old timer once carved these words in that ancient sycamore there, in tiny bloc letters as they looked out across to the Coast of Crescent Breach.

 

“Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living,” that’s what they say in the Banshee.

 

And my training never failed me, but when they send us into the field there was just so goddamn much we had to make up as we went along. I need to get out of this chicken shit EMS outfit and become the first practicing Muslim fire fighter, that’s the plan.

 

 

 

Scene 9

116 Ludlow Street, 2012ce

Mehanata

 

The lights are dim no matter what happens. 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 116 Ludlow Street.

This is its second location since many times police raided and finally burned to the ground in an ugly incident that took place in 2005.

At an infamous establishment such as this you ought to always know the names of the men “standing the watch” or women “pouring for your drinks” or the “holding down of your bags and coats. Most importantly you ought to be cautious of the seductive forces marshaled via inexpensive vodka and black magic to lead you to things you ought not to be playing around with.

There might was well be signs on the wall telling you anything not tied down will be carried away into the night, bags, souls, virginities.

Come to think of it, there are such overt 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 bar earn bottle.

It’s a Gypsy Bar. And it lives up to that designation splendidly.

You wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it. You’d only be looking for it is someone told you about it and perhaps you’d hate them for it later. But, in the wilderness a tavern of wild foreign and domestic people dancing to the tunes of the Roma can draw angels and demons by word of mouth and since 2001 it has been surviving pogroms, police raids and venue changes via fire.

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 Romania. The cast of characters around here boggles the mind.

The club has the look of a vast lawless pirate ship or a wilderness brothel.

The waitresses and bar tenders are skinny or shapely, Bucharest or Sophia girls just arrived recently though generally well educated and for now, un-indentured. They mostly don’t stay long and the reason for that is partly because of the demands of the work, and because their boss is the devil himself. The club is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday. There are private parties in the basement you’d do well not to crash unexpected or uninvited. The talent is highly various. There’s a rather pal-mal esthetic of transcontinental bacchanalia.

The booking agent 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. The primary live acts are Gypsy. Roma meets Latin American mostly. You get dance hall and reggae tone periodically.

The doughty wine.

The salsa, the tango, sometimes even a little Zouk.

The most popular disk jockeys are Raphael Ernesto Contreras Lynch also called the “DJ Rafflex” and Georgie from Bucharest also called the “DJ Mishto”. As stated “Romanian” but “not a Gypsy”.  The most famous of the bartenders is Martina called Hella Dubreskaya. She has been here a good deal longer than the others.

She has the special constitution that a bartender needs to work the shit show around here longer than a month.

Outside and inside are James White, the retired Fenian cop on ¾ pension after his ACL was torn chasing down a perp and James “Behemoth” Brown Pérezes a smart talking, burly Puerto Rican. Always outside is Slavi, the stone faced until a sneaked grin Bulgarian collecting the irregular admission wearing a Soviet wolf fur hat except during the time of summer.

You pay cash up front for everything unless, unless you’re a card carrying regular. James White and James Brown are sometimes easy going on admission and fierce to squash the fights which happen, generally around 2 AM, but often before and after.

Justin Toomey O’Azzello is the general’s manager. He has wandering hands. He is jovial and likes to tell elaborate stories about his days in the “air force”. 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 wander though.

 

The owner of this place is a fearsome Bulgarian Ivory called “Sasho”, but is real name is Alexandr Dmitrievich Perchevney.  He has a soft spot for revolutionists, 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. The cooks are all from the tropic of Capricorn but nothing is ever very good eat except the soup or the salad; white cheese over fries or some type of Borscht which is rumored to sometimes contain menstrual blood. 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 American engineered mega tunnels that run under the country in case of insurgency or general emergency. 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”.

Also that patrons must have at least three teeth to enter the establishment.

The music is always playing loud at the Mehanata Social Club where Natasha makes eyes then orders a Vodka energy drink confection, then slides up to Sebastian at the bar. He is wearing a black suit.

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

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

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

“That you did. You remember nothing?”

She just gives me a devilish smirk. And shakes her head.

“I drink a lot for fun. I don’t always remember my Fridays or my Saturday nights. I was told I was bad. So I’m saying the sorry. For the being of bad. What are you drinking? This is our custom.”

“Nothing? No recollection.”

“No nothing at all. Oh, 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.”

“Well we all have our demons in here don’t we. I’m good. Until I 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 thirty 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 cage by a second bar and dance floor.

“That looks like if would hurt,” he notes.

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

But that’s a silly thing to say. Seductively. She is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen with a proclivity for homicide. Describing just how beautiful she is almost doesn’t fit in a short play. 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 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, the grandeismo also the confidant of Rafael Ernesto and Victoria.”

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

“And on the bad nights?”

“Vasili Pveada.”

“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. 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.”

Martina the bartender comes over and gives Natasha a wink.

“This is sorry alright. Now I again reserve the right to be rude to you and forget about it later. Fair game yes?”

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?” she asks.

“Astika.”

And she thinks, terrible piss but of course she orders him one from Martina the raven black haired Bulgarian bartender. Because Russian apologies are based on acts not words.

“Are you coming to festival?” she asks then 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.

“Don’t call me dear ever again, I’m not so old. I’ll alert you that I may well come to some of it 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.

“Natasha, 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 comes on and she thrusts herself into his arms for a last dance.

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

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

She sashays him across the dance floor muscling out the other couples with her buxom. She lets him lead and he does a fairly good job.

“You dance like you’re from the Caribbean,” she says.

“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 replies.

It is 4am 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.

“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 patrons, tight except around his circumference.

“Hasn’t changed his cap 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 dancing with Natasha, good for him! She’s got great big ones.”

“He’s always dancing with Natasha.”

“You’re thinking of…” notes Justin.

“No Azello. I’m thinking exactly what I mean to be thinking. He’s always dancing with Natasha right before thing get interesting.”

“They just met boss.”

“You’re thinking of things three dimensionally and I am thinking of things fifth dimensionally 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 burnings of bodies.  It’s time to call up all our troops, every single man to the front.”

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.

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 NYU 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 three 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 in the Bronx.

 

 

Scene 10

High Bridge Outpost, 2010ce

Bronx

 

Technician Castro

 

7:14pm is 19:14 in military time Ambulance speak.

 

It’s Friday. I think. The job plays tricks on you with time.

Your loved ones never understand how your weekend moves through the week on the eight hour units. On five, off two, on five; off three.

It isn’t rocket surgery.

It makes cheating easy though.

Which I get accused of far more than I ever get to do.

Someone heard a crash in the night on the unpaved service road between the Deegan and the Harlem River called Exterior Ave. A bump that jolted us to sudden tachycardia, that is to say a fast heart rate, at our true 89 above the Deegan and Harlem River; which is to say where we are supposed to be stationed during our tour or within three blocks of. With the current staffing crisis we’re one of only six BLS trucks running in the South Bronx tonight.

It’s gotten bad like that.

I have my twelve years in the making; thick brown dreads tied off in stocking cap behind my head. I’m working straight time 17Boy Tour 3 with Leon Goldstone the ever eager emergency worker. The most enthusiastic employee we have. They sent me a notice today that I have to cut my dreads. It’s been an ongoing battle for the past two years. I had to claim “religious observance” and join a Rasta Mansion to get some papers! These cock suckers.

Enough to make me Banshee disturber, and accidental founding member.

Every time a Captain sees them I get more bullshit.

Now the Department is claiming it interferes with me getting my gas mask APR on.

As if I’ll ever use that thing.

But I’m civil service now. If they want to restrict me for my dreads I’ll take the four month vacation while the EEO lawyers sort it out. Not like I can lose my job now. You’d have to take titty sounds on an underage girl to get fired at this stage.

Which someone just did of course.

Rumor has it were functioning at 45%.

It’s a veritable skeleton crew these days. The rumors move faster than the ambulances; and they’re mostly lies and exaggerations. Excuses to complain.

We’re posted up at 17 Adam’s 89 location, on an off ramp no longer active above the Major Deegan right under the infamous High Bridge.  17A is the laziest goddamn unit in the whole South Bronx and that really says something. It’s a mentor truck so when they aren’t skelling out of their own devices they pass all the work to the rookies. I’m out here with Leon Goldson who’s doing overtime. Seems like he’s always doing overtime. Doing overtime or working out. Guy’s a freight train. Sometimes we’ll work out during facilities, irregularly mind you; and dude is diesel. And a nice guy too. Real refreshing having a partner who still like the job, probably cause he knows he ain’t gonna be doing it forever. He’s at Lehman College for Social Work. I tell him this is a lot like Social Work. ‘But without a defiant result’ he responds.

I have no idea what he means by that.

“I can’t be sure I’ve ever helped any of these people,” he continues.

“With social work there’s more hands on,” he says from behind the wheel, “there’s a real feeling you’ve gotten up in their life and given um some resources. Something more substantial than air and aspirin.”

“Sometimes a little Oxygen therapy is all a person really needs,” I respond sarcastically.

“Come on now. Even if we drive fast they done mostly fucked up their bodies well before we even met um. And more to case; nothing you or I can say in the so-called golden hour is gonna make um hold off on the stoags, and the poison, the fast food, the red meat, the gang bangin’ ways. We’re a non-factor, is all.”

 

But he knew that I knew that.

 

We’d known that all from way back the first month we started. When the expectations got dramatically lower once in the field. From presumptive diagnosis to vital vision as it were. Sometimes Leon liked to pontificate. He and Adon were perfect partners because they liked to take turns pontificating. Going on with yarns spun by things they saw on the job. Not common war stories mind you; no trumped up version of strange days or odd jobs; I mean the two of them liked to talk it out. Me too, just not all the time.

Leon, apparently getting restless began to drive the bus down the off ramp to river level. Around the bend we’d go off ramp-off road and end up in the badlands under High Bridge; an interconnected mess of Amtrak storage/repair depots, industrial waste sites, a trailer park on the Harlem River, and a damn good place to lose a body. Used to creep me out down here. Adon always came down here. Always taught his partners was the back door to Richmond Plaza. Going down this service road you’d circumvent the anarchy that sometimes prevailed when doing a Richmond Plaza job.

 

Leon kept gamily talking. 17 Boy rolled off road along the river bed through the mist.

 

I had a wife and kid back home. It made everything a lot simpler. Wifey made more than I did; emotionally high maintenance. Kid was real cute. I made one beautiful boy; sometimes I thought that it was the only good thing I ever did in my whole damn life. The only thing I was proud of. I didn’t love my wife any more. We hadn’t made love in a year, I’d fucked her senseless out of blind rage a month or two back, didn’t do much besides make me cum. She’s crazy I think, can’t place the madness.

Bipolar disorder maybe.

It’s a bad co-dependence now.

I don’t love her, but I love my boy.

Sometimes things will get real rough, we’ll fight, she’ll fucking break things. But I gotta make it cool ‘cause I can’t have my crazy fucking wife run off to Indonesia with my son.

I think if it hadn’t been for my son I’d never have stepped foot in Peggy Quinn’s office down at 9 Metrotech. And I made moves to be a fire fighter, next promotional list that goes up I should be on it. I had to join the Rastafarian Church to keep my dreads, but mark my words, the day my number comes up; I’ll shave my goddamn head. Anything for a little respect and a living wage.

I say it makes things simple because my vices, my social life even are a day dream. I go online to Lastnigthsparty.com and viddy pictures of beautiful women doing debauched and compromising things in bars and clubs and lofts and where ever. I jerk off sometimes thinking about a couple strawberry blonde twins sharing my happy cock enthusiastically. I have fantasy life, that is to say in another life I’m the guy at last night party, I’m a rock star, I’m the artist; the next big thing. No terrible, evil draining city job, never got her pregnant, never got married to keep her sane, never moved to Harlem, never drove an ambulance.

In my day dreams I do Capoeira, and I bike a lot; used to me a messenger, and I still remember thinking my whole life is front of me. Not just a countdown to pension. In my day dreams I’m still the kind of person who believes in things.

I’m in the mood for a cigarette. Leon doesn’t smoke, only unhealthy thing he does is balance four girlfriends. It’s dark out tonight. The lights from the bus hit a sort of low mist that’s rolling over the speeding cars below us on the Deegan up off the Harlem River. We quite a lot of sitting around. That’s the worst part. You sit around for nonsense a large percent of the time, then right out of nowhere, right when you’ve hunkered down, then you get the arrest, the shot, the multi trauma right when you let your guard down.

I remember the first time Sebastian Adon and I went out on this unit, before he fucked up and got shipped to Brooklyn, or pulled strings and got shipped depending who you ask.

We were real eager two years ago. We both wore ties and collar bras then; part pride, part defiance. I’d long since taken mine off. Rumor has it he still wears his.  He’d quit smoking back then and I still biked to work every day. We were as eager as Leon still is.

I suppose 17 hadn’t gotten us yet. But Adon eventually got transferred Brooklyn side to Bedstuy and Leon lives ten minutes from the station.

They call Division 2, that is to say the Bronx; “the gentleman’s borough”; what goes on in the Bronx stays in the Bronx. It’s a big front. Most people at 17 aren’t from the city much less the Bronx, and ones that are from here; like Leon, or Watts, Ortiz, Medina, Santiago a few others are hardly proud of the neighborhood. The worst are the ‘kids on Safari’ as Leon puts it. He might have gotten that phrase from Adon. That’s all the Up State, Long Island, ‘Suburban trash’ as Adon calls um that came out here to play tough guy in the ghetto, forget they aren’t cops, and aren’t shall we say, ‘sensitive’ to the pluralism and diversity of the city. Basically Battalion 17 has a lot of good old boys loose with the words nigger and spic. Not the greatest formula for patient care.

But at Battalion 17 a lot of things fly that don’t fly in Queens or Manhattan. Like how Andrew Celluci wears a gaudy gold chain on the job, like how Jenny Jones never wears her boots Tour 1, or a myriad of small ops guide details that don’t ever become a disciplinary problem here.

Leon was in the middle of a yarn about social work and the importance of physical fitness to the welfare of the black community. I cut him off tastefully. ‘Look,” is all I mutter.

It’s where the trailer park is, was, should be normally. There’s a skinny crack head without a shirt flagging us. Blood dripping out the side of his head. A tanker truck has careened of the road, plowed right through the tenement camp- shanty town that congregates in this little trailer park. Leon flips on the left light bars illuminating the whole area in white light. There’s blood on the torn tanker. There’s blood on the wheels, the tanker overt turned on its side has taken out half the encampment. The crack head bellows something unintelligible then sits down on the ground his face in the mud. I see what looks like the arm of small person; a child underneath the tanker.

 

There’s still a fog that hangs in the air. Leon jumps on the radio to report a possible MCI and possible Hazmat incident. I think to myself this is little beyond my level of training. The light bar illuminates the whole scene.

 

“There are dead things floating in the Harlem River. Dead people, dead parts, dead fish,” I say.

Leon took the high power lantern and shined it on the scene of the accident on the river itself.  The river was blood red. Its crimson tides crashed against the overturned tanker truck. It was as if the very composition of the thing had changed; its texture a frothy oil of arterial red blood in which ten thousand squelched out creatures floated to surface. And anything that had once died in that river floated upwards too.

 

Units synchronize your watches it’s 7:25pm, 2010.

 

Scene 11

The Hygeia Hotel, 2012ce

Block Island

 

 

“Don’t listen to the words I say, the screams all sound the same, though the truth may vary our ship will carry our bodies safe to shore,” she hums the Monsters and Men.

 

The boat ride to shore through sloshing blue black waters carrying their clandestine squad of four had gone off much more seamlessly copasetic than McIntosh had feared, who being West Indian did not know how to swim.

 

So after the submarine ride which had to round the Cape Horn and run both tropics twice to reach its drop off point undetected by the military intelligence of the U.S.A. a short boat ride thorough rocky waters brought Yulia, Adelina, Oleg and McIntosh to safe house on Block Island; via a small flashing green Beacon a woman named Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv guided them to shore, and quickly shuttled them in her jeep to the island’s underground railroad station at the Hygeia Hotel; where now they were most vulnerable for they were under the protection of a coven or witches, or shaman sorcerers it should be said, witches begin derogatory.

 

This coven could trace its origins back to the genocide in Salem when aligning with Fenian pirates, bootleggers and Mohegan Indian they had fallen back to New Shoreham to take control of the island.

 

Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv looked like she was in her late forties long dread locks rapped up above her head in a taam, but by night she transformed somehow and looked half that age. Oleg when he awoke and came to find breakfast in the three floor yellow and red hotel that he barely recognized her. All the sorcery alarmed him and he wondered what drugs had been injected into by the sneaky Ivorites, or fed to them enroot so he could be so susceptible to manipulation of the senses. Oleg had lived for some time in the Israeli city of Nazareth and served two years in its military police force before immigrating to America to not think the Israelis were one of the sneakiest, most manipulative peoples alive.

Oleg Medved feels the same way about Judaism as he does about witchcraft, but many a little more sentimental about Judaism because witchcraft doesn’t have any warm welcoming family holidays that he is aware of. Nor did the witches, shaman sorcerers rather help him obtain the blue American passport that makes him the only legal member of this little unit.

“So you want a Bajan truffle scone,” asks Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv.

“Why thank you,” he replies and pops the crunchy beige cake in his mouth.

“The orders are in to separate your cell immediately. You and Ms. Yulia Romanova will leave for New York this morning from the mainland by car. The candidate shaman Adelina Blazhennaya will take her partner up to Boston and get your safe houses established.

“Don’t you think we need more time before we make contact,” he asks.

“No. The enemy made contact two weeks ago. We’re behind schedule as usual.”

“One ought not to be fashionably late to a revolution,” Oleg notes.

And Tanya T-Bird Tall flame Luv agrees. Even if he does not believe in the magic, it is clear to her that Solomon selected a very good team to activate the network, get this revolution back online from here to New York and then via underground rail road out to Oakland, California.

 

“Where are your truest loyalties Mr. Medved,” Tanya Luv asks him suddenly before he heads up to his room to get his gear in order.

“To the art I make and the money I’m paid and women that love me for both when I am so fortunate.”

“Fair enough, like all men,” she replies.

Yulia pops her slinky brundinite head into the dining room and says in Russian, “You have call from Moscow, they are saying we must be in New York by tomorrow’s nightfall.”

“The blue moon has a power that will dash the best of plots and largest of armies into lunatic disarray. You should thus make haste,” Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv says, “and please remember that for whomever you work for or actually report up chain of command to; you’re in the American Arm of the resistance now; we budget for bribing and drinking, but not for whoring and gambling.”

Oleg the Bear grins, “We are internationalists, and this is still a free country.”

“What the blatnoy is a blue moon,” Yulia asks in Russian.

“You’ll know when you see its effects,” says Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv the Pagan shamanic sorcerous in Amharic.

“We don’t speak your dessert wasteland gibberish,” Yulia declares, “Only English, French and Russian!”

But, Oleg inferred what she meant and decided that he was quite uncomfortable with the American resistance’s widespread use of magic. One could not bribe magic or placate it with whores, or get magic too drunk.

 

Most unnerving work conditions to be sure.

Unlimited operations can get so fucking hectic, fast.

 

 

Chapter 12

Brooklyn Hospital, 2010ce

Downtown Brooklyn

 

Her name is (was) Tanya Albert; she works on a Transcare 911 unit out of Brooklyn Hospital. In her own words:

Only reason I’m out here this gorgeous Friday evening is that I don’t make a living wage and thus do an insane amount of overtime to keep myself in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I want to be a firewoman. I made the list, I passed the physical, and then the recession bullshit happened. Come the fuck on, I said to myself; I’ve paid my dues. It’s time for them to let me the hell out of this chicken shit outfit, this EMS bullshit. Its 1905, and I’m gonna bang out at midnight. The rain is beating down on the windshield, and I’m praying’ to black baby Seventh Day Adventist Jesus that we don’t get any more damn jobs! That’s what I pray to in the open anyway, if anyone asks me.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have no romantic ideas about fire suppression.

A woman, a black woman, I know the deck isn’t stacked in my favor over there in the goomba-squad. But you know what? I been asking myself a lot lately; what it is exactly those people do for 90,000 plus a year that makes them so much more valuable to the department than me. My unit is in the shit. We could do ten jobs a day on a summer shift in the Stuy. I don’t wanna say some shit like those fire fighters don’t work, they work a bit. And a real blaze, albeit hard to come by these days happens and yeah they heroically run in.

But number wise; come the fuck on.

In my five years in 911 EMS I’ve gotten fifteen confirmed saves. That’s eleven returns of spontaneous circulation in the field post cardiac arrest and four ‘hauled my ass at the speed of light to King’s county after some young brother got blasted away.’ They only gave me nine little sheets of accommodation because I think one of the arrests bottomed out in the ER 40 hours in. And they don’t give out nothing for shots and stabs. For ass haulin’, life saving spectaculars.

I done carried three tight asthmatic Peds out of projects and got worked up without getting intubated up in my bus and on the treatment. Nothin’ for that. I’m sayin’ I don’t want a bonus or nothing but the sum total of my work, of my personal life savin’ five year total is high as hell. And yeah I buff, but you gotta buff to keep it all interesting!

I’m a fast motherfucker. My hands move so damn fast at that wheel I can clock under four minutes on any notification anywhere in the borough of Brooklyn. I a demon behind the wheel. And if not for the recession I’d be getting’ mine. I’d make it through their academy and be up on a ladder by now. Savin’ property not life is where the green is. The fame too. Just last week the Daily News ran a two page spread bout a fire engine crew that delivered a baby on the Belt. Not to be a complete hater, but I done delivered six babies now, they even named one after my unit; Sonja “B” Carter. ‘

Cause I straight hold it down in the Stuy.

It’s aggravating that the press loves those fire fighters so much. Not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just we need a little love too. It gets to a tech when year after year they out in the trenches and they feel more like a cab driver than a medical professional. We always post the firefighter saves in the lounge whenever we see them, as if to say we do that shit too you know. We save lives too. It’s been near a decade since the merger and still they shit on us. They still think we’re the red headed step children of the emergency services.

But the cops know. They see us out there more doin’ our thing with the shots, and stabs, and EDPs. I heard just a week ago some EDP put a gun up in some crews face and demanded that his girlfriend be given Narcs. EMTs don’t carry narcs. We got Aspirin (the ASA), Albuterol, Oral Glucose (a fancy word for a sugar tube) and Oxygen. That’s it. TV has everyone thinking we’re paramedics. Anyhow, I got upwards of thirty recognized and mostly unrecognized saves and I want out. I want my goddamn promotion ‘cause I’m closing in on 29 and then they cut ya.

I heard that EDP motherfucker near shot two of our boys last week on 44I in Brownsville. Heard he shot his girlfriend, hit an MOS close range in the leg, then shot himself. The crew member saved the cop by hittin’ that EDP with his asp thirty times in the face. Bleeding’ out his damn leg he called a 10-13 and held direct pressure on the wounded cop. Don’t see that in the Daily News. Don’t get any thanks when we have to act like enforcement. But a Fireman who delivers a baby is a god among men.

Or a firefighter who does just about anything in front of a camera.

Just shows the fuck up for his groceries.

I want out of this EMS hustle. I want into Fire. I need the stimulus money to stop getting ‘lost’ in paperwork before it trickles down to EMS. I need to stay in shape, not burn out, and not let the resentment over take me. They say it’s for the good of the service, but I’d like the service to do a little good for me.

“31Sam for the Multi Trauma on Livonia,” the dispatcher cuts into my thoughts.

“I hate East New York,” mutters my partner Melvin Clarke. And he’s a 6 foot 6 Jamaican from FDNY doing overtime on my truck.

“31Sam, I got trauma and I ain’t got any other units available,” the dispatcher Shirley states, too always too camp casual on the air.

She tones us up, the loud extended beep to wake up sleeping crews.

“31Sam pick up your radio!”

“31Sam; sent it over central!” I hoot into the radio. It comes over flashing on the KDT.

“That looks really, really bad,” Melvin mutters. I glance at it without reading anything.

“Yup. Let’s ride,” I say not lookin’. “Central show us extended!”

Clarke taps me on the shoulder, points me to the screen; he never mentions the job enroute unless it might matter.

Apparently a dog is eating a little girls face.

I move far faster now, faster than the speed of public safety, or life.

 

Chapter 13

Block Island, 2012ce

The Hygeia Hotel

 

After Yulia Romanova, this was not her last name just the name of any of the women that belonged to the Bratva of Yuri Romanoff; and Oleg Medved boarded the Port Judith Ferry wearing flicker masks and made their way thirteen miles west to the mainland to retrieve the black jeep wrangler waiting for them on the mainland under the name, “Atticus Crispy”; well then Tanya turned on the good weather.

 

For the weather was indeed a thing that some factions controlled.

 

‘Most peculiar’ thought McIntosh now clad in a black suit cut exactly to his figure. When they arrived there had been storm and fog, rain and midnight, it was freezing cold all night as they landed on the beach in the hermitically sealed baby schooner. He had wondered how it could be so cold in this North Eastern August. But, as soon as ‘the Russians’ departed it was a beautiful August late afternoon on a Thursday. Adelina Anatolievna, the spry and beautiful pixy was a sorcerer like him, a sorcerous like Madame Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv; so her Russian ness was only superficial; for all people of real magic; “Majik” knew themselves to be Gods and Spirits living in host horse forms called human; vessels for the divine multitude.

“Do you have a first name Mr. McIntosh,” Ms. Adelina asks as they sit and watch the late afternoon beauty of this green and rocky place from the back porch of the hotel Hygeia.

“It’s David; David Darious Kudzai Chikwamba Dorset. McIntosh is just the super stupid code name they gave me back in Port-Au-Spain because I retain data like a computer.”

“What should I call you then,” Adelina smiles politely.

“You can call me Kudzai in private or Alexei because it says Alexei on this intricately forged passport here,” he beams at her.

Alex is a very, very common Russian name.

“What should I call you when nobody else is listen,” she whispers.

“You should call me Kudzai.”

She puts out her slender and delicate hand for the shaking and he takes it in his large and powerful dark hand that is becoming lighter as he begins his transmogrification into a light skinned, blond haired blue eyed Russian man.”

“Do you feel uncomfortable playing a Russian businessman?”

“Less uncomfortable than with the boys in blue patting down my long and my vulnerable every single time you and I go out in public.”

“You know I was thinking I’d make myself black just to make a little controversy but low profile is now we need to work. I’m sorry you have to hide yourself. You are a very attractive man as you are undisguised.”

“Don’t make me blush until my complexion better allows it,” smiled Kudzai, code name McIntosh.

“Alexei, Russians don’t ever blush. You’ll give your mask away.”

“I will call you Lady Adelina if that is all right,” Darious replies.

“Or Adi B, is fine too,” she says.

Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv looking younger and more vibrant as the day recedes comes out with pitcher of lemonade, some more Scarborough Scones and a leather bound ancient looking manuscript with red stones embedded in its cover.

“Do you have word in the Caribbean called Loup Garrou?” asks Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv pouring Lemonade so chilled it reminds Adelina of the vodka served at the Trinidadian Special Forces “School of Alcoholism” where operatives train to accomplish tasks like driving, dancing, sword fighting, doing yoga, or flying planes completely under the influence, yet as if sober. The lemonade looks mighty cold.

“Are you referring to the werewolf sorcerous who steal young babies and ruins marriages in the dead of night? Those we call the Je-Rouge, or red eyes.”

“Perhaps it is the same. A particular breed of super natural creature; like a werewolf, a vampire and temptress are in one.”

“Particular to the Island of Haiti there is a spirit called Je-Rouge Loup Garrou which can take possession of person, normally a woman and turn them into a cannibal lupine creature. They keep mother awake all night to trick them into giving away their children and they keep men awake all night with shall we say succubus like luring, disorientate both; steal children and infect the very soul of the men with their dark and primal character.”

 

His skin moved still a few shades paler and his build diminished substantially though his musculature remained.

 

“Why do you ask,” Lady Adelina.

“What know you both of Sebastian Adon and his Z.O.B.?”

“The ‘B’ stands for Banshee does it not?” says Kudzai Darious (called McIntosh) in front of Ms. Luv.

“No. That is a deception. The B doesn’t stand for anything nor do the other letters,” says Adelina shooting from her hip.

“You are most right. None of the letters stand for anything. They are a ghost shirt organization,” Starr explains.

“I’m not familiar with this Majik,” ‘McIntosh’ says sipping the ice cold lemonade.

“They are twelve old souls that jump from body to body at will. They project incredible power, Baraka is the word on those around them. They can leave their bodies at will and be in other places, other realities, other lives. They are six woman and six men, though some are hidden. The leadership on paper is not the leadership in practice. The term ‘Ghost Shirt’ refers to the American Indian practice of painting the crest of the soul on their under armor before battling the invading white colonizers. They therefore by moving so fast in space and time deny their enemies any real conception of their hidden numbers and power.”

“This is most interesting, unknown to me that Comrade Adon had such power,” says Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya.

“Only a speculation on my part and this coven, and I know his birth mother well, so my speculations about his auspicious condition are not based on pure speculation.”

McIntosh hides in him what he knows as Kudzai Darious Dorset as he transfigures more into Alexei Thermadorov; acquiring the memories of new food groups, mostly bland, new letters, mostly strange, new ways of making love; mostly savage, and new skills like dog fighting and the selling of medical equipment on the black market.

Kudzai Chikwamba is a Shona warrior from Zimbabwe, stranded in Trinidad during the War of Lesser Antilles Succession in the mid 1990’s. He had been send by President for Life Robert Mugabe as part of an expeditionary force supporting the Garveyite faction of the 1994 Civil War in Trinidad against the Western backed Indo-Guyanese nationalist faction. Cut off after the ceasefire due to the American naval blockade he was naturalized in Trinidad, became a bio-chemist and as eventually recruited in the elite Trinidadian Special Forces.

 

“What is his mother like,” Adelina asks.

“His mother is wise and kind and raised him as well as she could given all the circumstances of the curses upon their house.”

“Curses?”

“Well his father was full blood Chosen so that would have been enough to mark them all, but this is America so being a descendant of Ivorites or Ivories, is not enough to be marked. No it was a deal his father made with a devil during the third War in Indo-China. And his membership among the Bohemians that invited the cursing.”

“Enough for now,” interjects McIntosh looking ever more like a young Russian businessman, “speak of this Blue Moon, of the trigger it might play in this Labor Day Weekends events, tell us why you ask of Loup Garrou.”

“Well first the blue moon; you are both people of ancient knowledge; she a candidate and you a Shona Ougan. The blue moon itself implies a lunar cycle where in there is second full moon within a calendar month. One Lunation, the average lunar cycle is 29.53 days, there being about 365.25 days in the solar year there are therefore normally 12.37 lunation. Every 2 to 3 years in the 19 year Metonic cycle there will occur a 13^th moon. This occurrence, which will occur again tomorrow night is referred to as the blue moon.”

“As in, once in blue moon the Trinidadian Special Forces sends a raiding party to establish the readiness of the American resistance,” exclaims Adelina with delight.

“Yes, it’s been nineteen years,” replies Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv.

“The suggestion has been made that the term “blue moon” for “intercalary month” arose by folk etymology, the “blue” replacing the no-longer-understood belewe, ‘to betray’. The original meaning would then have been “betrayer moon”, referring to a full moon that would “normally” (in non-intercalating years) be the full moon of spring, while in intercalating year, it was “traitorous” in the sense that people would have had to continue fasting for another month in accordance with the season of Lent,” notes McIntosh quoting from his Wikipedia update almost verbatim.

“Very right,” says Ms. Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv looking herself younger by the hour as late afternoon stretches on. The weather is flawless.

“Interesting cycle of events, and the last of the cycle falling on September 1^st, 2012, the last possible moment before the B’ak’tun Long Count Calendar ends on 21 December,” Adelina concludes while trying to deduce via syncretism the overlap of old and new world Majik.

“The completion of 13 B’ak’tuns since August 11, 3114 BCE; which marks the Creation of the world of human beings according to the Maya. On this day, Raised-up-Sky-Lord caused three stones to be set by associated gods at Lying-Down-Sky, First-Three-Stone-Place. Because the sky still lay on the primordial sea, it was black. The setting of the three stones centered the cosmos which allowed the sky to be raised, revealing the sun,” quotes Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv from her red stone crusted book which has an electronic reading device inside it.

“Well what does that mean for our chances of success,” wonders McIntosh aloud who now fully every bit like a Slavic business man looks.

“Well there are two dates for the uprising are there not,” states Tanya Luv, ‘the political date and the spiritual date. The date of ‘the great disorder’ and the date of ‘the great revolt’ and the oligarchy knows neither.”

“I will tell you both well, coming from the political camp of things that the date of the uprising is certainly not set to a date of historical-spiritual-magnetic-geo-syncretic origin, but what do I know I am low in the chain of command” says Darious Dorset who now speaks in Russian as “Alexei Thermadorov”.

“I don’t care about the stupid politics of it all,” exclaims Adelina, “I want to know why you were asking us about the Loup Garrou!”

Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv turns to her, “Such passion!”

“You mistake inquisition for passion, I am quite numb,” she retorts.

“We shall see what you see in his head,” Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv replies.

“His head will be like the head of all men,” Adelina replies, “Self-absorbed, self-loathing in need of woman to pacify it. I was not chosen because I was just the best of the best of the candidates not committed. I was chosen because my Kaaba score ranks my empathic ability high and my sentimentality non-existent.”

“Hmm,” smiles Lisa, “we shall see.”

“Tell us now of the Loup Garrou, so we know what you are telling us in full.”

“Enhanced by the powers of the blue moon one will strike at Adon. It will be subtle, it will be nefarious. It will last. It will close him off to you completely except in dreams. If your associates Ms. Yulia and Mr. Oleg get out alive know you will have no ability to affect the outcome in New York the very minute she bites him. If she hasn’t bitten him already. I see blood and poison in the tea leaves. I see madness, treachery and betrayal. I see what nineteen years of planning non-violently will do, done away with a single bite. She bit him two weeks ago. Oleg will confirm the worst,” says Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv.

“Well this creature is not more powerful than I,” states Adelina Anatolievna.

“Beware the Loup Garrou, she is of old and primitive majik but she serves one who wishes this uprising to go bloody-bloody murder,” Lisa warns.

 

“They feed not on blood they feed on our excruciating pain and hopelessness, all pain we release is energy they drink of our body,” quotes Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv from the New Social Gospel, written by Emma Solomon and dictated to a teenage Sebastian Adon in 2001, before she was crucified and he was wiped clean.

 

“Perchevney,” says “Alexie Thermadorov” of the old devil himself.

“Part of the curse on the house of Adon was that for twelve years the eldest son Sebastian would spent the Sabbath in the House of Perchevney, that Tavern in the Wilderness called Mehanta. You must both stay out of New York and out of Brooklyn especially but above all things do not go in that Tavern or all is lost.

 

“Sounds like a damn good time,” says Alex in Russian.

 

“My message to you both is simple, what little Emma Solomon didn’t brief you on I was to share. You are being given a special and enormous task. Anyone can make a revolution. Tearing things down can be done with a herd of monkeys in any part of the world. Building things up requires open minds and the job of you four resurrectiors is to awaken the sleeping dead. Be bold, have no fear the Old Spirits, the New Spirits, the Old Gods and Goddesses, the New Oneness, the candidates, the sorcerers, and armies of Emma Solomon the Gold Lioness are behind you. You will both suffer much, but you will win; it is written and it will be made real. This slave uprising has been fought for 4,000 years since the first coming of the prophets. The scales will tip mark my words. Go city to city in this country from Boston out and seek out the ones this little Otriad, this group of 12 called the Z.O.B. find the ones they’ve touched and readied. Give them the vast freedom dreams, open in them the true knowledge. And when the hidden uprising does unleash itself see that we evolve, not devolve this people. The rest of the world has fought for the last two hundred years to liberate mere pockets. This uprising in the land of the eagle will fulfill the Baha’i Prophesy and then down will fall the Bear and the Dragon, good luck my magical co-conspirators,” says Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv with a jovial smile.

“What dream constructs are you using to tempter the hate and win the passion of Sebastian Vasily Adon,” Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv asks.

“Prague Sunsets and Burma Nights,” replies Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya.

“And some Trinidad and Tobago,” to take his lusty edge off says David Kudzai  Darious Dorset, code name McIntosh agent of the Trinidadian Special Forces, now hidden below the skin of Alexei Thermadorov.

 

Sunset falls for some odd reason in the East on lovely, rock green New Shoreham with its prohibition era hotels, its farm of exotic animals, its pirates, it’s boat people, its witches, it’s descendants of Mohican Indians and Fenian bondsmen. Sitting on the porch above one of earth’s many tertiary chakra points; Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv read beat poetry, Darious accustoms himself with yoga to his new fleshy pale armor; and Adelina Anatolievna breathes in the universe, and readies herself for the greatest act of passion and battle she will ever know.

And the moon in the distance readies vast and often misunderstood powers for the re-writing or shall we say perhaps the universe auto-correcting human destiny itself. The Thursday evening into Friday morning that Oleg and Yulia spent in a gritty off road motel 6 between Galilee Rhode Island and New York. That night she spent three hours nervously improving on her make-up, while Oleg took a few glamor pictures to calm her down; that night. That night where in all the nervousness of initial deployment she thought he’d really tear her apart, he was mostly a big gentleman.

 

Don’t ever fuck the mark or the modals, Oleg had learned early.

Their papers got them through all the weakest check points moving south bound on I95 and by late afternoon they were posted at the Green Point, Brooklyn safe house in a ginger bread brightly checkered apartment; that of Raphael Ernesto Contreras and his wife Victoria Lynch. Raphael was out when Oleg arrived; attending a so-called “political meeting” but she suspected he was drunk and with some yellow whore.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14

Woodhull Hospital, 2010ce

Brooklyn

 

 

My name is Scott Sevastra.

I’m 33, slightly overweight with silver freckled hair and spectacles. I wear spectacles, not glasses. That’s different. Adon and I both work out of Station 35, Woodhull Hospital on something called vacation relief, which means we hardly ever work the same unit, with the same person twice. Vacation Relief is a fancy of way of saying ‘people not showing up to work relief’. If Adon has a friend on the job, that buddy would be me. I used to be a fire fighter, even studied fire science in Schenectady. He never lets me live that down, he despises them (us), but he doesn’t get how real it can get so deadly, so fast.

Adon and I work out of the Woodhull Hospital’s garbage hangers where Station 35 is based, the so-called ‘Belly of the Beast’. The whole complex looks like the death star, all cast iron exterior, towers and flood lights.

One would suppose the beast is called Bedford Stuyvesant.

Bedstuy is a shit hole, no matter what color you are. It’s a bunch of dirty row houses that get no light and the people get no opportunity to do more than collect government money and get into shoot outs over stupid beef and universal staring problems.

To some this work is like a calling. We were all drawn here for different reasons, some were quite noble, and some were not. Tammany Hall is fifty years dead but being an Irish grandson of a fire fighter still opens a few doors. They call it ‘legacy’. It goes in a file, then without being officially recognized other than a check box will wind a new E.M.T. in Station 43 Coney Island then over to the Rock in a year to promote to suppression. There are a myriad of systemic problems around here. But you have to have a fairly analytical mind to see their connectivity.

After the towers fell a wave of civil service activism-romanticism swept the nation and the FDNY were once again working class rock stars. A brief era of patriotism took hold and the ranks of the emergency services were stocked with young men and women who might have gone white collar except for the collective ejaculation of national trauma. The FDNY, the greatest full time-part time job secret the Irish and Italians ever kept were quickly re-cooping man power and by 2003 the waiting list for the Fire Suppression open competitive exam was nearly 25,000 deep. EMS was the expeditious way to cut that line if you weren’t legacy, hadn’t passed high school, and may or may not have been in the top of your physical class.

In 1995 Giuliani merged various emergency services to cut the costs of their respective civilian bureaucracies. FDNY was 98% white, catholic and male while EMS was heavily integrated. FDNY with a force of nearly 12,000 fire fighters couldn’t justify keeping that many trucks in the field. EMS was already doing nearly a million calls a year with a force of under 3,000. The merger was toxic to everyone involved and it took another decade for the firemen to even look us in the eyes when we arrived on scene.

I wasn’t here for most of that. I was a paramedic and a volunteer firefighter in the city of Schenectady upstate. I earned a degree in Fire Science and had promoted to paramedic via my volunteer company. Everywhere but NYC becoming an E.M.T. or a Paramedic is a promotion. In the city of many lights you promote to firefighting. I became an E.M.T. because my uncle was a paramedic and I grew up in the glow of emergency lighting. I was built for this mentally. In the words of technician Adon; ‘I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go.’

There is no money in this. We probably lose 8 brothers and sisters a month to just about any other thing hiring. Attrition continues to thin the ranks. Studies report a disproportionately high rate of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide in EMS comparatively to Fire or Law Enforcement. We are asked and often mandated to work 12 to 16 hours a day in adverse conditions, in some of the most depressed regions of the country with outdated low-bid equipment, little public support, and virtually no encouragement from the city we serve. Moral is so low that the national statistics report that the average span of an EMS career is a little under four years. The department asks us for 25. Run the numbers and that’s why we’re always at 60%, that’s why you can find as much overtime as you can swallow.

Out of the 8 that leave each month, 5 quit, normally within their second year. 2; their number came up on a civil service test; normally PD, “Sanit”, Corrections or Suppression. The last one sustained a line of duty injury; real or concocted to get them off the streets on LODI for a few months to collect AFLAC benefits. We lose members far faster than they can recruit. There is a virtually endless pool of E.M.T.s to draw from, but most worth their salt go work for a Voluntary Hospital and can triple the wage we make. Others just know that the department will bleed you dry chasing a pension and a dream. They have recruiting posters in city shelters if that says anything.

The critical systemic problem is twofold. First because of low pay, hard hours and appallingly low morale we lose our toughest and bravest to the fire fighter promotional at a rate of a few hundred every three years. We lose our brighter and more ambitious members to the private sector and the field of nursing. This leaves us with a broken mish mash of skells, burn outs, a few buff zealots and a high rate of obesity in the ranks. The other side of this is the lowered expectations to close the staffing gaps.  That means on a segment 1-3 priority call you might get a truck load of CFR and long board trained fire men or a waddling glob of minority goo with a gold chain and an un-tucked shirt.

“This job is a calling, you either believe that or you’re on your way out,” I say to Sebastian.

But Sebastian is staring off into night. He’s chasing ghosts from the past.

“You can’t have unrequited love for a whole damn country,” I tell him.

He doesn’t hear me.

In November of 2009, Adon, myself and eight other E.M.T.s started a group called the “Banshee Association”, an EMS fraternal organization grounded in so-called militant human rights. We’d since put out three issues of our newspaper citywide and made quite a name for ourselves as a “Ivory-Commy-Nigger conspiracy to ruin EMS for white people and incite racial hatred in the ranks of F.D.N.Y”.

The Brothers and the Latinos, who make up over ¾ of the EMS work force seem to support it though. There’s really only one newspaper for true blue EMS sedition, and that paper is the Banshee. Our editorials rant along the lines of unity and diversity v. bigotry and being paid like summer camp councilors.

 

That paper made the Department crazy.

It wasn’t long after issue 2 they began their witch hunt. Adon was the focal point. Shortly after issue two he started getting jammed up for just about anything.

But, since the Israelis (who everyone now call Ivories) worked him up in Lod Prison, since his girl Maria Parsheva left him cause of his crazy, since he can’t get over his dead best friend’s death, since he may in fact be highly bipolar, well Adon isn’t talking so tough anymore. Our other Banshee Association leader Mickhi Dbrisk, an E.M.T. over at Transcare called me the other night.

 

“He ain’t got no woman; he ain’t got no country; he hates his job and slinging papers ain’t gonna save him. You better watch his ass,” Dbrisk had told me, “just the slightest thing could set him on a road to total self-destruction.”

 

It was nearly new years of 20:10pm, and we were all a little worried about Technician Adon.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 15

Lower East Side, 2012ce

Manhattan

 

 

For the rats in their races, this city never fucking sleeps. Its go-go-go, zoom-zoom rush, slaves and serf to the trains for service, getting in early and leaving late, the master sin yellow cabs and black sports utility cars, the city is high tower high octane multi-diverse plus racial death trap.

 

I need a drink, thinks Trickovitch, he thinks it regularly. And as of lately resorts to smoked Haitian Rum on the rocks.

 

For their troubles were really just getting started.

 

Well that same night Nicholai Trickovitch put together a little team to, “do a messy little big job.”

There were big jobs and little jobs. Jobs where social engineering was need, others where brute force was the best approach.

This required both. Now, outside New York the Resistance eclectic as it truly was relied heavily on “black, white and grey magic,” as Nicholai was fond of saying, “In New York we do things the old fashioned way. By having a real tight crew.”

In the dead of night around a table on the fourth floor of 113 Ludlow Street, that is to say the restaurant immediately above the Mehanata Tavern a little talk is underway; a briefing.

There are thirteen leaders of the Z.O.B. Two are hidden, two are sleeping, that means at any given period nine are charge of all the cells in the division; Greater New York City.

The table is wooden and plates of Pan-Asian fusion tapas have all been cleared.

“Let me tell you how this is gonna go down,” says Nikh to his fellow partisans the tall, well-polished Jamaican Gangster Mickhi Dbrisk; who is wearing a black suit and tie. Also Mara Fitzduff Donahue; the half pint Fenian dirty blonde famous for firebrand speeches on ‘the Fire Switch Radio’ and also present was Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contras; the Peruvian disk jockey, photographer and one time leader of a guerrilla band in Arequipa Province. The fifth member of this add-hock unit was Siegfried Sassoon; a bar tender and minor actor. A dashing swaggerous man of Cuban descent. And the sixth man in this late night call up was the light skinned Haitian Ken Francois, or ‘Ken the French’.

In the confusing and albeit vaguely disjointed chain of command Mara, Mickhi and Nikholai were are all title holding inner leadership while Kenneth, Ken and Raphael were called “volunteers”; though technically Ken the French was a “provisional member”, made but not sworn in. Not written in the books.

“The Labor Day weekend begins tomorrow and we all know what’s coming. The West Indian Day Parade isn’t heading south at the Grand Army Plaza; oh no; they’re gonna head north right over the bridges into the City.”

They were all aware of the score. This was being coordinated by the Pan-Africanists, the Garveyites, the trade unions, the IWW, the Muslims, the Occupiers, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and of course; Uhuru.

“Hectic shit,” mutters Raphael.

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

“We all know what was revealed about the h1n1 and Ebola. The documentation has been widely circulated and now the community is ready. Enough outrages have occurred to spark riots. Stop and Frisk, weekly shootings, the Iran war conscription, and the drones of course. This time almost everyone expects street warfare,” Nikholai explained.

“The Z.O.B. has called up eighty eight street medics and agitation propaganda officers to support this parade & convoy. They will be attached to each major island band truck. Flying columns are all on standby in all five boroughs; an additional three hundred and forty three women and men.  As usual the Haitian Convoy will bring up the rear. Unknown to the parade organizers and hopefully the police intelligence forces; there are actually two Haitian bands this year of 10,000 marchers a piece. One ¾ up the route which will initiate the charge across the plaza and up Flatbush. And this is when the hectic bloody melee will begin.

 

“What’s our precise role tonight,” asks Siegfried Sassoon. Siggy, who god or his parents made tall dark and handsome never goes to many meetings, he never votes in otriad elections except for Sebastian. He did however vote for putting Sebastian to sleep after the last Haiti job. He’s a serious knock around guy. Only does jobs. Never ever meetings, rarely even the candle light salons.

 

“We’re gonna install Fire Station Transmitters on four very, very tall structures,” says Mara Fitzduff. She has been the club’s chief communications officer for the past ten years.

 

“And then tomorrow we’re gonna blow up the NSA server depot inside the Consolidated Edison building,” says Mickhi Dbrisk, who has been the club’s Operation’s Chief since nearly the very beginning.

 

Nikholai holds the official title of Logistics Chief, but he’s more hands on than many before or after him, as logistic fixer should be.

 

“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.

“We’ve gotten the four spots picked out. Each transmitter is about the size of a football. There are blasters and flicker masks in the bags at the downstairs coat check, but those are for getting out of the buildings. Soon as this meeting is done you’re all getting in the town cars outside and getting dropped near all three targets, one man one location. In the bags with the guns and masks are the addresses and names of three sympathizers. You’re going to get dropped at some of the tallest buildings on the island; masks go on to obscure your faces, sympathizers have you over for a drink. Don’t really drink. Then they will give you a parachute and send you up to their roofs. You will see on your smart phone a beacon; follow the beacon to the lower roof via a base jump. The beacon will guide you to where we want the transmitter hidden. Install it. And exit the building without being caught or your parachute found,” says Mara.

 

“Ken Francois, you’re assigned to south Manhattan, Siegfried Sassoon you’re in Midtown, Mr. Raphael you’ll be setting up the Long Island City installation which is quite tricky because there’s nothing higher in Queens so you’ll have to social engineer it, while Nicholai and Dbrisk will go after the Hightower on Atlantic Junction also with the same predicament. But you’re all Pararescuemen and 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 nap. This doesn’t have to happen at once or tonight, it just has to happen before we blow up the server depot on Sunday night. So enjoy. 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,” grinned Mara Fitzduff knowing full well Raphael was married albeit a consummate adulterer; that Mickhi Dbrisk for all intents and purposes has three wives; that Ken Kin is married to the daughter of a powerful Russian oligarch; and that Nicholai is an incorrigible womanizer and that Ken Francois is a very loyal family man.

 

“We’re working out of apartment brothels again?” asks Raphael, hope in his voice for he so loves Manhattan apartment brothels.

 

“We needed these devices set up high,” says Mara, “Three of you are working out of brothels. Two of you out of homes. Assignments are random you’re five of the best jumpers we have. And remember the database has be blown up before the disorder on Monday. Even Uhuru doesn’t expect this action to result in a general uprising. But if we knock out their communications and we neutralize a mega data store where they will start for the round ups and reprisals then we’re keeping to our end of the mutual aid agreement with Uhuru; without blowing our arsenal and fighters prematurely,” she says.

 

“Am I based in a brothel or a house of the seniorly,” asks Raphael.

 

Mickhi Dbrisk chuckles at this plump washed out philanderer.

 

“Four transmitters. Then we blow the Consolidated Edison NSA depot on Sunday night and EMP the district financial at noon thirty Monday with the anarchists. 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.”

 

“A pubic library?” asks Raphael.

 

This time everyone chuckles cynically only on the inside. Because very few people could be found in Public libraries by late August of 2012; because this is where the department of Homeland Security over emphasized surveillance; that and few Americans still knew how to read.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 16

Brownsville, 2011ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Technician Mickhi Dbrisk reflects in the past.

 

All is quiet on the Eastern Front, the desecrated bad land of Brooklyn between Brownsville and East New York, the towers of Star City lit up by the coastline.

Paramedic Emile Cange is working Transport Unit 808 out the Transcare base in District Canarsie. He is slim and wears black spectacles. It’s Christmas and he shouldn’t be here, but his church teaches the Jesus wasn’t really even born on the 25^th, not even born in December. His partner is a tall Jamaican named E.M.T. Mickhi Dbrisk. Dbrisk is smoking a Newport out the Ambulance window, watching the snow, and thinking about his son Jayden.

Emile is judging him for smoke poisoning himself even though he was 5%.

“I just need to get off the night shift,” Emile mutters to Mickhi.

“This shit ain’t worth no goddamn $10.00 an hour,” Mickhi responds.

“When is yer medic upgrade class finishing?”

“It’s political.” That’s Dbrisk’s way of saying he doesn’t want to go into it.

Suddenly Dbrisk becomes more talkative.

“Son, no one has ever heard of our job classification. I am technically not an “ambulance driver” because I do not generally ever drive, being that I have no license to do so, and I am not a “medic” because that would imply I was a Paramedic in our EMS vernacular; and my qualification certainly prolongs life, but does little to diagnose and virtually nothing to treat. You can become State certified to do my job by sitting through a three month class and being over the age of 18. I believe people as young as 16 perform our skill set on Volunteer Ambulances and as young as 14 in developing countries. It’s about eight basic life support skills you need to perform for medical and traumatic emergency and sixty some odd sets of signs and symptoms it would be good to memorize, but a frighteningly small percentage of my graduating EMS class could recite off less than six months out of the program.”

“What’s yer point brother? Didn’t you read the memo, no one’s ever gonna say thank you except one in a blue moon the patients. ” Emile Cange asks.

“I can’t remember the last time that happened. I was one of ten brothers in my class of 65 at LaGuardia Community College which is viewed as one of the best EMS training centers in NYC. They made this game out a whole lot different than it turned out to be.”

“Well if you’re white in EMS: you’re crazy, a fuck up, or tryin’ to be a fireman for the FDNY. Then again, if you’re any other ethnicity in EMS you gotta be just a little crazy, a fuck up, or attempting to become a nurse. Because when it comes down to it: we are the hip hop of the Healthcare Industry. We make money takin’ lives. Ain’t savin’ nobody on the long enough; not even yo’ self.”

Emile continues;

“We can’t make you better like a doctor can, we don’t have to slightly pretend to care like a nurse does; we can’t stabilize in a pre-hospital setting via our own training like a PA can; we are EMS; people shoot at us because we look like police in the din of narrow housing project lighting; we might not know what you have but we can keep you alive for at least seven more minutes; and unless you’re missing your head, you’re not legally dead until we get you to a hospital.”

“Ain’t that truth,” says E.M.T. Mickhi Dbrisk.

On the wall of the Transcare Men’s room at the Brooklyn Base in Canarsie on 800 Bank Street: “We Scare ‘cause we Care” is scrawled in sharpie in the men’s room second stall.

“I work for the Wal-Mart of ambulance corps I’m fond of saying. At $10.00 an hour I have a worse healthcare package and wage than a Starbucks employee. And I don’t get any stock options after six months. We are the city’s, and soon to be country’s largest ambulance provider. I was hired exactly two months ago; most employees quit or transfer after six months when they go 911; and be nervous about the ones that don’t. Transcare is an enormous business like virtually everything else about Healthcare in America. I spent less than a day of the five day training being reassessed for skill retention; the remaining time went into how to prevent myself (and the company) from being sued, how to tastefully obtain patient insurance information, and how to properly fill out the Patient Care Forms so that that we can legal bind the patient incase their insurance won’t cover the cost of their trip.”

“This shit is business more than its medical profession,” notes Mickhi.

“Like most Americans, you and I are terribly misinformed when it comes to how the dark underbelly of how the Healthcare system functions in this country. It may be illegal for us not to transport a person who can’t or won’t sign, but this company will terminate technicians that transport those that can’t sign “too often”.

Mickhi tosses his mostly finished boag out into the falling the snow. Mickhi is an ambulance activist with the Adon’s club. On paper at least he’s Chief-of-Operations. Cange talks like an activist, but he isn’t one. Like most of EMS, he likes to explain, likes to complain, but it won’t lead to activism. Mickhi gets that. Sevastra and Adon don’t.

Emile pauses then resumes his critical stress debriefing,

“During patient assessment a transport E.M.T. obtains vitals; while the other ensures the airway, adequate breathing, and circulation. We gather a past medical history, a list of medications, any known allergies, and pick up any paperwork from relatives of the hospital or nursing home that might give us more clues to the patient’s current condition. At some point, generally when they’re loaded onto the ambulance, we ask them to sign a form that most E.M.T.’s describe as patient confidentiality statement, but it is actually a billing release. It is drilled into us in our retrain days 2 through 5 that we must always obtain a signature. That’s because it costs several hundred dollars for an ambulance ride. People wrongly think that calling 911 is a quick free way to see a doctor. That isn’t a very realistic conception at all.”

“Nope, FDNY shakes um for about 500 a run too,” says Mickhi.

“My work for Transcare brings me into the projects, townhouses, homes, and apartments of New Yorkers in all five boroughs. We also bring patients to places like Connecticut, Long Island, and Upstate New York. I always have a different partner because I work irregular shifts generally overnights and weekends. Most shifts will mandate you to work over 12 hours. One makes plans with a cushion when working; you’ll always be late if you have plans after work.”

Mickhi has heard all this before, said a hundred different ways. The paper articulates a lot of these basic points, puts in writing what most already now via word of mouth.

Says Emile Cange, “My partners fall into two categories of which I am in the second. The first have been here more than six months and have made a profession in EMS transport; that is to say non-911 pick-ups of the morbidly obese, chronically ill, or psychiatrically unstable. They like the job because by the third year it comes close to Starbucks pay and is particularly accommodating to larceny and laziness collectively. Going 911 would mean working harder, going to another Private company or FDNY might mean working harder and being more tightly scrutinized.”

Only about one/fifth of Transcare employees in EMS. They also operate a fleet of non-EMS Access-a-Ride Para transit buses are in this category.

Everyone else is out of here in six months. Mickhi and Emile included if they can organize it.

The remaining group is generally right out of school and looking to quickly accumulate experience before they either go 911 and transfer to better private or get accepted in to the FDNY Academy for EMS.

“A small subgroup of the second category is just logging the 200 hours they need to go Paramedic. The real difference in partners is those that want to do this career or those that see it as a complicated hustle getting paid to do precious little. It should reassure you slightly to know most of the people who will be doing this on a 911 level care enough to keep their skills sharp if not care enough to care.”

“I care enough to care,” admits Mickhi Dbrisk, “One day when Ayden asks what an e.m.t. is, I’m not going to recount even a single story about my work. There’s something really, really trite and cliché about an E.M.T. or Paramedic rattling off some crazy war story. The only thing more pathetic I feel is when an alcoholic or drug addict does it. You should take it for granted we see things that are crazy every single shift we work. It’s a big city full of people that are sick and dying.”

“I find that most of my partners from your second category have a micro/macro view of our work. On the larger macro level we are a vital link in the emergency response chain able to get the sick and wounded to a hospital that in NYC is never more than seven minutes away,” Emile responds.

“Our job at its most basic is to quickly bring the dead and dying to somewhere they can be kept alive,” says Mickhi.

“On the one on one micro-level we are the people bringing out the sick and dying when they are scared and with the people they love. More than any other link in the Healthcare chain we deal with people at their most vulnerable and it falls on us to earn their trust with our compassion. I keep songs on my cell phone in sixty different languages; people’s faces light up when I play them as we drive to the hospital,” explains Emile.

“One of my partners keeps several copies of the Malcolm X Autobiography for when we transport wounded prisoners to psychiatric wards and infirmaries. Another keeps teddy bears in his jump bag,” laughs Mickhi.

“A lot of people are a little out of it when we move them. Some beg for Jesus to take them or tell as terrible stories of tragic lives. A lot of people want to die because this life has been so hard on them. I try and make them feel special, or at least respected. Sometimes I’ll get people over a hundred years old and I’ll try and get them to tell me a story about their life. Sometimes I’ll transport a desperate middle-aged soul still quite totally confused about the purpose of their life.”

“It’s sort of easier to give someone a toy or a book and competently engage in a transport than to have that sort of universal empathy that lets you communicate your sympathy in a way that’s genuine; if it’s forced its counter productive and you should stick to the competency and giving of gifts,” says Mickhi.

“You can’t just nod you head and whisper sweet nothings of compassion; you have to empathize via a real experience to be related back. You have to honestly care, not transCare,” states Emile.

“People are either very scared or very intent upon dying. I’ve seen a person survive a nine-story drop because they were hyped up on PCP and believed in a thing called love,” war stories Mickhi.

“I’ve seen a partner restore stable vitals to someone with a “Do-Not-Resuscitate-Order” with a bag valve mask and the blasting of gospel music,” war stories Emile.

“I’ve seen people slip a twenty to bunch of kids when their single mother went to the ER so they could get something to eat,” war stories Mickhi right back.

“We are absolutely not paid enough to care. We can only engage in this line of work on a long enough time line because of the human good we are able to do. The death and suffering would surely take its toll on our mental health if we did not find outlets to make our works worth more than a skill set,” explains Emile, “that’s why I’m gonna become a doctor one day.

“I’ll tell you straight up; I would never have gone into East New York if it hadn’t been for this job. I wouldn’t be learning Spanish, I wouldn’t have such a large collection of foreign music; I wouldn’t know my city nearly as well as I’m about to in the next few years. This job is good because it is compatible with my sleeping habits, values, and allows me to flex my empathy,” says Mickhi lighting another Newport standard.

Emile cringes.

“You will learn to believe in a thing called love when you a carry a nameless 87 y/o woman in your arms who has no legs, has an external bladder you must also carry called a Foley Catheter that has made her sheets stink of urine; and although quite blind she “sees the light in you” and wants you to pray with her even when you ain’t been to church in a hot minute,” says Emile. Emile has been to Church yesterday. He’s rubbing it in with Mickhi as he sometimes does.

Emile continues: “I always feel like I’m bearing witness to the end of the world each Friday I go out. The clamor of the ER, the speeding around on lights and sirens, the murmurs of your dead and dying, and the precious little we’re good for except maintaining your vitals and proving to you we care. Or perhaps each shift we must prove it over and over again to ourselves; because it isn’t the paycheck and benefits that keep us out in that bus; it’s a love we can’t explain for people who we are not obligated to love or empathize for; but have to if we want to keep up this work.”

“There are a lot of sick people in this city; some made sick by circumstance, some by trauma, and many by ignorance about personal health. We will treat them all irrespective of class, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation,” says Mickhi almost paraphrasing the Banshee Operating guide he helped write.

“But I’m only busting out the pillow if you’re old, or if you’re Haitian,” jokes Emile.

The night is brick as hell. Christmas dinner for Mickhi was Delhi sandwich and a pack of Newport regulars. He fills the tiny confines of the compartment with carbon monoxide.

“I don’t play games and I don’t take prisoners; I got buck wild debt, I got child support to pay and big dreams. Just nine more hours of this grind and hustle to go.”

 

 

 

Chapter 17

140 Nassau Street, 2012ce

Financial District

 

 

Sebastian Adon was always reading a book, though he never seemed to finish any; the title of the one in his hand now which was 1984, the year his documents had told to him that he was born.

 

Seated on the roof he could be seen from any number of vantage points or sniper posts. The roof of 140 Nassau street was adjacent from the Woolworth building with is copper green spires and the five story City Hall; as well as just three blocks from Police Plaza One; and below it the holding cells for all of the cities concentrated perpetrators. While no book in the Unites States of America was a “banned book”, 1984 was certainly a “flagged book” because the Department of Homeland Security viewed it as a “gateway book” to subversive thinking. By late August of 2012 it was not so much that the American public didn’t know how to read; simply that they chose not to for the most part. It was quite unusual for families to ever turn off their televisions; “telescreens” as described in the book. And while these devices were not two way transmitters; there was virtually no corner of Manhattan not under surveillance by a networked feed of public and private CCTV. Some guerilla efforts in Breuklyn, Queens and the Bronx has rolled some of that back; but Manhattan was fully watched.

 

Especially since September 11^th, 2001 when the towers came down and the security state rolled out into the open, like it had always been there.

 

In 1984 there are three world powers described; Oceania (the United States and England), Eurasia (Russian and the EU), and East Asia (China, India, Japan) and they square off in endless resource wars in the rest of the world. Although each power block claims to have competing ideological differences; such as Chinese Communism, Euro-Socialism, or Capitalism; each simply utilizes the ideological coloring to distract their respective populations from the real system of control.

A book within a book; in 1984 the heroes discover something called ‘the Brotherhood’ which is distributing ‘the Goldstein Book’ which explains the way the world is; a system called Oligarical-Collectivism; an international corporate oligarchy devoid of ideology which utilizes endless warfare as a means to dispose of productive labor and surplus value. The wars supposedly fought for control of resources in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa are actually utilized to keep the population terrified, patriotic and get rid of wealth that might otherwise trickle down and create valid middle classes.

 

Class consciousness is parlayed into base hate and war mongering and fear. The book which describes a young couples efforts to join this clandestine network; the Brotherhood end with their capture, torture, and betrayal of each other.

 

Typically read in American colleges Political Science classes; George Orwell’s tome against authoritarianism of all kinds, alongside his more pedantic novel Animal Farm are used as part of the American Oligarchies perpetual indictment of Socialism in general and Russian Socialism in particular. Although the book is set in England, Oceania is clearly America; and George Orwell was himself a Socialist, shot in the face while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Sebastian owns many copies of this book. He likes giving it to lovers and friends on their birthdays. While he is unconvinced many have ever read it cover to cover; it is better reading and more radicalizing than say, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Days of War, Nights of Love or Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States of America or World System Analysis. Which are all very good books, but you have to be open or free minded to absorb them.

The book was waking Sebastian up though the others didn’t realize it.

This was perhaps the critical realization of the Z.O.B. underground. That to fight the mental slavery imposed on the American working class; a sophisticated range of media and parapsychology would have to be utilized to free minds. The release of Matrix, Fight Club, Hunger Games and a whole industry of black market films designed to erode this mass socialization had been deployed throughout the decade. Thinly veiled metaphors and overt subversive media made it through the censors; but it was in the bathhouses that the underground used to deprogram.

 

Bathhouses were of course Russian mob money laundering facilities and black market steering sites with the right references. And though the kinds had been worked out slowly; the movement soon learned to deprogram efficiently; using the bathhouses as “wake fields”. It was long known that the American Oligarchy was using Nano-bots in the water supply, social programming via television; as well as spraying from planes a chemical that encouraged tiredness and obesity. It was fully known that between alcohol, sports, TV, feature films, and schools the public was put to sleep; believing the American Middle class was quite large. While in fact the distribution of wealth was quite comparable to anywhere else.

They had utilized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to squander the decade’s surplus and manufactured a financial crisis in 2008 to further consolidate their economic gains. Now 1% of Americans controlled 47% of American wealth. And 85 people on earth were worth as much as the bottom 3.5 billion. And the planet was dying to boot.

Sebastian Adon was reading his favorite book on the roof, where two weeks ago he dreamed he had fallen seventeen stories with a young woman named Natasha Andreavna. But everything was a dream now. He had been put sleep by the resistance after completion of his last job; a messy raid in Syria. What that meant was that he was now thinking three dimensionally. That he couldn’t see the parallel worlds; couldn’t see all the possibilities. Didn’t see his past and future lives.  Didn’t know that he had spent the last twelve years as staff sergeant in a vast international underground, a member of the Zionist movement.

The sun was out, it was completely beautiful. From the roof he can look up in the bourgeoisie fish tank called the Gerry Building shooting 104 stories up blue glass. He doesn’t remember anything about a wife and child. Doesn’t remember Kibbutz Ain Dor. Or Kibbutz Sde Bokr. He doesn’t remember his Pararescueman training in Cuba, Haiti, or Syria either. Science is a hell of a drug.

And doesn’t remember at all when he stood on this roof eleven years ago, wearing a flicker mask to hide his face and with a shoulder to air missile launcher to put a flaming hole in the World Trade Center.

 

He wakes up on the same roof. A burning sense of shame, of failure or is it the booze. Is it the late nights, the rigors of studying something he might have learned before in another life.

 

What year is this is the first thing he wonders. His gut says 2012, but that mean he’s in the future. Doesn’t it?

How many jobs has it been, and where’s Natasha? Is everyone ok? Did everyone make it out of the ghetto? Who has my back? Is my back got?

They gonna kill us all, them brutal pigs.

His mobilblat goes off. It’s a Telegram 2.0 text from Tanya. It’s a YouTube video, of the Soca artist Ricardo Veshanti, followed by a selfie of Tanya. Which is a signal for notification that the Trinidadian Special Forces have landed.

 

 

 

Chapter 18

Bronxville, 2011ce

Brooklyn

 

Technician Byron Abad

 

When I first met my old partner Sebastian Adon two years ago I couldn’t place him. He had entirely too much enthusiasm to have been on the job long, but he had more time than me; just over a year then. He’d just started some EMS newspaper, which just about everybody loved to hate on. We’ been partners for just a month when they shipped me out to 31 in Downtown Brooklyn; the Cumberland Station. He stayed in touch and did overtime together in Rossville 23 after our third 12 hour on, we’d bang eight, sometimes nine more. We’d sleep in shifts. Staten Island only has two stations; 23 and 22. They incorporated Station 43 in Coney Island to supplement the utter lack of call volume in Division 5. We do our dawn breaker tours together; that is to say 12 in Brooklyn immediately followed by 8 in Division 5. To be 20 hours out on a unit you need real solidarity.

 

Got trust you can go to sleep and your partner will stay up and monitor the radio.

 

There isn’t any real work in Staten Island. Low population, larger blue collar middle class. On job a day tops. It’s where old EMTs and Paramedics go before they retire to die.

 

Seven months later they brought me back to the 35, for the ‘good of the service.’ Everything was always being done for the good of the service. The good of the fire fighters, the good of the chiefs, the good of the city and some rhetoric about freedom never being free. When I came on there were 11,346 fire fighters and roughly 2,300 EMS which not including active fires were collectively handling over 2.3 million calls a year. Then they initiated a hiring freeze when the recession hit. Closed four fire houses, and then shut down 60 ambulance units. For the good of the service the 12 hours began, there was a lot of money to be made if you had the constitution t make it. By the summer of 2009 we were working at an attrition rate of 8 per month due to quitters, skels and injuries which wasn’t helped by the fact that we started that summer at only 65% staffing.

 

Adon sometimes did MUTUALs with this guy Mir Ali, who I didn’t know too well from the 58. You couldn’t do mutuals with people at other stations unless it was approved Captain to Captain, but everybody knew Adon and he’d made it happen. Being infamous is better than being obscure he always says. I took the regular approach of keeping my file empty and my nose clean. The night was looking like a solid no hitter on the graveyard Friday overnight. After Adon moved on to fire I still picked up overtime with Mir Ali.

 

Ali was a good dude, an Indian Muslim, and he even pronounced my name right. It’s not A-BAD, its AaBaad; with rolling A’s.

 

I normally work unit 37B tour 3, a twelve hour unit out of Station 35 at Woodhull Hospital. Homeland security used to follow me around until I proved that there is not a single Muslim thing about my family other than maybe my name. My mom came here illegally from Ecuador twenty years ago. I came in with papers, but I never forgot what my family had to go through to get to America. I never forget where I came from if you will.

An image of my Irish wife’s racist in-laws from Garretson Beach; I guess white is a state of mind and a skin color. I try not generalize or think to hard about what this guy is alluding too.

Woodhull was supposed to be a prison. It looks a lot like a prison all black steel and spires. No windows, crimson brick; smack in between Bed Stuy and Bushwick. Adon called in the Ministry of Love, from the book 1984. It does look like a place to torture people; certainly it is a place where people in this neighborhood come to die. Adon really only talks about three things when it comes down to it; being Jewish and bettering our lot on this job. And that he has a hot red head for a girlfriend.

Ali and Adon apparently were in the same squad, in the same Top Class 8001 and again in 8002, they’d both done the Academy twice for one concealed reason or another. They were close, but certainly not likely friends. It’s late and I’m tired and I want to pass out, but somehow can’t when I work with somebody whose style I don’t know.

We finally get a job a little after seven for what comes over as a segment 4 SICK on the corner of Dean and Albany. When we get there, and get upstairs a drunk, black EDP puts a gun in Ali’s face and demands Ali ‘give him the shit!’ Slowly Ali puts up his hands; I quietly press the emergency button on my radio; Ali says we don’t carry what the guy wants; the guy starts yelling at Ali calling him a ‘sand nigger’ a ‘camel fucker’; Ali doesn’t move, just keeps his hands up. THIS CRAZY FUCKING EDP is slobbering about his sick girlfriend, a moaning whore in the next room.

“57Adam: DO YOU HAVE AN EMERGENCY?” Central asks loudly in response to me pressing the button. My radio was on too loud. THE EDP flips. Puts two rounds right in my chest and knocks me on my back. Two quick flashes and I have this taste in my mouth of death. It tastes like sulfur and almonds.

 

The rooms spinning and there’s blood all over my hands and face as I lie on my back in the jerking spasms of shock. The last thing I see, Mir Ali swings the oxygen tank against the EDPs head in a swift loud ‘thWack’. I fade out, dying quickly; the only person who even wears the bullshit ‘stab resistant’ vest they issue us. Fuck me, I choke on my own blood. I hear Ali yelling,

 

“MAN DOWN! MAN DOWN! 10-13. 10-13: MY PARTNERS BEEN FUCKING SHOT!”

 

And the next thing I know, I’m dead.

 

My ex-wife is still my death beneficiary.

 

She’s gonna be ecstatic.

 

 

Chapter 19

East Bushwalk District,

Bohemian Encampment,

 August, 30^th 2012ce

Borough of Brooklyn

 

 

Friday morning of the Labor Day Weekend. The sun is shining and thus the August humidity is oppressive, but the Flushing highway leads deep into the greener pastures of Queens. A heat wave of unprecedented proportions has been ravishing the city for the entire week. The globe is warm.

 

It is warming up further.

 

The New York Times, the local paper of the liberal elites says wild fires in Moscow and its environs are blazing completely out of control. As if allowed to burn.

 

Five to perhaps six dozen tents of assorted makes and models have been erected at the top of green hill whose perimeter is a steel fence; its base a small Dutch historic home and the rest a camp ground in the badlands of Industrial Bushwalk. A big band stage is almost finished in erection to blare live Gypsy Latin music is being set up and sound tested. A four day proclamation of lawlessness has been posted, but only the social club staff and its regulars will truly be encamping. At forty dollars a day, it’s a rather pricey venture to go camping in a field in the heart of a barren industrial wasteland between Brooklyn and Queens know for salvage yards, construction material stock piling, biker gangs, and various front operations.

A railroad to somewhere and poisonous green river called the Dutch Kills Creek separating Brooklyn and Queens officially.

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

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

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

“Chicken,” says Justin with his mouth, but ‘people’ with his teeth and she refrains from trying.

At various points Justin Toomey O’Azzello has come and gone as Mehanata’s so-called “General Manager”. He’s quit, gotten fired, quit, gotten sober, quit found god, rehired, lost god, gotten very drunk, gotten very sober, and now, he seems to be conducting business well enough and is back in good graces of the management. Which means Sasho, and maybe to a lesser degree in reporting and accounting; Misha Kishbivalli, but Sasho is undisputedly the boss.

The Onderdonk Fields are now held by a colorful gypsy mafia. Sasho and his young son join a game of football game now underway.

And then around 4 in the pm; arrives the medical team; Sebastian and Jared Forgetter.

Sebastian Adon shows up proudly. With his tall street aspiring paramedic partner from Methodist Academy Class 33. Jared Forgetter is carrying a large red medical tech bag, the one Adon was allowed to keep unofficially by his friends and supporters in the quarter master’s office after the Fire Department made him resign in lieu of termination after a long and draining trial over the event that occurred two years prior in Haiti.

The nature of those bloody ruinous events will be recounted in due course. But the big red bag, his experiences and ten thousand dollars were all he walked away with. And the cost of the years with that agency were yet to be calculated.

Jared is tall and dirty blond and lanky and looks exactly like one might draw all stereotypes of the laid back high fiving, dope smoking west coaster; is a skilled electrician and followed his college sweetheart out east.

Adon and Sebastian join Victoria Lynch and Raphael on the top of the hill by the main encampment.

Raphael and Sebastian embrace as they always do. They grin because they know what is coming in the next 72 hours.

A large and gregarious man rises to introduce himself, the slinky slender dark brown haired woman at his side does not. Also seated in the main encampment are Lia Monteleone with her big French tits, Georgie Rabanca, and Natasha Andreavna Skorbogatova.

Natasha ignores his arrival most completely.

A burly Post-Soviet man with a cropped beard and fashionable dress with a camera around his neck steps up and offers his hand.

 

“My name is Oleg Medved, but you may also call me Alan,” the big Russian says.

“Sebastian Adon,” Adon replies, “this is my partner Jared Forgetter, medical partner for the encampment, not homosexual lover.”

Oleg grins and pours everyone drinks and Adon takes out a large bottle of Spanish red wine and uncorks it.

And he passes out wine glasses wrapped up in socks.

They all then dance and dance and drink and steal and make art and chat about the world. And the fearsome, but utterly kind hearted in disposition Ukrainian-Israeli gangster Oleg Megved “from Boston” takes a wide assortment of photos of former and Postsoviet models. Victoria has arranged a series of photo shoots and allegedly Alan, who most call ‘Oleg the Bear’ is local celebrity “up in Boston” and he takes tons of fashionable pictures. Sebastian in his blue paramilitary style EMT uniform with a red bandana arm band is soon dancing the half tango, half salsa with Natasha clad in a yellow mesh cocktail dress with blue Indian war paint under her eyes; it makes for a lovely picture.

 

“I didn’t recognize you in the uniform and your little partisan cap,” she earlier exclaimed.

 

The four day Bohemian Gypsy Festival is in Friday day one full swing by evening.

It’s a very Old Soul-Old School movement of a moment.

They’ve taken a barren camp ground in bad part of warehouse district and turned into something of a cross between the Gypsies of Patagonia and or a cold war partisan encampment.

Adon has little medical work to do so Jared at some point disappears into a tent with a young Russian girl to smoke some weed and then later they see the tent shaking gently, arithmetically. Sensuously.

And Adon begins working on sketch of Georgie and the big French tits on Lia, and Georgie with a laugh mentions he found black and blue marks all over his woman’s body the night she went back to Sebastian’s home two weeks prior. The night Natasha nearly killed him.

 

“I fell down some stairs,” is all Lia says. And Georgie laughs it all off because he knows Sebastian is tragic man, a good man but a tragic man. He doesn’t have it in him to have any affairs. Georgie who is CUNY Grad center professor and also a computer scientist has affairs all the time, but he is not an American, or tragic, or rarely ever sad.

However Lia’s black and blue marks are from Sebastian fucking her dirty and rough, and then fucking her with love making. Just one week ago.
Georgie wonders when it will be that Natasha Skorbogatova gives him the opportunity for a good long strong affair, but Sebastian has and does have affairs all the time, including with Georgie’s girls and main mistress. No regard at all for other men’s relationships. Admittedly such a conquest seems expensive in a few regards. Georgie feels sad for Sebastian at times, buys him drinks periodically with an ugly Romanian smile. He has never understood the complexity of the man, or the complex behind his tragedy.

 

Recently he became aware of the possibility of the small and short affair between Sebastian and another regular mistress, the French girl named Lia Lewis; he was shocked that beautiful women could find pleasure with such a sad broken man.

 

And low and behold Natasha and Sebastian are dancing up a storm to the Latin Ska-Gypsy Jazz Band Eskarioka now playing. Followed by the Sunny Side Social club. George has never even seen the man dance more than two or three forced times. No use of hips at all!

 

She is the woman at the tavern that turns all the heads as per the usual lately. Even more so than that American girl Jessica who always takes off her clothes and climbs the downstairs stripper poles, even more than Amelia who after the Sebastian affair has been around a great deal less. Even more than the Moldovan twins who kiss! She arrived perhaps six months ago and now certainly has a regular card. Sebastian turned his in for some time and has just begun to reestablish it.

A regular doesn’t just show up early and stay late two of three weekend days open; they make themselves part of the tavern’s atmosphere. They have affairs, they get in fights, they make scene.

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

“She’s fucking that hot, prosto,” Raphael says, prosto is Russian for simple.

Sebastian Adon who is half of the medical team for a three day commitment here, but is also part of the back-up team if needed for Raphael’s planned raid on Citi Plaza Tower, the “big blue building in Queens,” has been given the green light to have a good time after three non-intensive demonstrations of his worth a competency paying for themselves. And the not giving of a shit on Sasho’s end if the house paramedics are intoxicated.

Jared Forgetter is kind to people and ‘really fucking West Coast’ as a spacy partner and is high as a kite making out with some young lady in a tent somewhere, she’s a just off the boat and he’s never had a “Russian girl” before. She’s not really Russian, she’s Moldovan, but Jared isn’t really sure what the difference is. He’s good long and uncut and after three spliffs the young girl drains him dry. His cock, not his pocket. Although she does manage to take forty bucks off him. While he was in the tent Sebastian attended to three small intermittent soccer related injuries.

Natasha is never far from the fact that Sebastian not only has steel toed boots and two left feet, but she takes him up on his hand to dance over and over.

Sebastian is so happy to be dancing again and he aims to do it well, but that is a highly subjective “well”. He swore to her on the night she almost killed them that he never dances anymore. So that night before the fall, she made him two-step as she watched and pressed her weight against his hip until he came correct.

“Your hips man! Move your goddamn hips.”

And he almost crushes her bare foot with a steel towed combat boot dip.

Ernesto is wearing a gold baseball cap and sits watching with his wife Victoria manically try and direct this shit show. Bands not showing up, nothing going to schedule everyone getting more and more furiously drunk. In yester year and future year Raphael commanded men, now he mostly makes life. With his music twice a week at the tavern as part of Bordel Dali and he also makes love with his camera twice a week and always maintains a slave job at a boutique blue jeans fashion blog.

But, a revolutionary is a revolutionary and when asked by the resistance three weeks ago to activate his cell and raid the big blue tower to deposit the transmitter for the Fire Station to broadcast orders and shut down government coms during the Labor Day Parade, he agreed.

Jumping out of planes, carrying out raids and building non-lethal bombs is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it.

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

“They are another tricky thing now moving too fast,” states Victoria as she watches out the corner of her eye. Victoria is very happy with herself for it was she who made this four day festival come together. And it is mostly out of control.

She has no idea her husband and most of the Peruvian Ska band Eskarioka are about to stage a raid on the tallest building in Queens. She has no idea that Oleg Medved and Yulia Romanova are poisoning half the camp with vodka based neurotransmitters. She was no idea there is dead hooker in the tent next to hers. She has no idea that an Islamic Sleeper cell is carrying a bomb into the heart of Times Square to black out the city in a thermo-electric pulse Monday morning. She has no idea that 2 million black woman, men and children are coordinating their revelry amid an armed uprising. She just isn’t aware of those things.

She doesn’t know about all of her husband’s affairs, she doesn’t know he used to lead a guerrilla band in Peru called the “Bolivarian Hotshots of the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo”. She loves Raphael her husband with all her heart, she loves Sebastian Adon as her tragic brother, she loves-hates Sasho who gives her a platform for her fashion, art and music. She wasn’t a child one day. She came to this city and got a job at the Tavern as events producer and tavern has taken over most of her life and time. She doesn’t see the world like Raphael does, or Sebastian did before his friends put him into sleep.

Sleep is the cousin of death, but not physical death. It is simply reducing the size of the world one can see, third, fourth and fifth and sixth dimensionally.

Sebastian and Victoria can only really see a couple days into the past and future. Whereas people like Raphael, and Natasha Andreavna can see things much further back and forward, see things happening in other realities. It makes them very, very functional in this reality.

But the more one drinks, the less they see.

If Victoria Lynch Contreras was aware of any of those above listed things, she’d have a baby heart attack. And probably move back to upstate New York where the world is safer. Back to her hippy parents Alpaca farm. Way out of the coming crossfire.

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

“He will try, but when he fails I’ll have to pick up the tragic pieces again,” states Victoria. She’s already had to coax him gently from his Maria to his Yelizaveta and then to freedom and then through the affair where he broke the French girl Amelia’s heart and it’s now back to the bondage of his wanton reckless emotions and habits of loving early and often. She admires that about him though, she’s a hopeless romantic herself.

It is Victoria’s shoulder where Sebastian does his most cathartic crying over the past three years since they all met on Floyd Benet Field at the original Bohemian-Gypsy-Tabor festival on the abandoned tarmacs of Idlewild airport.

A cool breeze breaks the city’s August humid heat wave.

“Spin me faster man!” commands Natasha.

He is under her spell.

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

And as a card carrying Banshee member he has several local ambulance crews on speed dial worse comes to worse.

There are endless bottles of wine and vodka miraculously stashed away about the encampment. All need tasting.

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

After his work in Haiti, the brought him to the bathhouse, they submerged his consciousness in the great waters of a temple buried in the earth; and to keep him safe they closed his eyes and made him aware only of what was around him in a small circle of seeing.

A hint that there was a close bout with death has been made. Did our protagonist antagonists actually plumed to death off a roof top?

In a futurist play, any bout with death has at least three angels standing guard over the protagonist antagonists. And if he had died on the roof how might he have died on the roof a second time as indicated in Act One, or at the Millennium Theatre after that?

So to clarify.

The night Natasha and Sebastian boxed ferociously after he yanked the cigarette from out her mouth, she shoved him off a roof.

That was two weeks prior from the night before the Blue Moon, now.

He grabbed out for her and they both died falling into the deadly drop pit.

She did shove to kill, but rather than make suicide assembled he pulled her along, to death. They toppled off the roof into that pit of death.

But angels quickly and immediately came to their rescue.

Only Nanoseconds after lying broken and dead in a pit of death, having killed each other over nothing, over posturing and arrogance and lack of respect for physics; reality reset.

The angels, on behalf of the spirits took their two souls from their corpses and went back in time five seconds. And put the souls into the bodies of Sebastian and Natasha, took control to make them step just one foot away from the pit.

So bang! When they toppled this time they just fell to the side and pissed the pit and their deaths by one single foot. A near death experience was now near life experience. Because the spirits were protecting them both.

Panting hard, as if post-coitus she grabs his right hand.

She bit down into his right index finger to draw blood. He makes no reaction his animal soul hasn’t fully absorbed itself into his new body. Then they lay panting by the edge of precipice staring each other down, bitten hand clasped and bleeding; and then she confessed to him things that were highly unnerving.

Some were true. And some were white lies.

Now, back at festival!

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

Had they fallen into that pit having no spirits or angel to aid them you could have taken their bodies out a side basement door and it wouldn’t have even been real news. Senseless tragedy only bothers all of the living as everyone is missed by someone. So now they dance and self-seduce, she would say she is incapable he above it, so they self-seduce.

They are engaged in a passionate stare down, but it is more playful than hot. She is very used to drunken men desiring her. He is very used to being a sober gentleman and sometimes also a drunken man.

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

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

Night comes and darkness falls.

“It most was tender to see you saving the life of Sasho’s son,” Natasha had whispered earlier making a dry Russian joke out of his earlier handy work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will call you Vasa!” she declares. “My name for you from this point out.”

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

“You like a devil have too many names,” she smiles.

Drunkenly they declare what each had planned to name to the other already.

Then more dancing, dancing and more dancing; sway and grind like they almost died for nothing.

Sebastian kisses her hand in the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets in inch from the ground with her long golden locks. For the second time now with not much more grace than before.

Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. Again. I could fall for her quite hard, he thinks, but he obviously, has thought such thoughts before. A rather ferocious amount of wine and vodka and Astika beer are consumed.

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

She colors quite enthusiastically.

Oh to live just two lives more! He thinks.

As you know, he will get to.

She, this wild woman Natasha is pressing against me and I feel no pain, he cries out in his mind. She just smiles and takes each color rendering his work into a superior rendition via the brightness of the combined war effort.

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

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

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

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

Ironically, like as if he had ten thousand spoons and all he needed was a knife; Sebastian Adon has in his drunken stupor articulates exactly what has happened to he and Natasha just two weeks before.

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

It is to Adon like one of those grand conversations he once one had in the East Village coffee house Yaffa Café over red wine when he was younger. Or on the Golan Heights hills in Syria. Sweet mental nostalgia.

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

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

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

Natasha makes faces at Sebastian as they go on. The fire continues to die down.

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

“Soon, soon,” Adon says.

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

“Boys! Bed!” yells Natasha.

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

Raphael Ernesto with a devilish smirk says, “Speak of reality later. Go after her or I will.”

And Sebastian catches up with her mid hill and takes her hand.

“Lie with me,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

She stares into him with Old Soul eyes.

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

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

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

“We will see. For now this an ok plan. Likely I will leave you in the morning.”

They draw closer into a cuddle and then complete spoon. She wraps herself within his arms and he holds her like it is his duty, but it is also a thrill of some buried passion. He holds her tight like a little partisan as the trees whisper and the two double blue moons that are out late can blot out reasonable doubt. He likes to hold her.

They curl together on an inflatable mattress and a green Arabian blanket. They are both, for a variety of reasons unaccustomed to the perfect fit of a well-intentioned cuddle.

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

“We almost died for nothing,” he says.

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

“What if I loved you until you know just what hope truly is?” he responds to her in muted tone.

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

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

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

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

It all felt like déjà vu, as if it happened a few times before this very moment.

She sleeps indifferent to his hold or his guard.

She has survived a nation of thieves to get here and scuttled through a den of vipers since arrival. Sleeping in a park, with or without “protection”, with or without a mattress or a pillow, these are not so high on her hierarchy of concerns. Amongst many other pressing troubles, the Vodka sung her to sleep.

 

And the big blue full moon lit up the sky marking on the lunar calendar the end of an epoch and beginning of an existential war.

 

 

Chapter 20

Lincoln Hospital, January 12^th 2010ce

South Bronx

 

17Frank

 

That crazy unit that was just too fast to be allowed to live.

They were a series of terrible law suits waiting to happen.

They were the fastest unit in the South Bronx.

They were surely, racist while being diverse; masongistic while being charming and rag tag, but if you got jammed up they were the next best thing to a van load of impact cops. 17F3 was out of Battalion 55 which sits on Melrose and 154^th st across from the so-called ‘haunted projects.’ An old fire house like 17; a little bigger, a little more respect for itself. A lot of good people at 55 who never forgot where they came from; most of them Puerto Rican or Dominican; most of them form the Battalion they served.

 

A real click that outfit is. Few quite like it in Division 2.

 

17 Frank 3 was bad outfit.

Gregory on the A Platoon was Irish, 6 foot 6; carried an asp on his belt. Just an ASP and some PPE gloves. Said that was all he ever used; everything else was cosmetic. B Platoon was a small half Italian; half ugly white kid everyone called Craig. He drove most of the time. He was lightning fast. Had the kind of palm techniques and hand eye yo really have to born with. The third man in on the C Platoon was Jimmy. Jimmy was probably Latino, maybe a Sikh, maybe Native American. He was supposedly their real agitator and spokesperson. I once saw him drop a charging in EDP in Bronx Lebanon. Never carried weapons, liked using his hands. If he wasn’t on, then the Tech Bag was unlikely to leave the bus. They weren’t bad guys; they were the best when it came to trauma, because they stole everyone else’s jobs. 17 Frank was just too fast to live long, like star eating its one fuel, too big, too bright to occupy space for that long.

 

When shots went off they were always, “two minutes out.”

 

People would hate on um’ cause they were always buffing jobs. I’m sure the patients families never minded. The object was to get there quickly, no? 17F had three guys, three total gung ho trauma buffs, that is to say guys who could give a shit about EMS, could give a shit about patient care, they tuned a spare radio to PD frequency: shots fired; and they were off. The only guys who’d chase an EDP across a park in the dark of night or puppy pile a wild drunk who went buck wild in the ER. They should have been cops. But I don’t think they really were up for that kind of supervision.

It takes three guys to run a seven day, eight hour unit for one tour. There are three tours in a day. Tour one is the graveyard; all DOAs, fucked up shit, you earn the night differential which calculates to some fifty extra fucks a month. Studies say the graveyard takes five years off your like. It’s for burnt out H&H old schoolers or guys going to college. Tour 2 is the busiest; the day tour. People wake up and die as the sun comes up, lots of scrutiny, lots of bosses in the field making comments.

 

Tour 2 is for the family man. Tour 3 is the evening shift. They normally go out at 4, 5, 6, or 7pm. These are the trauma shifts; when booze, ego and gang color make the boroughs bleed.

 

As it stands, you need 9 techs to run a unit. Platoons A, B, and C indicate when people will be on. Two at a time. They say third guys always the asshole, if both your partners are cool you’re the asshole. But 17F3 were tight as a drum. They were ruthless in their pursuit of blood. The recession hit in the winter of 2009. They weren’t gonna close Fire Houses so EMS took it, like we always do. We signed a nonsense contract, which didn’t give us the 20 and out we fought for, for years like Sanit, Cops, and Suppression guys do. Built into the thing was this new 12 Hour day thing. Instead of 9 techs to run a truck 24/7 you now only needed 4. They piloted the thing in Brooklyn in the summer of 09. E Platoon and F Platoon; 12 hours each; these guys got a three day weekend on the actual weekend twice a month. It was a mix of the recession and the existing personnel shortage they just never seemed to fill.

 

At any given time there are around 2,200 Emergency Medical Technicians working for the FDNY in NYC and around 240 Paramedics. The word on the street (which you should trust as far as you can throw Manhattan) about our attrition; is 8 EMTs quit each month for a range of reasons. 4 go out on LODI (line of duty injury) every two months. 4 get fired every six months for outlandish shit. Each time a promotional exam is formed for Fire Suppression, approximately every two years until the recession hit; we lose around 100 of our Bravest and most physically fit. Out of the 200 Paramedics, that is to say all the personnel which can administer drugs intravenously, intubate patients, interpret EKGs, and are generally our brightest lot; of that 200; ¼ go on to be nurses of Pas thus we lose them after three years and change. ¼ go over to the private sector when their pay literally nearly triples from around $24 to $60 and change. ¼ promote to the leadership after around 10 on the job; the remaining quarter stay in the streets pushing. Burn out happens quicker with EMTs, but more severely with Paramedics.

Everyone, thanks to watching the idiot box thinks: ‘Someone’s hurt or sick!’ ‘Call 911 for Paramedics’. But you’re gonna get an EMT most of the time. Because we’re faster and we don’t have enough training to stay and play. All trauma goes to EMTs first. There isn’t much more a medic can do for a guy stabbed twenty times in the chest. Fluids, needle stick decompressions to prevent tension pneumothorax, and quick clot don’t compete with a solid 2 minute ETA, a three minute on scene rapid package and go, occlusive three sides on the chest, bleeding manually controlled, patient boarded and collared; at the hospital in less than four.

 

The more they bleed, the more we speed.

 

17 Frank was one for the thirty units to be cut in the recession based effort to not fire any firefighters. Thirty units were to be run down, staff transferred to plug all vacancies on 8 hour trucks. Brooklyn, Division 3 was to pilot the 12 hour tours. They’d tried in Manhattan (Division 1) some years back. It flopped big time. Everyone in the Bronx hoped Brooklyn would drop the ball, bang out in large numbers and ruin the chiefs’ hope of implementing it city wide. In the 12 hour mode a unit could run with 4 not 9 and they could stop paying out all the insane amounts of over time.

Seven months later; it was still all speculation and state of play. Only parts of Division 3 were 12 hour implemented. But tonight was the deadline for the 30 units to get run down. It was to be the very last tour of 17 Frank. And much to the annoyance of Greg and Jimmy; it was a real quiet night on the Southern front. But the night was still young. It was Friday after all. They were gonna go out with a bang.

Around 1925 the PD radio began giving inclinations some evil shit was a foot at the infamous Richmond Plaza Complex (Rich Man Plaza). Big bang. And then a fire, and a calling out of the Task Force detachment next to the Deegan. This was huge. That evil fucking den of sin was finally burning to the ground.

17F took off blazing lights and sirens even though they hadn’t been assigned.

 

“Gonna go out blazin’,” Jimmy muttered. Like a buck wild, blazing banshee; the unit ripped up the GCC. Richmond Plaza wasn’t even in their Battalion, but this was the gentleman’s borough.

 

 

 

Chapter 21

Bohemian Gypsy Encampment, 2012ce

Borough of Brooklyn,

Day 2

 

He awakes on Onderdonk fields and she is still in his arms. She is warm and breathing deeply and clutching his hand to her ample breasts and thus is pressing her body against and besides him. Very much engorged he presses his hardness into the plump of her buttocks as if waiting for her to wine.

 

The sun has very much arisen. He finds it very tranquil and makes no effort to wrest her into wake field yet. The drumming has begun again and the camp is awakening and she smells of perfume and also cigarettes.

Sprawled out on a Persian carpet, on a now deflated air mattress the thick of him pressed against her rear parts, tits in hand he smiles happy victory; for she is most beautiful.

The Labor Day weekend is allowing about half of the teeming eleven million multitude of the NYC masses not to engage in much less Monday work. This Festival is well timed but is a small Gypsy side show to Winkle and Baltic’s production at Pzeier Chemical Factory, OR the Juveaurt festivities before the Labor Day Parade on Monday.

 

“Today is just Saturday which means there are three more to go!” declares Raphael Ernesto, “hooray for our liberated labor! Labor Day is designed to fall not anywhere near international May Day, which is communist international workers day to all other workers. Labor Day is designed to separate the bullets from the proverbial gun of the American proletariat,” Ernesto Lynch explains as Natasha rolls her eyes and throws back some breakfast Vodka Oleg Megved has obtained to wash down late breakfast.

Oleg Megved, the Ukrainian-Israeli photographer ‘from Boston’ exclaims: “This man looks just like Mayakovski!”

“You’re right, it’s the hat and uniform and red arm band. A little junior communist we have here,” agreed Natasha.

“Who was Mayakovsky,” asks Sebastian Adon.

“Mayakovski was the greatest Russian Poet that ever lived,” says Oleg.

Natasha had then cut in sardonically, “the second or third greatest of his period at the very least.”

“And you look just like him!” she says pointing to Sebastian.

“He had lovers all over the cities and the towns! Stalin let him tour Europe, Cuba, Mexico and America knowing he’d bring those capitalist pigs to their knees: Just with words,” puts in Oleg Megved.

“Let me put on this cap while you draw me more perfectly,” Natasha orders him.

He did as she ordered. And she looked like a partisan girl wearing it, a freedom fighter made so by the circumstances of her times, certainly not of individual ideals, bare and rugged necessity made fearless.

Early deaths for most.

“Spitting image of a Partizan,” said Oleg Megved.

A burly Russian gangster, although really of Ukrainian origin with a puzzling stopover in the Promised Land north of Tel Aviv, an Arab ghetto citadel called Nazareth, only an Amerikanski might dub him “a Russian”.

Or to use Adon’s favorite lexicon a “Former Soviet” or “Postsoviet.”

“Mayakovski was something of a total romantic and free radical,” Natasha then went on, “he wrote no less than thirteen volumes of Soviet poetry. A full third just to his tovarish, lover and muse Lily Brik.”

“Tell him about Lily Brik,” says Oleg the Bear.

“Let him read about it,” said Natasha Andreavna.

Sebastian who was earlier working on an epic caracatura of Victoria and Raphael; has turned his artistic abilities toward the capture of Natasha’s breasts on paper.

“Woman, tell him the goddamn story of Lilya Brik,” commands Ernesto.

Natasha grabs Sebastian Adon by his artistic medical coat tails and lays the sordid affair down in New Speak, Jive;

“So here you have Russia’s greatest poet and writer. Stalin gives him a Carte Blanche to get away with almost anything. So here we have his madness and his love life. He meets Lily Brik and her publisher husband early in career and they have a sick ménage where husband and Mayakovski have to share Lily while being partners themselves creatively.”

“They lived together right up until his suicide. He had to sometimes listen to her screw him from the kitchen even! That level of openness about the affair was absolute as her husband was a polyandrous man, a futurist,” she declares.

“What is a Futurist,” Sebastian asks.

“We believe in the future,” Natasha says calmly.

Oleg gives her a look, and grins a burly grin.

“A Futurist rejects all aspect of his past, the utility of pasts in general.”

“This is what I just said,” Natasha snaps at him.

“You didn’t say it gracefully enough in English for my liking,” Ernesto sneers playfully.

She give him dagger eyes and continues.

“In the end of many trials and many years Mayakovski couldn’t wrest her away from her husband, his closest friend and lifelong editor and then at age 36 he put a gun to his head and ended his foolish, albeit brilliant life over this Brik woman.”

“And then there was also the Tatiana affair in Paris to complicate the matter further,” breaks in Oleg Megved, “two perfect archetypes of unobtainable Russian women one red and one white.”

“Don’t kill all his limited American hope in one shot of story,” retorts Natasha, “Vasa will go acquire the books if he wants to hear the whole series of events.”

And shortly after Vasa and Natasha leave the encampment to wander the urban wastelands looking for a bodega and a place to buy more wine.

They make a curious spectacle walking together through the desolate warehouse district. There was not a Bodega in miles it seemed.

The district was quite bleak and they were alone on a lonely highway except for an occasional passing mac or semi-truck. Her yellow dress blows in the wind, but the sun still beats down and he offers her a water canteen and she drinks and hands him a cigarette.

They’re looking for a Bodega in the wilderness.

The grim warehouses are all one or two stories, all fortified and locked down with tall walls and barbed wire. The place is mostly without any life and smells of asphalt melting in the hottest heat of summer.

Eventually after a great deal of wandering small talk they find some foods and make their way back to gypsy camp.

 

“Could I be plain with you brother,” Sebastian asks Oleg the bear as they watch the girls fool around in the huge rubber inflatable pool, “what is the Russian mentality?”

“Oh, that’s just an American code word for building elaborate prejudices to former and Post Soviets. Or maybe the bunker mentality of thieves in law locked together under iron curtain quarantine.”

“Quarantine?”

“Quite so. That’s what you’re old government did to our revolution and then what our government did to us to preserve it. Locked us down in our Soviet Union.”

“There were other variables.”

“I am no apologist, but the Stalin I grew up with or should I say read about growing up for he was dead; was a very different Stalin than the one you maybe, or maybe not encountered in you college political science. To you all growing up the Soviet Union was an authoritarian gulag state of bread lines and deprivation. To us, growing up before the fall in 1989; it was our country. It was not spectacularly better or worse than yours. But we all could read and we all had jobs and no one was starving and since 1/3 of the world was within our red sphere the quarantine was less impactful. Our zone ran from Havana to Ho Chi Min City; south ways as far as Angola.”

“Fair enough.”

“Your government and your media spent early one hundred years teaching you red terror. The school house desk hiding fallout shelter raids, the numerous adventures with torture abroad, the missile crisis, the Reagan years it all built up a viral fear and hate. And anyway you know what you do with your enemy’s women! Ha. The men are supposed to be barbarians and the women all whores. This is picture your country painted of “Ivan”, well my country too now,” he laughs.

“Agreed, whores and criminals is the stereotype, but I’m talking about the so called mentality. The effects of the iron quarantine.”

“We like new things, this is true, but more importantly we like true security without being in anyone’s debt. Those that even remember the former Soviet Union remember only its hardships mostly via stories told to them. Deprivations and breadlines they really at this stage were too young to remember. I was born in Ukraine, but I really grew up in Israel so I’m not even so shaped by this past. And of course, I’m something of a Ivory. At least below the belt. Those that grew up after the fall of communism likely tasted western things and culture and simply grew up knowing they could be better off here. So some like my family used their Ivoryish heritage to go through Israel then here. Some got stuck in Israel, enough for the fourth national language to now be Russian.”

“Yeah I remember that was about to happen when last I was there,” Adon says.

“Mentality? I don’t know, people are people, we all like a good laugh, some happiness, a toast and a good fuck!”

“Well I believe that, but I think people process data differently.”

“No comrade, not so differently at all. That Natasha you’re consorting with has just gotten off the boat. Whatever barriers between you both seem to have ben easily dispelled with vodka, wine and dancing did they not?”

“I’ve always had something for Russian women.”

“That’s because there’s nothing better than Russian women, everyone knows that of course.”

“Why is it though?! What is it about them,” muses Adon.

“Well I bet you have many most misguided theories.”

“Surely I do.”

“They make incredibly pliant whores” states Oleg to see a reaction.

But, there is none.

Oleg, who got off the boat quite literally three days ago wonders if he has the right mark. This Adon is a charachture of the potentially fearsome guerilla leader his file claimed him to be. This man was, well he was a nostalgic poet. A hipster even living in another age, perhaps uncomfortable in his very own skin. Not a leader of men. Could this really be the most fearsome operative the American résistance had?

“Russian mentality; this sounds like an American device to reduce us all to whores and vicious gangsters. Your media likes this kind of objectification to enable you to kill and rape us with less moral indignation” says Oleg.

“Perhaps that’s the truth though is that many of you do seem to have whore and gangster tendencies.”

“If you claim it,” Oleg.

Natasha storms up to them appearing quite distraught as well as intoxicated.

“Drink man,” she says foisting a bottle upon them. She shoves a cold bottle of red Georgian wine into Oleg’s hands. And he thanks her in Russian.

The she suddenly exclaims;

“I must leave! There is someone who will ask serious questions if I don’t.”

“Please do instead stay,” Sebastian lets alcohol speak for him, “nothing will happen if you do,” pleads Adon.

“You don’t know anything about what will or will not happen to me anyhow!”

“Please stay, its already night and if you leave I’ll have to follow my code and escort you all the way home and then I’ll be waking up drunk on the beach in Brighton certainly.”

“I don’t need you to get home safe.”

“Well the code says real men don’t let women take the trains’ home by themselves after dark.”

“What stupid code is this?”

“The Code of the Haitian gentleman,” he replies.

“Well I am bound by no such nigger code and now I take my leave man.”

“I’ll bring you home,” says Adon abandoning his responsibilities to protect the camp completely notes Oleg the bear.

She storms off and he follows after her and this in itself seems like a thing that has happened and will happen again as if a cosmic comedy.

“I live in Brighton,” she declares, which is very long way off.

 

Like an aroused puppy he follows her blindly out into the blue moon lit night. But they only make it as far as a tavern down the road called the Cobra Club, a few drinks later they change course back to camp and never make it to Brighton at all.

 

 

Chapter 22

Fort Totten, January 12^th, 2010ce

Queens

 

Instructor Jon Healy

 

Back in time at 3pm, 1500; two training units left Outpost 53 at Fort Totten with two instructors, and two cadet probes each. One went to Brooklyn, one the Bronx. The one heading over the Throgs Neck bound for Hunt’s Point was being driven by Jack Carlson and his partner, the most senior, non-brass member of the service; Instructor Coordinator John Healy; who was also a founder and leader of the EMS Pipes and Drums band.

Further back, like a year back tragedy struck.

When the man most responsible for training the last two generations of NYC EMS drops to the ground in the middle of the Academy in cardiac arrest some might call that a taste of things to come. A whole class of cadets was sleeping through a lecture on the operating guide when he dropped to the ground; all 185 calloused, hard Irish pounds of him. He was a battle axe, but everyone knew this coming.

He dropped and went into Vfib.

Not gonna say everyone stood there, jaw dropped, these future new jack EMTs; but they stood there like a CFR circle of death for long enough for Instructor Paramedic Nick Barker to sprint across a fifty foot room, dive over crowd of jaw dropped, useless new recruits and being CPR. They defibrillated him right there in Totten Green after approximately 3 ½ minutes dead.

Everyone knew Instructor Coordinator John Healy. He’d been an EMT since the world knew what that was. He was a short guy, had Celtic tattoos up and down his brawny arms.

He’d been one of the first ambulance crews into the smog and death of the towers.

 

“We know now not to breathe shit you can see,” was one of his favorite sayings.

 

He’d been in the trenches too long. Caught COPD. Later developed Chronic Heart Failure and positional dyspnea. Still smoked a half pack of Marlboro Red a day. Would ‘til the day he died. Which was today, one year ago. His partner of 15 years Instructor Jack Carlson was by contrast one of the healthiest fifty plus men alive in EMS. He went twice, sometimes three times a day on the up to 6 mile PE runs. He wore little red short shorts, was flamboyant as hell; everyone swore Jack had a million hot girlfriends half his age, but I think folks are in real denial about his ‘temperamental’ character.

Healy had a failed marriage and a ‘severely bipolar’ son, as he put it. He was slowly dying after days at the towers and thought sometimes about never seeing his son finish high school.

The Department gave Healy a quiet suggestion he might think about taking some paid time off from a bottomless pit of unused sick leave he had in his bank. Nobody even bothered whispering the R word, even though he had near 28 years on the job. Healy was back at Fort Totten in a month. Teaching again after three.

Healy was the man most responsible, second only to Peg Quinn of course, for all of us being here. He’d given himself to this city and perhaps, although he’d never admit it; been poorly compensated. People tried to protest, even a year after the heart attack when he insisted on taking out a unit with Jack to take two new cadets on a rotation in the South Bronx.

 

“It’s cool,” he said with a cigarette between his lips, “I ain’t cashing out ‘til the sky starts falling.” And like always, John was right. 12 January 2010 was the day he, and many many others would actually die.

 

 

Chapter 23

Bohemian Gypsy Encampment, 2012ce

Borough of Brooklyn,

Day 3

 

He awakes on Onderdonk Fields and she is still in his arms, tits still plump and cutely snoring. She is warm and breathing deeply and clutching his hand to her ample breasts and thus is pressing her body against and besides him. Very much engorged he presses his hardness into the plump of her buttocks as if waiting for her to wine.

 

It was Sunday and everything would repeat itself again. Indecisive lusty flirtations with nothing to support the imagined memories and Oleg the bear stood by taking pictures. The festival of the Gypsy’s continued as the city braced for Monday West Indian Day parade. The dress rehearsal for any insurrection.

 

Eventually Sunday evening Natasha and Sebastian broke camp and headed towards the underground.      They arrived at a small tavern across the street from the faded green light posts of the L underground train in bombed out warehouse zones of so called “East Williamsburg”. The tavern is paneled in old wood and is made up like some old school prohibition tavern; the name of the joint is the “Cobra Club”. It professes to combine mixology and light yoga. Much to the delight of Sebastian who cannot think of two activities worse suited for each other than drinking and yoga, perhaps drinking and driving an ambulance.

And it was here that he notices that Natasha has a dragon fly necklace and matching wrist bracelet, which he had not notices previously adorning her. Although not on her person for the previous two and part days of festival, now they were back on. And that all other times which has been twice before the festival she was wearing some accessory piece with this image it occurs to him. How curious.

 

“What then does the dragonfly symbolize?” he asks her.

“It doesn’t symbolize anything. I just like the way it looks,” she responds.

Impossible it seems to gauge if she is lying he thinks. After three days of general revelry, they are both a little out of body.

“Your eyes are now green,” she smiles.

“Normally they are,” he starts.

“Hazel, I know,” she smiles.

“And yours are now silver where before they were blue.”

“What kind of American are you? You’re not like them and yet you are them and you are certain qualities that are Russian and yet not of us at all.”

“I could help you with your anything.”

“But I need nothing from you. Not even physical help.”

“Where are you and we gonna be when the weekend is over,” he asks.

“Strangers.”

“You’re indomitable woman.”

“Are you a jealous man?” she asks.

He looks into her thinking he could learn to be. There had been some deliberation on option, such are her joining him in the Hamptons at the family dacha or participating in the West Indian Parade. Nevertheless, politely she said he could take her number and call her later since she had to soften the conspicuous blow to her keeper inflicted by two night’s disappearance.

“I do not know if we shall meet again stranger, but I did enjoy you,” she explained and then they took the L toward the city and went their separate ways.

 

In his sketch book on a drawing they colored together she wrote in Russian; “Shame that it all will end.” Though you could translate that several different ways.

 

 

 

Chapter 24

Kings County Hospital, 2010ce

Brooklyn,

 

 

I am called Anatoly Garalov.

I am twelve hour unit of 35B3 from Woodhull.

I am only real Russian in New York EMS.

Other Russians are not Slavic, they are either half Russian, Ukrainian or Jews. I am real, 100% Russian from Moscow, actually true.  Before, in former Soviet Union I make drive trucks.

I am good driver, very fast. People they call me ‘the Russian.’

This is fine.

Also the stupid fat lieutenant, he not pronounce name correctly.

This is fine.

Also people make confuse with me other ‘fake’ Russian Ilya Razimov. My name not so much a problem, English not strong language like Russian.

But, I tell them I am not Ilya. Ilya is not a real Russian. Not a real man. Perhaps a homosexual, or mentally ill.

In Russian community I am not, what you would say; making use of myself in this country so I well. My wife asks me if when that Obama took the power I would be fired and replaced with the blacks.

I tell her this is not like in fatherland.

I tell her we are in America and Fire Department is auspicious distinguishment.

She ask me why I paid to be like Russian janitor.

This I make her be quiet.

She has no job, she is good for only two things.

I used to make drive trucks in former Soviet Union, as said previous.

Lived just on outside of Moscow.

There are no blacks in Russia.

We call the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis, the Tajiks, the Jew, the Kazaks, the Uzbeks, the wild evil Chechnee; these we call the Chiornee; the ones with black soul.

My son thinks he is very smart, we live in the Starrette City amid many blacks to which he calls REGGIN!

All day from his car, he yell to them “REGGIN, RIGGIN: WHAT IS UP?”

The blacks do not know what he means.

They think he greets them in Russian language.

I tell him one day they will shoot to him. They are wiser now, one sits in Presidential Palace of Washington.

I do not hate the blacks like my son and my wife, and all of New York Russian community.

They are tragic.

I have been offered to make transfer to Coney Island Station 43 where is need for Russian is speaking EMT.

I tell Captain I wish to stay at 35, I like to do the real work that is my job, not sleep and grow more fat like not Brooklyn units.    

At base I take not one shower, but two.

One before and after I take out my bus.

Everywhere the blacks live is dirty.

They make piss in elevators, they make piss in stairwells, they write scratch-scratch on many walls, they break or steal all the time.

I worry to bring disease from blacks to family, so always I scrub myself. Last two nights all patients making itch of themselves.

Everyone in city make itch. Cousin Bilo also. Not just the blacks. Lice all over city, creatures in hair. I will make twice a scrub. Not bring creatures to my home. In the hair of the blacks they hide. But not just blacks. Fat lieutenant also makes an itch; complains of ‘gnats’? What is?

I heard the screams on the radio, while in ER Bay at Brookdale.

Was the Indian Mir Ali, friend from Academy class two years ago; class 8002.

I think to self, it is what unit? Again more screams and static. Unit designation unclear. I see several crews make turn up of radio.

General alarm; nothing for us to do.

Nothing I can do. Have patient inside, still not triaged.

Would help if could, cannot go now. What unit?

Ali makes yell on radio; 37B; Sebastian Adon then is one shot?

Byron and Adon normal crew. Adon is look Russian, not real though.

More Russian than this boy Ilya blat.

Hope not Adon, probably not Adon, his luck is too much.

I turn off my radio. Nothing I can do. Cannot leave hospital.

Either Sebastian or Byron shot.

Tak.

Radio I turn back on at 8:16. Still at the Brookdale.

Is worst hospital in all of Brooklyn? Adon has much luck. Byron is dead. Announcement made at 8:19. Tension pneumothorax secondary to gunshot wounds, high caliber this is my guess. Pronounced dead at Kings County Hospital.

This very sad.

We drop like flies.

Without much problems we still die one a month.

My head begins to make itch.

 

 

Chapter 25

Two Holes of Water Road, 2012ce

East Hampton

 

 

Why are black people always late, wonders Sebastian as he waits on 40^th street and Lexington for the Hampton Jitney. And what’s so terrible about being early?

 

But they had been slaves and thus were excused from just about anything in his mind thereafter. Only a racist blan oppressor makes you work for free for five hundred years, reduces you to raped and broken human cattle, and then complains when you’re late.

Even if that was a racism to its own self. Which clearly it often was. It is impossible to exorcise ones racism, you can try so hard and the whiteness still returns.

 

After Natasha replied by mobile phone she wasn’t leaving Brooklyn, the night before Labor Day Adon had called his bad man partner in crime Mickhi Dbrisk to run away from the city to the country to a place called Montauk for a midnight journey into a day trip, the night before Labor Day proper which locked down Brooklyn with 2.6 million feters and full mobilization of the NYPD amongst other agencies. Each year they flipped a coin over Hamptons v. Jeauvert and it was “heads for Hamptons” this year. But really only because Natasha was occupied. And he hadn’t woken up completely, Mickhi was supposed to be on the lines tom.

Surely, they needed to make a long palaver.

Mickhi Dbrisk and Sebastian Adon had met in LaGuardia Community College seven years prior in the EMT program. They helped found the Banshee Association and later the nucleus of the New York City cell of the Z.O.B. underground. In the seven years that they had known each other Dbrisk had scene his friend through many ups and downs, many treacherous jobs, and many lives saved and thankfully none taken. He had seen just what Adon was capable of when he took his little salt pills and worked under the right woman. Dbrisk also had seen his partner fall down real bloody, horror show hard.

“It feels as though I have awoken again from a dream.”

“I heard you a say that just after you came back from Port-Au-Prince. And the next thing I remember is you with a sharp knife heading down to settle a score in District Garretson beach. And then came your arrest, your escape from Lennox Hill and the beginning of the end for your municipal employee status. So forgive me if I worry every single time I hear that again.”

“I’d like permission to step out of the chain of command to handle a situation.”

“Of course you don’t ever need my permission.”

“The full assault on the district will commence in seventeen days.”

“So it seems.”

“We have committed all of our best volunteers to serve in the medical detachment. It will raise eyebrows if you are not there.”

“I plan to be there. I just need to handle something first.”

“Well I plan not to be there, but you do whatever you go to do.”

Mickhi Dbrisk is a six-foot tall, smooth Jamaican paramedic. He leads quietly the one of the mightiest guerrilla squadrons of paramedics and emts history has ever known with its bases in Brooklyn, Haiti, Croix-De-Bouquet and; the little park occupied in the Financial District’s northern frontier. The public private park called Zuccotti which a year ago was taken over by students and radicals and has since become the epicenter of a national rising now most regimented and entrenched against the national elites.

He leads quietly because he is gangster. That is how a true gangster leads.

He has been held in prison for over a year where he marinated his gangster by refusing to name names of coconspirators. He now raises two children. He saves human life on three continents as a paramedic adventurer. In the diffuse and decentralized chain of command of the militant human rights movement he holds the position of a Captain. The name of the faction he leads alongside Adon and few others is the Z.O.B., also known as the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club or the Banshee Association of the City of New York.

He is a bad mother fucker. Shatah.

David leads the Operations Section of Banshee mostly, with, Sebastian Adon our romantic “protagonist” leading the Planning Section. And a very, very big operation is happening as they speak involving short wave transmitters, an electronic magnetic pulse bomb, and full mobilization of partisans.

2/8ths of the elected leadership of the Club’s Executive, one awake, one awakening getting quite removed from the front.

It is now the fourth day of Sebastian not sleeping and he is looking at a golden pistol in the men’s room the Hampton Jitney, while David Dbrisk, a co-passenger on a nearly empty Labor Day Midnight Express Bus jots down baby names for his third upcoming child.

“I may need a fast car,” notes Sebastian as he passes back the loaded weapon wrapped in a gangster bandana colored blue.

As soulful pause.

“I’ll borrow you a real fast car.”

Sebastian has been manically talking whispers about a kidnapped, a hostage bloneenet: a woman named Natasha he was just made a big picture of.

Soulful pause.

“I may, mind you may need a pistol.”

“Brother. I will get you a very good pistol.”

Mickhi Dbrisk has two; soon three children, lives out a hoopdee and three safe house in Bk and Staten Island, and he doesn’t have more than 5,000 green backs in the bank.

Sebastian lives within the Financial District, has no dependents and lives what’s left of savings he squirreled away while working for the New York Fire Department as an EMT.

“You are a dear and trusted comrade brother Mickhi Dbrisk,” states Sebastian.

Mickhi doesn’t even have to nod.

“I have to roll in and save her. I have to get her out of Brighton Beach probably out of city, maybe tomorrow night.”

The Maroon five song “Baby One More Night” comes on from his phone and annoys only the single hedge fund baby not sleeping on the midnight shuttle bus to Montauk.

“Sebby. You are going to have to free her without back up. I got a third kid coming and the uprising is just three hours away.”

“The uprising,” Sebastian mutters and she sees a forty mile high view of the city erupting in violence.

Sebastian contemplates if, what if, armed with a eight shooter set and a new sholem he can keep himself and the mission alive when it comes to Natasha Andreavna, this new dorogaia; maybe tovarish, maybe the sexiest woman living in the Soviet alive and happy and free.

Mickhi can actually hear Sebastian think.

 

“Brother, oh, brother you fell hard yet again, once a year you get the woman, but always lose your head. Keep yourself alive and you can save you, and maybe, just maybe daddy: you get the girl. But we been down this path ain’t we? Man you have to be asking yourself a lot these days just who you let pull your strings.”

            “She bit me,” says Adon and shows Dbrisk the bite marks on his right index finger.

“Well that ain’t no good.”

No good at all.

After Festival and then some real Hamptons fuckery gets underway and Sebastian via his weed Roll-And and Mickhi with his dancing get four girls back to the dacha built by Adon’s parents. But no pants off fuckery goes down even as those girls splash naked about the pool because Mickhi and Sebastian are both in love with superior sets of women, the Maroon five song comes on that September 1^st Labor Day weekend 2012 and Sebastian sleeps well alone in big Hamptons bedroom wondering, what kind of man am I? Do I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go? What kind of woman is she? And all kinds of such questions. And Mickhi waits for Sebastian not to notice and steps out in the cool but still summer right to get a smoke and Newport. It’s exactly midnight, should be Juveaurt Eve back in the city, the march in the morning the strike at high noon.

Mickhi picks up his burner phone and short wave jammer at exactly 00:00 almost midnight Sunday, he relays a message to be bounced out via Sky Pager to the unit and detachment commanders; “Stand down on Wall Street. I repeat. Stand down on Wall Street. They know, I repeat, they already know the uprising is about to happen. We have infiltration. Get everybody off line. Secure the material. We are staggering the primary hit until the secondary fall back date.”

 

And then Mickhi Dbrisk tosses the burner into a camp fire. He goes to bed in the cute little Hamptons Dacha knowing hell is breaking out in Brooklyn and it’s gonna get much worse in the morning.

 

There’s gonna be a street melee to write home about in history popping and erupting like and avalanche of rage and burning, all day long. Kop Tete, boulay maisons! Cut heads, burn houses. Nonviolently!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 26

Bronx Lebanon, 2010ce

BRONX

 

Technician Christopher Jacobs

 

A little secret that I never, ever share is that I helped found the banshee underground, or at least contributed to clandestine circulation of their paper in the Bronx. I knew Sebastian Adon in another life, at another time. Back when we didn’t believe in much, if anything. I’m in a war of attrition to get my daughter back. I’ve been married to my second wife Karina, a beautiful Dominican social worker for about two years. My evil fucking crazy ex-wife Kat lives in Philly and has dragged me into two states worth of courts to keep my baby girl. Just when I think I’m winning her rich parents hire another lawyer and launch another suite. At least she’s living with me now.

A partner of mine in Astoria where I used to work before my redeployment told me her he a guy who knew a Greek who specialized in taking care of these kinds of things. It was tempted.

The papers today all said that the meat was no good.

That any meat in the country was diseased. There were images on the TV of them burning livestock to fight the spread of infection. Images of supermarkets clearing out meat products. That all began yesterday. Lots of hysteria because people in Staten Island were developing festering boils and pocks all over their bodies 24 hours after eating fast food. Most of the cases were from Taco Bell and Burger King, but that’s only because McDonalds has a better press and legal team. The boils looked something like zoster or herpes, like late stage immunodeficiency. They were contagious as hell. Hadn’t spread to the other boroughs yet when I went to sleep. When I woke up there were outbreaks of these so called ‘incurable boils’ in Queens and Westchester. More pictures of flaming heaps of slaughtered livestock. I had taken a nap in the afternoon and woke up around 8:20 pm to get ready to go out Tour 1 03K out of 55 with my partner Danny Madrano. The TV was flashing images of the outbreak and was blaming Chinese imported beef. Other pundits said it was a bacterium. Livestock were being meeting holocaust nationwide while I was sleeping.

Karina packed me a tuna fish sandwich. A European sized one, which is to say too small.

I live on Fordham so it’s only a fifteen minute drive down to 55 on Melrose Ave and 55^th street. The streets were quiet for a Friday, for the Bronx, which means they were still packed and hectic, but there was less tension.

I glance at my phone and see I have a text from Adon. Says he is working tonight.

Adon fashioned himself more a leader than was his true ability to lead. This was largely due to the myriad of enemies he seemed to always make. He would admit that it was hard to be neutral on the subject of himself. He was arrogant, still in shape, highly loud and worst of all personally wealthy. The fact that he held a Bachelor’s Degree, had written a left leaning book and had gone off to launch a controversial newspaper is what probably rubbed people the wrong way most. He was disliked, truth be told; even in Brooklyn. He’d been hated when he first got deployed at Battalion 17; hated. I was in Queens then, but people told me stories. His tie and brass wearing, know it all, boots shining bourgeois pluralism made him quite a lot of needless enemies. He’d almost lost his job over something stupid two years ago. But for every twenty enemies he’d made in the ranks, he had an ace in the hole or two with the higher ups. He never said who.

But right after his BITS trial last November he was transferred to 35 Brooklyn, went to Haiti maybe a year after that, not much later on. Has been on trial since.

You never knew who might help you or try and fuck you around here. But, you had to stick to your guns. Better to be a black sheep than the crews thinking you were a push over. Sebastian had allies too. A few friends even. I was one of them. We did couples stuff every other month or so, his lady friend Maria and my wife Karina really get on. Our schedules rarely worked out well. I was on an eight hour unit on the B Platoon; he was 24 hour on the F. So it was once in a blue moon, but we always followed up.

He backed me when my driver’s license expired and they suspended me for a year and made me do the Academy all over again. I backed him when he fell asleep after hitting the 63 on a segment 2 Pediatric asthma and they damn near fired him. He isn’t a bad kid. He just doesn’t have a true EMS mode like the rest of us. He doesn’t dissociate properly. You gotta do that on this job. When you take a patient to the hospital; they get better, that’s it. If your partner is an ass you turn on the radio and tune them out.

You don’t bring the job home.

I’ll repeat.

YOU DON’T BRING THE JOB HOME.

Because if you do it will eat you up.

And you will die alone!

 

Sebastian Adon once told me he never tells his family or small group of friend’s war stories. He’s got half the mode down. He doesn’t bring it home. His problem is he brings his ideals from home to work. He wants so damn bad to help, to heal to make some little change. And that attitude will get him killed. Because we’re not here to make a difference. We’re here so the dead don’t clog the streets. But I don’t really believe tough talk like that.

Karina says Adon and I need each other; love each other even because we both came here to make a difference. Came here not because there wasn’t a better option came here to make our pasts right by our present works. Sebastian will never let me forget that in another life we both were not such good men.

My favorite call, his too actually is a good delivery; bringing a new little life into this world. Everyone else, ourselves included is tainted somehow. Except for the nine little babies I’ve delivered in the field; everyone else; Sebastian Adon, Karina, even me: we brought this upon ourselves, as eternal sinners.

 

Chapter 27

85^th Street, 2012ce

Penthouse j

 

From Manhattan one could see the signs of smoke rising from Brooklyn below.

The Labor Day Parade and its 2.6 million marchers were turned back at the Manhattan Bridge with tear gas and water cannons. There were a wide range of street battles driving the first Brooklyn Rising which went on for several weeks in the National News cast as urban looting. The bulk of the rising didn’t utilize short guns or bombings or burnings. Just days of rioting and economic disruption that got recast as black on black crime. The National Guard was called up on 4 September. Barricades had gone up in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens since the Labor Day rising. It was getting tense as hell.

 

The safe house roof deck of the House of Trikhovitch is on the 17^th story and looks north over the Hudson River valley rolling towards it is the heavens on the Side Upper West, a predominantly Ivoryish district. The George Washington Bridge and Riverside Park form a noble causeway of greenery against the back blue river, scenic but polluted.

“Cuddling is very sensual,” explains Trikhovitch, “my ex-wife and I used to cuddle, before and after having amazing tantric sex. Hot sensuous fucking that sometimes went on for like nine hours. Always, always began and ended with cuddling and candles.”

“So this went on for just two nights.”

“And it was hot and heavy?”

“No, highly innocent.”

“You’ll have to paint another picture.”

“We did on the third day.”

He refers to the two page drawing Sebastian and Natasha made of each other. He began it during the fashion shoot and she came back over and took a picture facing the colorless sketch and later they drank and colored and danced and drank and colored and it came alive.

 

“I worry about the girl who’d separate my bullets from my gun,” reads Nikh from the picture in the black archive binder where Sebastian keeps his sketches and pictures of women he enjoys capturing, caressing and making into his muse. Pictures of beautiful former Soviet women and post cards to prove it. He’s gotten a much more serious taste for the former Soviet Union in the last six years which has led to monogamous inclinations.

 

As most former and Postsoviet women demand. Partners as sponsors highly in need of undivided attention if you can’t throw a rubber band bank at a problem, at least worship it.

 

“What does that mean again in reggae?”

“She makes me want to live Nikholai. She makes me forget the wars we are fighting in Haiti and soon in Haiti and Syria. She makes me want to live and call out to her Natasha Adon until we are old. Have children with her. Not die on some barricade a million miles from home. Not face anarchist trials and accusations of treason and mental illness. She makes me want to take the salt.”

“And forget your past old boy?”

“Especially my past! No more a thousand and one lives of torment and struggle!”

“Old souls! That’s what we are, it is not our destiny to die or have boring lives” Nikh declares.

“Promise me I won’t die poorly in your next narrative!” Nikh exclaims.

He is referring to the latest manuscript being circulated about their club and circle, an epic war story love tragedy revenge opera set in Africa. One in which Nikholai is cut to smithereens and hung eyes cut out from a tree.

A dramatic pause: “Nikholai, this, this is to be the content of my next play, and surely the greatest one yet!”

Sebastian doesn’t write “plays” so much as hard to follow multi character Noires loosely spun off of his life starring his friends, over and associates.

“What about your gun? And the old devil blue moon? Did she pull out all your bullets until you couldn’t shoot at her anymore!? What are you now but a love sick puppy! I have seen your 808s and heartbreaks, I have seen you in your glory and also you a toothless loon howling at moons and lost, last lives,” Nikholai proclaims.

“All we did was make cuddle, man.”

And on that drawing they made in a wilderness tavern before Sunday evening when they parted, her side of the drawing has a note in Russian which translates several ways.

“Sucks it will soon end. Or it is a shame it must end. Or, thanks for the memory its over,” as soon as Sebastian has his Russian friend Marina translate it via a camera phone picture his heart went to his sleeve.

“I will have you know that you speak of too easily of love. You have many times rendered the pandemonium of your emotions into this word, you have unleashed it like these metaphorical bullets on the often undeserving, offering yourself up as bush to be burned before the higher power of your emotions.”

“How now? What makes you so sure my emotions are so hay wire? Why can’t I be of an old soul, old school in which I act on the things that I feel? Why can’t I look into the encounter with this woman and not be overwhelmed? No woman has so effortlessly rendered near murder into tender longing. And the wild fire of her nature consumes me still.”

“You’ve known the broad for two days and a bad moon black out,” Nikh reverts from devilish poeticism back into American English, “No more new speak jive old friend. What I have seen in the decade I have been your closest friend and companion is not like the cycle of moons. It is like the Phoenix. Soaring heroic adventures punctuated by dissents into foul broken madness. Need the laundry list be read before the trip to the super market?”

“There have been bad falls…”

“Only matched by the heights you were reaching before them.”

“Nikholai. I cannot walk away from this.”

“How now! Tovarish you have said this before ruinously! Mali, Israel, Hali, Haiti, Yelizaveta, and Tiputti all were all impossible mountains you climbed in the name of love and good ideals and each time your back broke. See there is your list. The only true victim of your epic promises was you, each and every time.”

“There were more than those. But each ones listed were the epic failures of my human vanity.”

“You did deliver what you promised in Haiti.”

“Only because you all banded besides me.”

“Hear me now friend; you will be remembered by all who truly knew you as a romantic first and a revolutionary second. Your war of words are parlor tricks your ability to lead is what draws so many to you to carry long these overlapping missions, each which you dedicate in hindsight to your love of a woman. Saving lost children, saving whole nations, saving girls who never knew their fathers; these things I will list off at your funeral. But friend, Sebastian, you must check your passions before they make that funeral an event quickly upcoming.”

“Death puts no great fear in man who knows of true love.”

“I will not ever try and temper your ideals, or tell you that you are not really loving these women you invest so much time in. But the broad almost pushed you off a roof friend. You almost took her right along with you. And you’re response to that, is that you love her? What fuckery is this? That is what Dbrisk will say too.”

“Mickhi Dbrisk has said that I ought to ride into battle alone on this.”

“Well remember that battles you fight for love or wars you start for ideas will be always be rallied to by your companions. You dragged me into the fray over Haiti. I served there honorably because of your pipe dreams. And some good we did surely. Hear me when I say that if you ruin yourself again over a woman, all I will be able to do is give warning. This girl is trouble. And a love battle field is not your historical point of triumph. I’d forgotten too about Birdy.”

“Ah, Birdy. A comic tragedy.”

He almost died.

“A tragic comedy? Who fucking cares. You’ve send your friends off to danger and possible death and risked your life for many worthwhile things in the cap city of being an American. But, but! But please don’t die for a woman who you’ve known but for two nights of cuddles and one night of near life experience. You have a lot to give the world if you can just survive your reckless adventurist youth. Hear it from me, as you heard it from Captain Dbrisk.”

“I’m sorry. This will be the seventh big promise. I will keep it this time. Without reinforcements.”

“You kept your promise to Tiputti. The rest were not even in your powers to promise.”

“I didn’t promise her anything yet.”

“Oh. Well. And what is it you plan to promise then?”

“I promised that we’d see each other again.”

“That’s banal enough I suppose.”

“I suspect that’s easy enough to keep. But there is some question of her man. She asked me am I jealous. Surely I am jealous if this proves to be new love.”

“I assure you it isn’t. But your promises invite trouble.”

“I saw Mickhi Dbrisk the day I left here. We traveled out to Montauk. I told him that I plan to steal her from this man and take her away from the life she lives. I plan to promise her a better life with me at her side.”

“You’ve made a good deal of presumptions about her life. How bad it is. How unhappy she is or isn’t’ Are you the knight in shining armor or just a mark, a shill.”

“I wrote her a poem.”

“Then I know it’s already too late to talk any sense into you. I suppose I’ll just stand back and watch the buildings explode. And of course stand ready to play the violin at the funeral.”

“Stop being so melodramatic poor droog, I’m sure she’ll partially appreciate it.”

 

The poem is numbered #17 and is entitled:  BANG! There just went Midnight!

 

 

If I had only one bullet in the chamber

I’d have to get the target close

To not blow it.

The shot.

Not the target.

Though, I’d let the target blow me in the chamber close.

Given all the variables.

See Amerikanski word games.

I took chances when it came to my target,

Which was moving, and still is.

Am I objectifying my sole objective?

Of course I am.

For hilarity.

And because American men have no tact.

Not a mind game tonight!

Dorogaia, I beg, please just a word game.

Three for three.

Not an objective mission: A lesson or an aim.

One has to keep love for one’s life,

Away from the love of one’s life,

Always at arm’s length,

That’s some man’s wife.

Use the pistol in the bedroom, if necessary.

She writes like she draws.

She draws a crowd.

And her morality is former Soviet.

What she does with her heart,

Isn’t not at all what she sometimes does with her eyes,

And her thighs,

Her hips_ her lips.

And especially her lies.

It comes all over me like a shudder sometimes.

Or a blindfold before a Saturday night weekly execution.

Pure lust between those angel wings.

Don’t be fooled by whose side I’m on by dawn.

Hold me tight again before we part for days.

What he don’t know won’t hurt him,

Since you guys don’t have the same last name.

So, what if I miss you_ kiss you_ imaginary bliss, true?

I bet you take issue.

To hopeless target acquisition,

Running afoul of all common sense.

I’ve lost my etiquette.

I guess I’m an Amerikanski when the cap comes off.

And thus she separates my bullets from my gun.

And BANG!

 

There just went midnight.

 

 

Ⱥdon to Natasha.

 

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

Dorogaia (dear one) I have failed you, where are you now! What have I again done!!

 

That was certainly not the first, last or best poem to be generated in her name and handed over with intent to take her long to bed, and out of Brooklyn and anywhere else on earth, she wanted to go. And it didn’t take but four feckless days to see her again.

 

 

 

Chapter 28

Station 17, 2010ce

South Bronx

 

 

Lieutenant Moishe Klein

 

Hi, I’m Lt. Moishe Klein and I don’t need to be liked.

I just need to be vaguely respected to my face. And if not respected I just need these units to not be sitting around a couch 99 at 17 when the Bronx is burning and we got BITS running around inspecting people when they aren’t 89. BITS isn’t out tonight, but Richmond Plaza is finally burning down.

I once told Adon when he came to me ready to quit not last August, but the one before after he’d been out here just two months, “A sane man in an insane world is?”

It was a Talmudic question, it didn’t have an answer, it was just meant to provoke bigger questions and knock them around for a while.

I haven’t been in the Bronx for at least six months, but I have to do a whole run around now picking up mutuals so I can get off for Shabbos. The trick to being a religious Jew in the FDNY is to find a few Catholic guys who want off Christmas, Easter, Lent or Superbowl Sunday. You dangle out a years’ worth of coverage along with the goys kid’s birthday, his anniversary, the list goes on. You try and find four trusty gentiles that will mutual with you so you cannot be here Friday sundown ‘til Saturday dusk.

It was harder when I became a Lieutenant because half the lieutenants are Jews. Not too many of us make Captain and brass above, although the Deputy Chief Gumbo is a Jew.

So, here I am covering this bullshit old station of mine. I has here almost three years before my ins got me back to Brooklyn at Cumberland 31. Battalion 17 in the rundown old firehouse on 1095 Ogden Ave has a skeleton crew. Only places with fewer personnel are the Outposts. Like the Outposts, 17 is where they dump those that can’t play well with others. They hated me, I hated them; wearing a yarmulke doesn’t help, but they didn’t hate me for being a Yid they hated me because they were used to not having to follow any rules. This place is a rejects kindergarten.

Let me dust off this run down:

On 17A2 have Celluci, Devon Howard, and a vacancy.  Celluci thinks he speaks Spanish and is sexy; he does not and certainly is not. He has two sexual harassment EEO violations in his file from a previous station. He’s big on being an I-Talian! But he’s actually only half Italian, a quarter Ukrainian, and some other part, part asshole. He failed the CPR segment not only in his Academy practical exam, but again at a Core training. He’s been here six years, failed the Medic screening three times. Not the worst guy, just a little loud with the ladies on his units PA system. Devon Howard is middle class black from Brooklyn who posits himself as mini-thug, but is too effeminate to pull it off. He’s clean cut and hardworking, but a huge Queen. The reason there’s a near permanent vacancy on 17A2 is that Devon files EEO charges against anyone who says anything to him. Although Adon once said, ‘you people’ in an argument and that went all the way to a formal hearing. They have taking it easy going to the next level; they do three jobs a day tops; sit on everything. They both always parade hot girlfriends of the month around the station, but I’d speculate they fuck each other up the ass. 17A sits on the ramp above the Deegan, right under Highbridge.

On 17B2 they have Santiago, Montgomery, and some new guy I don’t really know. Santiago threw a tantrum after some other Puerto Rican Lieutenant called him some Spanish slang word back when he was at Station 26, the ‘Tin House’ on Boston Road. The story goes this lieutenant called him the Spanish slang word for fag, Santiago flipped out and threatened to kill him. Suffice to say the brass dumped him here. Montgomery came out less than a year ago, he came out enthusiastic not knowing a damn thing about anything. They promptly turned him into a skell. Santiago has about three years and knows how to his job, these other two are useless without him and he, like 17 Adam 3’s guys, likes to do as little as possible. 17B sits on 165^th and where ever they feel like.

17 Charlie 2 is hands down the most bipolar unit in Division 2. Leon Goldson is this body building Jamaican cadet, out two years now who works hard, has charisma out the ass. He’s well liked and surprisingly motivated for someone with two years on the job. Ilya ‘Razz’ Razimov is an EDP. Probably at least a little bipolar. He he’s a rich Russian kid that just doesn’t get it. He makes all these sarcastic comments that no one gets. He’s gonna get beat up one of these days. When its Leon and Goldson on the truck they do real fine work. When it’s Razz and the third guy, Leacroft Walters, its silence or outbursts. Craig has a temper. He told off a doctor, got restricted. Cursed at a nurse, got restricted had to meet with Dr. Gonzalez. Tried to strangle Razz; lost five days pay. He wants to be a nurse. But I really doubt it. He wants to skell out hard core. Suffice to say Leon and Craig will only do 3 to 4 jobs with increased grab-assing and social engineering. Leon is the mediator of the little triumvirate. Things apparently settled down after the scuffle. 17C sits in front of the Jamaican restaurant, the Feeding Tree on 161^st and River.

17 Henry 2 runs 0600 to 1400. Right now its Juan Ortiz and, wait; Juan Ortiz: double Vacancy. The Hazmat people are all fucking insane, excuse my language. The worst of the worst, who got their two weeks nonsense training (that is never ever used); for the craziest, most paranoid reasons imaginable. John Martinez, the fast talking, perpetually absent Union Delegate is off in Iraq. Paul Casson was fired after leaving a little girl in the ER by herself on New Year’s Eve, forged the nurse’s signature, and then proceeded to go lights and sirens to a fast-food spot running eight red lights. BITS was there and took pictures of everything. Casson had EEO violations in nearly all 26 protected categories. He had eight years on the job when they finally terminated him a month ago. Margaret Brown, an old battle axe with 31 years on the job had a heart attack while cursing out a co-worker; she’s been on LODI sense. The Old bitch needs to retire. Eddie Aldridge shot himself in the head with a .45 last autumn. Got a full FDNY Funeral, but only five people showed up. The last Battalion 17 Hazmat EMT is a fat, surely Irish alcoholic named Brandon Shipley. Shipley was out of his mind spent more time at Sin City than at his mother’s house. Six months ago he went to a health screening at BHS and they found him unfit for duty due to his pulmonary output and his elevated Cholesterol levels. He went on light duty at Station 43 shortly after.

If those Tour Units sound like people you don’t want to pick up your grandparents, don’t even get me started on Tour 3. Thank god those disgusting skell divas Jones and Barbour are both on A/L.

All BLS Units run Tour 2 and 3. Only Charlie runs Tour 1, Henry used to, but doesn’t these days do to the Juan Ortiz Battalion 17 Hazmat army of one. Oh wait, 17 Charlie 1 has a double vacancy too. Only the stoic, Old School Jamaican Leacroft Sebastian was left apparently. The man could sleep though a missile strike. Adon’s old partner if I remember correctly before they nearly terminated him. What a mess that was.

Asleep at the goddamn wheel.

17 also runs two paramedic units out of 17 as well. 17 Zebra and 17 Young. Zebra is an ALS Hazmat Unit, 17 Young; standard ALS. The medics here mostly keep to themselves and stay out of the ever raging Station politics and civil war. Most stations had some degree of dysfunction, but this place was the dumping ground. Besides the few new Jacks, everyone was here at 17 because no one wanted to work with them at their old stations or were awaiting termination. There was always someone in plain clothes on the couch. Some restricted person they couldn’t fire right away because of civil service status.

The last guy on the couch, an actor now on Third Watch and an extra on Life on Mars named Vincent Ceiola was sitting there two years after he refused to work up a cardiac arrest, proceeded to punch out a lieutenant, and couldn’t be promptly fired.

You’d never have all these vacancies at a normal station. They’d run down units, or merge crews. But it was different here; some of these people would literally kill each other if asked to spend 8 hours on a unit. There was no choice but separate them, put on kiddy gloves, tray and handle fights in station, and post overtime on the KDT. Everyone was KVO here. They all signed up for three OT shifts so they didn’t run the risk of having to work together.

I look at 17 under a certain, Captain not to be named from Germany that was in charge when I came in and the new regime of Captain Miller two years and running. There is stock room up front, while before there was just piles of boxes dumped in stack in the back of the bay without rhyme or reason. Under the old Captain 17 produced in a single year the most EEO violations filed at a single FDNY Battalion or Station. Now, there is some degree of mediation. Back when I came here the other lieutenants covered everybody’s ass on things that should have produced CDs like chronic lateness and ridiculously low uniform standards. It made me fully understand why we Yids have Hatzalah. These people shouldn’t be trusted with human life. Captain James Miller was an activist. He pissed off upper brass with something while commanding in the Rockaway’s Station 47. They dropped him here. They dumped me here after I fucked up a bad call in Brooklyn just after getting my bars. They dumped Adon here cause of that thing on the Subway. This was a place for rebels, fuck ups and trash. And I credit Captain Miller with almost cleaning up 17. He almost single-handedly re painted the bay doors, cleared the trash, branches, and piles of human feces out of the tiny side lot. He installed INSERT WHAT IT IS on the walls inside the bay. He got them a real BLS stock room re-organized; he sent Adon and Scagnetti into the basement to turn a INSERT stable into a storage depot. He even installed an external ladder which allowed these skells to open up the third floor bunk room and got equipment s they could have a gym. Miller used the restricted guys as his work horses and may have cut them deals. When the renovations were done Adon got sent to Brooklyn and Scagnetti resigned without a messy lawsuit and criminal charges. Shortly after he got his break on Third Watch. Captain Marty Miller poured his energies into proving everyone wrong about 17. People had low expectations and he surpassed them wildly. But I say he almost because all that work to change the nature of a station could do nothing to change the way these people felt about themselves.

In the immortal words of Jenny Jones, the chubby Irish-Cuban mentor on 17A3: “We run a cab service. We ain’t shit. This job is total bullshit and will always be total bullshit. It’s a stupid summer job for people who got nowhere else to go.”

“Conditions 17 for the assignment,” central tells me over the radio.

“Conditions 17,” I respond.

“Report for staging on Sedgwick and Exterior Ave. We have a three alarm fire in the Borough of the Bronx. The fire has been reported at the Richmond Plaza Complex.”

 

20:12.

 

That place is such bad news.

What a nightmare. I really, really, not in a million years would pick up overtime on Shabbas. I haven’t worked on Shabbas in my entire life. But tonight there are a slew of pre-rendered events setting themselves in rapid motion and I was ordered, yes ordered to be on hand to pull my weight. Why, well because I was chosen.

 

 

Chapter 29

Rich Man Tower Complex, 2010ce

South Bronx

 

 

Technician Leon Goldson

 

Fit is the new rich. And I know that to be true as I’m carrying Castro on my shoulders, running through the woods after those fucking crazy kids stabbed him and then lit our bus on fire.

I hear 17 Bravo explode in flames behind us. It’s 8pm.

 

How ya doin’? Name’s Leon Goldson, I work on 17C Tour 2. I study social work at Leman College and yes, I have an undercover, part time job training at Manhattan sports club. I shouldn’t even be on this unit tonight.

 

I’m a big dude, I worked for it. Now I’m running through the badlands under High Bridge with Lee’s blood leaking all over me. And I realize we got ahead of those kids and that Lee is bit of a buff and keeps some occlusives in his utility belt. There’s some kind of tenement shed on this dirt road called Exterior Avenue that runs along the river toward Richmond Plaza. I kick open the door and drag Lee inside laying him down on a dirty mattress. I’ve never been one for a utility belt, but I guess they’re for 10-13s not abdominal pains. He’s gagging and convulsing. First I slap him in the face.

“Calm down,” I mutter, “it’s gonna be cool,” I say. They tell you not to lie to your patients. I mostly only lie to my partners.

I tear open his job shirt. I wipe the gush of blood clear so I can see the injuries. None to the chest; looks like three in the mid lower abdomen. Fuck. I grab a large multitrauma dressing, cut off his uniform shirt and cover the three puncture wounds to his stomach. I hoist him to a sitting position and circumvent his chest with two inch tape. Castro makes a gurgling noise, coughs some blood then I drag him up to his feet.

The thing about this job is you can’t ever get complacent. You might go a whole year with nothing but sicks, and abdominal pains and drunk people. Then disaster strikes and you gotta be ready. You can’t ever turn off your game face.

There was an accident. A truck driver fell asleep and careened off the highway ad jumped the ramp. Rig landed in the trailer park on exterior. Lots of dead homeless women and kids. Survivors flipped out. Radio went dead. Couldn’t put enough people in the back of the bus. Blood, lots of dead kids, screaming people. Screaming at us to do something. And then the mob that had gathered, lots of bloods from Richmond Plaza. Yelling, tension, someone stabbed up Castro. I left my patients on the scene. Few were alive anyway. I dragged Lee to this shed.

Radio still doesn’t work. His nor mine. I pick up my cell and call the conditions NEXTEL. Klein picks up. I jabber something all at once.

“Slow down, what’s going on out there?” the Jewish Lieutenant asks me.

“Radios are dead, it’s an MCI; unknown number of casualties; a truck hit the trailer park. Mob of kids stabbed up Castro. It’s real bad. We’re in a shed on Exterior, bout a hundred feet south of Richmond Plaza.”

“I’m enroute; it just came over as an MCI and three alarm fire.”

“If we stay here he’ll bleed to death before we can get extracted. If we struggle on towards Richmond plaza, he’ll likely go into shock. Lee is bleeding like a stuck pig and that bandage isn’t gonna do it. I can’t leave him to get help.”

“Stay where you are Leon,” Klein says. “I’m coming to get you guys.”

“When it rains around here it pours,” I say to him.

I have a hypothetical night life. As far as my co-workers are concerned I’m hypothetically pounding out every cute ER Nurse south of Tremont Ave. I have a hypothetical future as a social worker and owner of a small business. I have a hypothetical notion that I can keep my buddy Castro alive. Hypothetically I can carry him back to the highway.

I hear yelling. I hear a big angry mob. I get off the phone.

 

“Stay alive.” I assure him.

 

“I’m trying,” he says coughing blood, “I’m”, pant cough, “really fucking trying.”

 

I throw him over my shoulder and dash towards Richmond Plaza where the Security booth in the lower access check point should have a radio and a phone or hopefully a gun. I’m nearly there. It’s as if I’ve been training for this moment all my life.

 

And then I see Richmond Tower 40 explode.

 

 

 

Chapter 30

Weather Up Speakeasy, 2012ce

Battery Park

 

 

Life is a series of calamities punctuated by stiff drinks, but some taste pretty good in the right company. Weather Up is a dimly lit mixology bar with white and blue tiles in District Battery Park.

The fall came up on them all suddenly. The trees became good socialists giving up everything and turning red, at least some of them. The leather jackets came right out. The first kiss had to occur properly. There was so much dynamic tension.

Our two car-crossed lovers have a drink off at the Weather Up, and she wins because he pays. Even though she has a black card in her inner thigh pocket.

 

They go for a walk in the park where the Tom Ottorness statues haunt my many haunts.

He twists his ankle and falls, and she catches him with a hard kiss. A real one planted right to stop him from ruining anything with his chatter. She blows hope down his lips, gives him so much reason not to feel pain.

He fell before he could tell a long, old soul story.

She had just begun to craft her tale when in his big leather cowboy boots balancing himself on the back of a large copper turtle pedestal he tripped himself up coming down hard on his right foot as it twisted making wet crunching noise in his mind.

 

He’s in terrible pain and thinking something in him is torn. And then comes her kiss.

 

It was opportune. She keeps kissing me, upside down while putting on the song, black-black heart, but not until she uses her tongue to never let him utter a cry or a yelp even.

She swallows his tongue. Upside down.

I only kiss you because you are in pain, she thinks.

Please, please Natasha; just keep kissing me he thinks.

            But eventually the time for kissing has to end, late on a Wednesday. She recalls her warning, “Are you a jealous man?” She has a bed to return to in Brighton and he buys her a cab. He presses green notes into her hand.

I am a jealous man when it comes to you he thinks. Cuddled just twice, kissed just once.

“I belong to another man. I do owe him a lot,” she warns him.

“I’m not in trouble, or abused. I am a happy girl.”

“Kiss me again.”

“I will. But don’t get used to it happening forever.”

The cabby shuttles her off into the night and he curses his ongoing unrequited love life. He asks the heavens which are blotted out by the district; “Why me! Why must I always go after that which I can’t have so all claim, even her.”

 

But the first kiss was a true kiss and Natasha who has sworn off affairs as of lately likes the way he felt on her lips and she therefore swears that she will see him yet again because he is passionate and she has read long Russian tales of men and what they do when they open their hearts and then close their eyes so it seems this Sebastian has.

 

“I’ll call distraction and will keep you from wanting me to have your last name,” she vows to the moon as she crosses the old bridge back to Breuklyn.

 

“But you do distract me, and this may end so terribly. What have I done this time,” she wonders. Then she yanks him into the cab and off toward Brighton Beach they go via the Tunnel which is the only way in, the only way the through the blockades and street fighting lawless tumult. Her tits in his palms, her tongue working his mouth the cap driver as if non-existent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 31

9 Metrotech, 2011ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Bureau of Investigations and Trials

 

By the third month of the investigation (into the series of extreme events that occurred on January 12^th, 2010) there were six separate BITS investigators working on this particular case. They were told from the very top to be cautious and methodical. This wasn’t about Adon’s political beliefs, his newspaper, his proto-union, his medical condition or even what he did or did not do in Haiti. Ultimately this investigation was about stealing time.

In an off the record interview conducted by the Bureau of Investigations and Trials:

“You know what gets me with all you tree hugging “save the world” psychopaths? You all go running down for the latest cause, and then leave, having made yourself feel good. How come none of you want to relocate to Haiti? I mean come on, you are all gonna save the planet, and everyone on it… Why not go live there? Oh that’s right… because if you tried the shit you all pull up here they would cut your fucking heads off with a machete!”

“Tell me Sebastian “I must be a legend in my own mind” Adon, hypothetically speaking of course… What is your opinion on a person who leaves his post on his City Ambulance to just run down and play hero for two weeks? Do you think that person should be butt fucked when he gets back to work?”

“What kind of a message does that send to the rest? I mean, a person just leaves his post because he feels the need to be a raging asshole? And what about the people who work at that job whose lives get disrupted because they are now forced to work in the slots created by the self-absorbed liberal scumbag who left his post? What do you think about a scumbag like that, hypothetically speaking?”

“I can tell you my opinion… Hypothetically speaking, I hope that the employer of that raging scumbag bends him over and drives the ambulance he walked away from straight up his ass…Sideways.”

 

In a letter to the Bureau of investigations and trials:

 

With all due respect, I do not approve of anyone using profanity, or launching personal attacks on anyone, in any forum. While Sebastian is to be admired for his drive, there is a reason that protocols are put in place, and it is not “as you put it, the piece of paper” that is essential, but the background, education and experience that is the most important asset in working mass casualty incidents.

Mr. Adon, not only misrepresented his level of training, but attempted to circumvent the Command structure established for the safety of all working on the ground in Haiti. Furthermore, he violated several well established and venerated safety procedures that in fact, placed others in grave jeopardy.

Among the worst of his transgressions, was believing that he had the authority to try take command over a compound that was being led by individuals with more experience, knowledge and organizational skills based on years of performing disaster emergency medicine.

His behavior ultimately disrupted the continuity of care, he refused to accept what his designated role as not important enough, and decided to freelance, because working within the team concept was unacceptable to him. It is a shame that he did not want to be humble and learn and a further shame that he had to be detained by the USMC to ensure that he left the country.

Lastly whether he likes it or not, he has a job in NYC, and he is relied upon to show up for work and perform that job. Having his relatives call him in as sick and lie about his whereabouts is just plain wrong and dishonest and places a strain on an already heavily stressed 911 system.

His intentions might have been well placed, but his poor judgment and actions cannot be excused, nor should they praised, because he became more of a problem than part of a solution.”

 

In a letter to the Bureau of investigations and trials:

 

“The actions and tactics used by EMT Adon were dangerous to personnel on the ground. They exhibited a total disregard for authority and leadership structure of any kind.

In the end, 77 EMTs, Paramedics, Firefighters, doctors, nurses, cops and soldiers testified to the boldness of actions and the fundamental goodness of his character exemplified by the courageous, although high unorthodox actions of January 12^th, 2010. It only took four letters and four recorded testimonies to seal his termination.

 

 

Chapter 32

85^th Street, 2012ce

Penthouse j

 

 

Back on the safe house deck of Penthouse J, the sky is quite clear and the city has hardly gotten any less humid. From the deck of House Trikhovitch one can see the whole Hudson River valley and watch the concrete jungle spread up into vast monolithic canyons in Midtown or the highland of Washington Heights.

 

Nikholai is sometimes dashing, sometimes just a drunk. That’s the only word for it. And he doesn’t like Russian Banya, and doesn’t trust Russian women, though he is sleeping besides one as of lately.

But she, the woman in question, is a Ukrainian Ivoryess from Brighton Six and had rain bow colored hair, and she sings in drag, and she will soon be a Physician Assistant from Hunter University.

Nikh for short has few close friends and works for the club’s logistical arm, but the Red Cross is his bank check and his education is continuing, in bursts at the Breuklyn College in Journalism, Marketing, as well as dabbling in Disaster Relief with employment.

 

His new lust-or partner in his crimes, new in that he has never dated his own before, his new lady friend is Fran or Franny for short.

 

She was once a happy little Burner, but then she got roofied and repossessed on the Playa; enlightenment never followed. Sebastian has just met Franny Rainbows (not her real name at all), who at the safe house is listening to Sebastian get a lecture from Nikholai about “the kind of Zamni Cherie a man really needs.”

 

Zamni Cherie is a Haitian Creole interjection that basically means “the dear partner”. The Z.O.B., amongst the other services it renders to the ambulance men and women who affiliate with it has for nearly years’ time since the great earthquake killed over 316,000 in Haiti, been building a volunteer ambulance system on that island.

 

“When she kissed me, I think I didn’t long to die ever again.”

“Ever?” asks Fran.

“Ever. I just wanted to come back, alive to that moment and keep getting kissed.”

“Tak,” pontificates Nikh.

“Tak, is quite right,” notes Sebastian, “She kissed me upside down and had the dexterity to tune her mobilblat to ‘Black, Black Hearts.’ That takes commitment to continued passion.”

“If she’s Russian, she’s just restless and sees you like new puppy,” says Nikh and Fran nods.

“I’m not so concerned,” retorts Sebastian.

“She’s pure Russian.”

“She’s taking her time,” jokes Franny

“She’s bored and you are certainly a colorful catch,” states Nikholai Trikhovitch wondering why it seems as though on the eve of every major stage of the war plan called the “the blue print” a Russian woman shows up to sweep Adon off his feet. To prop him up or knock him down, that is just too hard to call.

“She’s not bored of me yet.”

“You have gone down this road before and you know where the road ends,” states Nikholai Trikhovitch remembering the past which his friend has wiped clean for the sake of the coming rising.

 

“Are you Ivory or Gorski; are you Cossack? An Uzbek? Or are you Chechen like me,” Trickovitch asks, more perhaps demands, or maybe even channels.

 

 

 

Chapter 33

Station 17, 2010ce

SOUTH BRONX

 

 

Technician Charlie Moto

 

Nineteen Years ago it was 1992.

That was when I joined this outfit. Back when we wore green and it was called the “Health and Hospital Corporation.”

I got nineteen years on this stupid, fucking job. This crazy fucking, fuck your shit up job. Fighting for custody of my daughter, smoking two packs a day; that’s mostly what I have to show for it. I’ve been at this same station; Station 17 in beat down former fire house, in a beat down part of the Bronx, on a beat down stupid unit that does a little too much work for my liking. In my Italian childhood the Bronx was burning, and now it simply smolders.

I’m Charlie Moto. Fuck you.

I’m just a beat down guy so it works, but look at me funny and I’ll knock yer lights. I’m from the H&H Old School; these new jacks, these green rookie fucks don’t have any respect.

I came to Highbridge after the Academy. It was just a step above an outpost with roughly more than sixty members of service holed up in single engine, abandoned fire house in the 4^th most depressed neighborhood in the united states. Highbridge is the Western edge of the South Bronx; a rising set of hills that rise above new and old Yankee Stadium. The Deegan hems us in to the west, the hills drop of into the Grand Course to the East. Nothing up here but deadly poor Dominicans dying of aids. After I peered through a classified study last year on the epidemic level of HIV infection in the South Bronx; some estimated 72%; I stopped fucking the locals. It’s bad up here, not East New York bad where my girlfriend is from, but real bad. I’ve been on 17 Charlie Tour 3 for the past seven years. These Captains come and go trying to bring 17 in line with the Department; they don’t mess with my slot. It’s been called a Station, then a Battalion, it’s had activist Captains, didn’t give a fuck captains, rank climbing captains, even all out skell captains.  The story of Highbridge Station is the story of EMS; it’s been kicked around and put down so much in its short thankless life it’s too used to failure to advance itself. Failure makes us comfortable.

So after that fire I took up drawing, you know animals doing stuff.

I hope to team up with the right people and make a kids book.

 

They always warned us after 9/11 another shoe would fall, and it did. On the Bronx in a deadly inexplicable way flame and disease, falling planes and fogs, death of the first born, rivers into blood, dead cattle, it ain’t a metaphor. On the 12^th of January, 2010 I walked away. Scene not safe, not safe at fucking all. I walked away like they always said I could. Everyone else on duty at Stations 17, 55 and 14 died from what I remember.

 

 

 

Chapter 34

Zuccotti Park (called Liberty Square), 2012ce

District Financial

 

 

A year ago in September a group of Canadian & North American anarchists supported numerically by left leaning college students used live stream, social media and the internet to coordinate a nationwide uprising against corporate financial establishment based in the United States.

 

It exceeded the expectations of all involved.

 

That demonstration which began in Zuccotti Park on 17 September of 2011, quickly spread to over 4,500 encampments worldwide, yet, was crushed just after three months[1].

 

Reading to Franny and a new girl Molly with a back flip and tales of danger and anarchist trials; Nikholai, Zachariah, Molly, Krissy and a big bottle of Spanish White Wine are all Sunday morning rising in the Adon Otriad Safe House on 140 Nassau Street; Northern edge of the Financial District.

“Anarchist trials always begin and end, with an explosion of some kind. So they necessitate their being with a bombing,” explains Sebastian Adon tipping the Spanish wine.

The other three look on. They are all after partying after the Mehanta Social Club around 5 am. The entire several dozen human leadership had run up a several thousand dollar food and drink tab, but only paid 700 American when it all gets settled and that’s with a 43% tip to all the staff serving.

 

Ernesto and Victoria opted out of this Safe House roof after the pre party and there by skipped out on the lesson and parable of Anarchist Trials.

 

“Things are bad and then; ya Basta,” he enunciates for some reason in Italian, though he often claims to be prejudiced to Italians. “Enough.”

Sebastian speaks fluently. He speaks often at late night dinner salons lecturing on conflicts in Africa, or the Middle East. Or various terrorist responses to atrocities and genocides. He is well versed, enough to conduct amalgamated services in the New Testament, the Torah, also Midrash and Qur’an.

“But we, not that I am an anarchist, the proverbial royal and esoteric “we”; never throw the first punch, and by punch I mean light off the first bomb.”

He plays quite an open militant.

“I don’t even know how to build a bomb, but the point of an Anarchist trial is not about the alleged bombing plot, or success of the bombing operation. It is about accusing civilian non-combatant activists of all kinds of stripes and colors of being one big anarchist plot,” he says with fire in his eyes.

Krissy sips and Molly drinks, very much paying attention.

“The whole purpose is to imprison and execute a big illegal grouping of public enemies. Niggers. Ivories. Hispaniacs, people with tattoos. Illegals. The Faggots. The Russians. Shtarkers. Fenians. Communists and Revolutionary Socialists of all tendencies. Students. Unionists. People with dark skin. People practicing Eastern religions. Hippies.  Everyone that’s even want just a couple more human rights. Like Indonesia in 1965[2], yeah boom! Kill us all. They round up all the usual suspects. Accuse them of putting a bomb in a building, then they execute nearly everybody.”

 

They are ten minutes to sun rise, where they will brave guard dogs and no guard rails to see the sun rise from the safe house roof deck as soon as the danger story comes to a conclusion.

 

“The purpose of an anarchist trial, is just to kill some anarchists. But the reality is that they round up thirty, try twelve, and kill thirteen. They kill the public will to resist with a big forgery of justice designed to trap make believe anarchists.”

 

            Thinks Nikholai; like they in the secret police, the proto-DHS did to us in 2000 common era over a so-called bomb in the Nike Mega Store.

 

“And they’ve done for thousands of years and they’ll do it again, and they did it to us in 2000 when they rounded up our student movement leaders and accused us of putting Earth Liberation Front IED’s in GAP, Nike and Disney over child slave labor.”

 

Slave labor eh, more bold, misplaced, lost on everyone words.

 

“Let’s get drunker and hear a poem on the roof,” notes Nikholai Trikhovitch. “Before you make us sound like Jihadists or something far worse.”

He’s verifying via operational protocol whether Sebastian is sleeping or sleep walking.

Sebastian has written a five page hand written poem called to Natasha #01. He plans to read it on the roof. It’s all about his feelings for Natasha Andreavna of course.

“The last words he said! Ladies we, are not mere anarchists. We are patriots and freedom fighters. But they, they being the security apparatus of the iron heel have already raided this very safe house just ten years before and as recently as one year ago. I once had storm troopers kick in that very door and beat me and put me in a sack!”

“Ladies, this is all a true story,” notes Nikh. “But the sunset…”

“Oh tovarish Trickovitch! The sun will still rise! Five more minutes of this fine story!”

Franny and Molly are still smiling, half stunned by this zeal and hyper-Homeric story telling maybe real, maybe a total brazen invention?

“Tell me one thing,” interjects Krissy, “Do the lovers of accused anarchists suffer too?”

A pause to consider.

“After they killed Jesus and be became a God again guess who suffers most? They round up Mary M, his mother and all the disciples and they kill his girlfriends and his kids, probably even kill people that owe him money” replays Nikholai Trikhovitch from a speech he knows so well.

 

He is anxious to open another bottle of delicious sickly sweet ‘Xhocolee’ wine, from Basque country.

 

“Ok, ok we’ll go to the roof,” concedes Sebastian, “but Krissy, to answer your question, it is tragic and true, but people who love anarchists suffer even more.”

 

“It’s a high crime to love an anarchist,” he concludes, “but don’t be afraid we’re not anarchists. We’re just under-employed petty bourgeoisie pseudo intellectuals, just saying bold things to woe younger women, don’t be alarmed.”

 

“But no one loves an anarchist at all,” Franny suggests the lesson.

 

 

Chapter 35

Rich Man Towers, 2010ce

SOUTH BRINX

 

 

Technician Madrano

 

Everybody calls me Danny. I work 26F Tour 3 out of Station 55 in this wild part of the South Bronx called Melrose. I got transferred here out of the Academy. It’s a tight little outfit. At 55 we go hard.

 

I was told and experienced soon after that death comes in threes and patterns begin to emerge in the calls you do. If it gonna be sicks, it’ll be sicks all day, same with trauma, same with the death as well as the bullshit.

 

Once I was doing an off work job on the Kosciuszko Bridge, still in Academy Blue and whites; out there on this towering bridge between Brooklyn and Queens. Some women and her car had been forced through the railing and was hanging perilously over the edge. And there were myself and Sebastian climbing perilously toward her with a collar and a stethoscope and a BP cuff. We had less than a month on the job, we had not even cleared our scenarios of field rotations, but there we were climbing out into this crumpled wreck that for all we knew might plummet nearly fifteen stories to the industrial park and Dutch Kills creek below. And why were we doing this, because we wanted to be heroes.

 

We were beyond green, we weren’t even ripe yet. I had nearly a year doing transport out of Midwood Ambulance and Oxygen Corp, Adon a few years more as an Action Medic in Israel, but nothing of note in the city. We still believed, as we had been indoctrinated then to believe that we were an elite lifesaving apparatus, the largest and best on earth.

And we believed that then. He still might.

As that woman and that car made scary grinding, we’re-all-about-to die noises, as Adon crawled deeper toward impending death with a 200 foot rope wrapped around his waist tied back to his white Chevy blazer the woman just screamed hysterically flailing getting blood all over us.

There was a loud slow grinding, the woman flailing hit the gas and before Adon could yell ‘GET OUT’ he shoved me out of the passenger door before the car toppled over the side. He bear hugged her and they flew out the back window, the car disappearing ingloriously into the river below. With a Channel 12 news crew filming everything, I hauled the two of them back onto the shattered bridge. That was how Adon got on the cover of the Post for a second time in a year. That was how Adon and I got called heroes in the papers and brought a little more glory to EMS. How we became friends.

To get any credit for being an EMT you have to do dangerous things like a Cop or a Fireman.

Adon, in retrospect could not have picked a possibly worse evening to do overtime on my unit. He was picking up the meager overtime the department trickled out with by making his way back to the Bronx. We live about four blocks from each other in Flatbush, but he got transferred after that mess with the little kid, the little kid’s asthma and he and Leacroft Walters passed out asleep. These thing happened, and thankfully no one died.

The night started with a bullshit sick call, moved on to an EDP after our taco dinner on a 10-100, and then this thing happened. The radio let off a loud piercing screech then they started handing out priorities all over the Bronx like a war was on. Within five minutes half a dozen gun shots, stabbings, motor vehicle accidents and the like came over, they stuck us first on a stab, but upgraded us to an MCI 21 at the Richmond Plaza complex.

We got there quick enough cause Adon drives crazy, the complex was a war zone it looked like a 747 had flown into Tower 40, the burnt out Hull of Vision Air ripped apart on the plaza. Smoke everywhere, already engines were on scene and ladder company boys getting’ ready for what was shaping up to be a poor man’s 911.

There were screams and smoke and fire and then at the worst moment our radios began admitting this weird static, we couldn’t reach anyone.

Out first patient was EMT Lee Castro, carried out the back of a Conditions car bleeding all over the place by Lt. Klein and Leon Goldson. Adon and get him boarded and collared, fire men are running everywhere on the plaza. The next unit on scene is 17Frank, followed by  17 Henry with Ortiz and Jacobs on crew. There isn’t a staging area, the plaza itself is burning smoking mess, we should pull our units out, but Castro is crapping out and then, and then a second plane hits Tower 30.

The déjà vu factor is phenomenal. Everyone stops and stares and watches a plane fly over head and strike the building in a ball of fire. Castro stops spontaneously breathing, Sebastian is desperately trying to save his friend. The sky is black with falling ash.

“GET HIM OUT OF HERE!” yells Lt. Klein, as a fireman runs over to help dragging along a wounded compatriot who’s passed out form the smoke and is bleeding from his head. I’ve got the two firemen and Lt. Klein on the bench, Sebastian is bagging Castro, then the plaza floor cracks and crumbles in a bash and BOOM.

Its total cluster-fuckery. A lot of people are trapped in the apartment blocks, a fire engine is overturned and flaming. The bus is tipped on its side, we ain’t goin’ no where. Screams snap me back out and I climb out te side of the vehicle in a half daze, got blood and sweat in my eyes.

In the Academy they stress scene safety over and over and over again. You, us and them. You have to stay alive to be of use to anyone. There are a lot of dead people on this scene, Tower 40 just cracked and game down, blocked us off. Leon has run over to our overturned bus with Ortiz and Jacobs, there’s a ringing in my ears, Ortiz and Jacobs have on their yellow pretotective glow suits and APR masks, I got nothing, there wasn’t really time. Leon pulls me out of the driver seat. I cough out ash, a bit of blood. I don’t look in the back. Lt. Klein has dragged Sebastian Adon and a wounded fireman out the back. Castro is dead, the second fireman had his neck snapped in the impact.

Still no radio, no way to call for help. Hard to see who else made it. We’re pulling out. Scene safety and nothing around here looks safe. They got Adon on a long board, and the nameless fireman on a second one, Jacobs and I got Adon, Ortiz and Lt. Klein got the fireman and we take off over the rubble to get clear of the smoke. No working trucks, to way to save anyone, there are protocols for how to handle some real shit like this. Only Klein probably knows them, but his radio is dead too. There were three engines and two ladders on the plaza when it collapsed trapping out two trucks.

“Where the FUCK did those planes come from?!” yells Leon.

Nobody knows so nobody answers, we run with our two guys ‘til we’re clear, over a rubble pile the size of union square away from the two flaming towers and the falling complex. It was an evil place that complex, more convicted sex offenders per square mile than anywhere in the country.

Eventually we get clear, get down some emergency exit down to the water front. You can smell the world burning, you can see the worst thing you’ve ever scene in your life and know all you were capable of doing is rescuing only two rescuers.

Lt. Klein checks the vitals on Adon and, well, what the fuck, a fireman that looks exactly like Adon. They’re both out cold on our boards. Adon has brown hair and has this familiar face that makes everyone swear they’ve met him before.

“What the fuck?” mutters Jacobs, just out of harm’s way realizing it too.

The name on the black fire coat says ADON.

“They’re carbon copies, Sebastian has a twin?” asks Leon Goldson dumbfounded.

“Sebastian Adon, doesn’t have a twin,” responds Lt. Klein setting off a blue smoke signal flare. A huge plume of dark blue jets off from their little rest point down by the water upwind from the inferno on the plaza.

We all know Sebastian Adon. We all know him well enough to know he doesn’t have a twin. Leon was his partner for six months and is a member of a certain underground organization affiliated with the Banshee newspaper. Jacobs was locked up with him in juvenile for a year almost a decade ago. I’m his drinking buddy and Lt. Klein might as well be his rabbi.

Everyone stands around the two wounded identical rescuers with nothing to say. Lt. Klein bandages the gash on Sebastian’s head, then the gash on the head of the fireman look alike Adon.

The blue smoke rises high above us, we should hear sirens coming, we should be able to call for reinforcements, we can’t we don’t.

“What the hell is going on Leu?” Ortiz asks finally.

“There is a long version which I can recount later, for now you all have two options. You may do what most are doing right now and defect to go find your family members, or in about three minutes a Hatzolah unit will be arriving to transport myself, Adon, and FF Adon to an appropriate receiving facility.”

“What about all this?!” yells Leon.

“And what are we gonna do about it?” Klein responds sharply. His Nextel goes off. It’s Jimmy on 17Frank, they’re driving up the dirt road from the Deegan underpass. Jimmy and Gregory of 17 Frank the unit too fast to be allowed to live. Klein speaks to the them in Hebrew, which is the latest wierdiest thing happening. You never hear dthose guys really admit to where they were from, ambiguous nationalities, surely ghetto demeanors learned from working in the Bronx.

“Lt, what the hell is happening?” Ortiz mumbles. Two planes had dropped out of the sky and obliterated the two towers of wretched plaza, a place everyone had hoped would burn down for over two decades, a place they still chucked bricks off the roof at the ambulances. Sebastian had a fire man clone, and the rough and tumble boys Jimmy and Gregory were speaking’ Yiddish, or was it Ivory

“You know in Church when they told you guys the Jews killed Jesus and your religion was the only true faith. Well, my catholic friends. Your religion was totally wrong and ours was a day by day survival tool for when the end finally came. The world is ending boys, tend to your families or join us on a one way boat ride to the Caribbean where we plan to try and save the world.”

He was this slightly nebbish, over weight Lt that nobody really liked except Sebastian Adon. Now he had fire in his eyes like a biblical patriarch, in his element finally.

“I’m out of here Leu, if the world is really ending, I’m Puerto Rican and I got family all over the Bronx that probably need my help,” says Ortiz.

“Karina and your little girl are safe,” Lt. Klein says to Chris Jacobs, “We evacuated her before the event and its disorders began half an hour ago.

“Who the hell is we?” asks Leon, whose whole family is in Jamaica.

“Why the Chosen people of course, the massive Jewish conspiracy highly organized to save humanity from the devil, aliens, mad scientists, voodoo magic and all other forces so very determined to blight you all out.”

17Frank pulls up to our pillar of blue smoke. Both Gregory, whose real name is Simcha and Jimmy whose real name is Mikhail Kreminizer are no longer wearing fire department blues, they’re wearing olive Israeli greens. Without saying anything they load Adon and his perfect double the FF Sebastian Adon onto the two beds set up in the back of 17 Frank.

In accents which are devoid of ghetto drawl or sentimentality, once the load on is complete, once the man who I’ve gotten beers with for nearly two years with and his doppelganger are hooked up on oxygen, Jimmy salutes and says, “Reports came in four minutes ago from 35Gold and 43Myrr; both are currently securing the packages, rendezvous has been set four hours from now at the Seagate Basis.”

“Lt, I’m getting’ out of here, gonna huff it back to 17 and steal a bus, go find my family,” states Juan Ortiz, a standup guy.

“Best of luck brother,” says Klein.

“Well Gold Lion, I’m stickin’ with you all. I got nowhere to be an I’m just itichin’ to hear the long version and see the big picture,” says Leon Goldson.

“Can I hitch a ride to Brooklyn?” I ask.

“They say Brooklyn’s the borough,” Klein grins.

 

The smart phones tell us that planes and satellites and helicopters have all dropped out of the sky above New York and that thousands of people are dead and dying.

 

“This is the end times,” Leone Goldson asks Klein.

Klein chuckles, “No brother, not the end times. It’s just the Oligarchy fucking around with their toys, maybe settling a bet, maybe causing havoc for fun.”

“Why”” Leone asks.

“Because they can and they do.”

 

 

Chapter 36

23^rd Street, 2012ce

Isle of Man

 

 

 

            They wear these black furry hats on Friday. They often smell and don’t make eye contact with gentiles. There are eleven Ivoryish ghettos in New York City, but only one Russian Quarter. It begins south of the Kings Highway and runs all the way to Bright Beach, Manhattan Beach, Coney Island and Seagate.

 

There are a lot of Ivories living on and around the quarter, but they get less religious the closer you get to the water front. They lived in the bigger, nicer houses, especially the Syrians.

 

            During the week Sebastian goes to Southern Brooklyn twice via the Q train to attend paramedic academy on Kings Highway and Natasha goes North on the Q to Manhattan’s Clinton Murray Hill District in the east side 20’s accounting school at City University of New York Barack and they illicitly miss each other perhaps and so they meet on a school night and he reads to Natasha poem to her in park as the fall falls in. It will be the first of many poems where his emotions entangle her with worry, where she cannot read his English writing and has the poem read then re-read by a female confidant. The early poems didn’t rhyme as Sebastian began reading Mayakovski and assumed that to craft such pieces meant visceral images not rhyme. He missed the underlying reality of Mayakovski being famous for his rhymes, but in Russian, only the translations couldn’t pull that off.

 

Shortly after the seventeenth poem he changed his entire cadence back to rhyme. This impressed her far more, but that wasn’t until later. And it didn’t impress her enough even then do give him exactly what he was asking for.

 

“You’re always so well dressed. English doesn’t have enough words for all the grades of beautiful I must be forced to consider whenever I see you,” he says.

 

She peers back at him with big curious eyes. They are seated in the Park across from each other looking coy. She’s a flowing blue dress and her tight leather jacket and he’s all composed like he isn’t about to whip out a pistol, don a mask and take over a subway car over human rights later in the week.

“You remind me too much of the artist Mayakovski!” she reminds him.

“Then allow me just to write like him and act like him and because this is in America, with fearlessness.”

So over time he wrote many poems, each penned just for her then recopied, but they all had cadence alike extolling her virtue and ways, also declaring himself a true rebel, making great cause just for her. Fighting monsters for her real and mostly imagined. Urging her to run way to the West Indies with him.

 

Then she went back to her college and he off to carry out a wild plot to take over the A train on the anniversary of 11 September in solidarity with the Brooklyn and all Borough uprisings, Staten Island not actually being a real borough, not in anyone’s imagination at all.

 

 

 

Chapter 37

Broadway Junction, 2010ce

BROOKLYN

 

Technician Poyer

 

“Are you guys having fun yet,” I cackle and they ignore me. It’s raining ash.

I bet it’s highly disconcerting when the world goes to hell and you didn’t have a backup plan other than call 911 and beg for help. But the phone lines are down and the only people with working radios are the Jews. The Ivory ones.

I catch up my former co-workers from Station 35 at the Broadway Junction. The firemen were scrambling to put out jet fuel fires, but fuck um, it’s what they’re paid to do. I wasn’t in uniform cause I’d been out line of duty injury a year, I just lived around the corner. When the lights went out and the rioting began someone lit my building on fire and I chased away a band of looters with a .22 pistol. Then there I was at the junction watching it all go down. The planes falling out of the sky, the pillars of smoke, the great unwashed eating each other, burning everything.

I’m wearing a bomber jacket and my turnout pants and the ridiculous orange FDNY turnout Helmut. That’s all the gear I could find.

It takes a lot to come into work with ‘regularment’. I’ve been an EMT for thirty odd years, been in the FDNY for 23. I’ll be 53 in the springtime, if it ever comes again. You know they say every station has one guy that no one wants to work with and if you don’t know who it is, it’s probably you. Well that’s me; “I have no idea who that person is.”

EMT Mark Poyer is my name. I’m independently wealthy. Which is important for a black man, or any man in EMS for that make. I’m not hyper-educated, but I’ve got valid opinion. I’m not a theorist, but I’ve got lots of theories.

Here’s a theory. The fundamental problem is not that people absolutely abuse the welfare system; it’s that they don’t demand enough. I mean, if you really think about it; not everyone is cut out to work right? It’s a done gone shame we deprive these people like we do, my co-workers get angry, but I embrace them. God bless um, they just don’t like working, and who really does? MORE, more, and still some more that’s what we need to give um. Not for slaveries sake, or some abstract concept of redistribution of wealth. It’s just that welfare isn’t done right, it’s not enough fun.

All this talk of working makes me sincerely tired and hungry for a sandwich. I good Jewish sandwich mind you not an EBT WIC sandwich, no government cheese for me, no sir.

My sister is a celebrity. I can’t tell you which one. So I go out to the Kit Kat club, the Brown Sugar Club, the Pink Elephant, the Russell Simmons Hamptons white party where they give away free sneakers. Love it. I tell people I’m and EMT, doesn’t really impress those hard partying Hamptons people much. The poor folks love us though even if our own department won’t. There will be a revolution one day, and when that happens those poor folks will ask what you were doing before the revolution.

I’ll tell um I was an ambu’lance man, pronounced just like that. And they’ll let me live. All those cake eating rich people will hang for sure though.

Two years ago I saw Melvin Clarke the Jamaican mentoring a new Jack not much newer than himself, some kid they call ‘Adon.’ I told that kid to take a picture of himself and look at it again in a year to see how the job changed him.

Here’s another theory. For those of us that study things like quantum physics, time travel and fourth dimensional operating systems know that no two identical life forms may occupy the same objective realty or they risk destabilizing the physical plain in which they occupy. Like say if a plane load of passengers was dropped out of the sky a month in the future from embarking in the past of another reality. If that plane load of passengers crossed into a parallel reality where say all of the people on it were working, living, sleeping as if nothing had gone wrong, because in this realty the critical event hadn’t ever happened, well these travelers upon encountering their doubles, the closer they got to them in fact could determine just how unstable the objective realty for us could become. This is just a theory mind you. I suspect you have a few of your own.

So, when not one, but four planes fell out of the sky, well if I hadn’t been in the Blue Lodge then I suspect I totally would have been unprepared.

Two hit the Richmond Tower complex in the Bronx. One, Vision Air 808 an hour after it left Miami, on January 17^th, 2010. The other was Vision Air 801 an hour after it left Haiti roughly a week later with most of the original first wave. A third has hit Woodhull Hospital, that one hasn’t been identified and a fourth one has hit the Broadway Junction. Opening salvos in a vast and unnatural spiritual voodoo war. Ash falls on my brow and the sky is black with the darkness rolled in on us.

“Are you having fun yet?” I yell over to Melvin Clarke again as he’s getting ready with some of our brothers and sisters to do something not in his job description. He ignores me again.

There’s a cluster of EMTs, no medics clustered around a burnt out ambulance and an overturned fire rig in this Beirut cum Brooklyn of a Junction. Adon once told me the Broadway Junction has ‘bad black voodoo magic.’ He was right.

The firemen kept battling the blaze where the 757 hit the junction tracks like a divine and fiery comet. There were likely a lot of people trapped in the tunnels below, but the firemen were spread thin, the whole city was on fire tonight.

EMT Melvin Clarke turns to me and says, “We’re going down into the tunnel to evacuate the people trapped in the trains. Wanna make yerself useful Poyer?”

“Let me lead the way,” I said taking my pistol out from under my turnout coat.

“What do you think you’re gonna need that for?” a white boy EMT whose name is Ross asks me.

“Crowd control,” I respond gleefully.

 

 

 

Chapter 38

Brighton 6^th Street, 2012ce

Tatiana’Blue

 

 

If one follows Brighton 6 all the way to the water you arrive at the two Tatiana’s, competing Russian restaurants on the Boardwalk, one blue, one green. The blue one has a better reputation for food and music, the green one for gambling and boxing.

 

They meet the next day they can for a picnic in the warm fall night of September 11^th. She collects him from Blue Tatiana Café on Brighton 6. He carries a burgundy satchel where he’s put inside a four course home cooked partisan meal of rice and cheese and chicken and red wine. He was drinking Borjomi when she found him. That’s a Georgian mineral water. He was drawing what looked like a Brighton flooding, and practicing a couple Russian phrases that she’s taught by text message.

She collected him and led him to the sand.

They dine on the beach on a big blanket.

“When it comes time for Halloween festival, and I bite people with real fangs; am I part of your resistance war efforts too?”

“I think not.”

“Well I will have looked in my enemies eyes and tasted his blood!”

“Who are your enemies?”

“All those who oppose the will of Natasha! I am the once and future Queen of Slavs!”

“To me you are a most benevolent queen.”

“What does it mean benevolent?”

“Compassionate and caring.”

“Ha! There is not even any word for that in Russian,” she lies with a smile.

Sun was setting in its subtle shimmers of red-yellow tones dwindling on the abyss of horizon, but on the desolate sands of Coney Island you can watch the cosmos illuminated retreat for some time before making an abrupt departure into the blackness and glow of a goodnight moon.

The sand is gritty graceful sand, it is populist sand and the untidy refuse of eleven million summarily visitations despite the best efforts of the parks department have left it a tainted oasis, but it has old school charm by the boatload. Adon has seen the beaches of East Hampton and Natasha has four times been off the coast of Turkey, so they have a high standards to work off of, but this place has je ne sais quoi?- It has sand and a mesmerizing effect on some type of minds.

They lay out a burgundy picnic blanket right below the parachute drop with the steeple chase pier in sight just to the west and it seems like they are very much alone in all directions, though a couple vagabonds are late night fishing. She has just come her boxing class at the Underground Gym she has as of lately been attending since the night a deranged man stalked her from the train to her lobby. She has on no make-up, but her hair is well brushed, maintained and flowing, her gym session doing quite little to alter her fresh faced and polished appearance.

That is a Russian art form too, being made up to get groceries, glamorously present oneself for buying coffee, not allowing the elements to chip the facade of womanly presentations.

Adon has just come from paramedic school on Kings highway and has a dark red picnicking back pack, and is dressed similar to how he was at festival, in ems ‘battle dress uniform’ blues and black boots and a skally cap and a red bandana tucked exposed in a back pocket, in case a woman begins to cry or a riot breaks out due a spontaneous eruption of the lumping proletariat.

He has set up before them a three course meal of sautéed mushrooms, broccoli rob, breaded chicken, and pilaf rice accompanied by Israeli avocado salad and three types of cheese that he cannot pronounce and bottle of Chilean red wine. He has brought red and white icon candles and they flicker in the spreading moonlit darkness. Picnicking is a poor man’s refuge at romance and he’s done all the cooking, though he hasn’t been on a picnic in two years. You don’t ever forget how to picnic if you were once good at it, it’s like riding a bike.

 

The rabbis say that an Ivoryish man ought to be able determine if he could marry a woman in but four dates, but Sebastian is only half an Ivory so perhaps it takes seven or eight.

 

“Beg me to let you take me on a date,” she’d once said the night she nearly killed him, and he’d told her he never ever learned how to beg.

But, how he’d learn with this one.

She had thought to break plans with him unsure if she could justify her prolonged absence after the boxing class, but she ran with it in the end, as he had seemingly put all this work in. The food fared much better than she had suspected he was capable of.

He looks so happy! She thinks. He makes jokes and he’s witty for an Amerikanski. Odd how he fetishizes us, she thinks. He cannot speak any Russian and has never been there. Curious fascination.

The sun down and the candles flickering she dispenses with small talk to pry out the root of his amorous fascinations.

“What is it that you think you know about this Soviet mentality you are always referring to,” she asks preparing well in advance to be disappointed by the answer. She already feels a certain pang of contempt when he switches out of the black suit into this blue paramilitary attire the ambulance workers wear. It was a reminder that this was not the prince in the suit and tie to carry her immediately from this coastal ghetto. It was vaguely unnerving for reasons she had yet to articulate or place why a child of solidly bourgeoisie parents residing in the financial district in that beautiful loft was playing hard not just at proletarian, but at a communist too! It was if anything vaguely a spit in the face of all the work she’d done to flee, that he who was born with a silver spoon in the greatest city on earth might be romanticizing the cold criminal empire she had fled. But he did it so sincerely that what first might be a laughable nativity took on a charm, a quirky little juxtaposition of opposites.

Well he is bipolar after all.

But what she couldn’t place and what made this boy so interesting was that he was so genuinely interested in her. He seemingly truly believed in these blue collar proclamations he made. Curiouser and curiouser, but she suspected that by the end of this picnic she would be ready to relegate him to a passing hello at the social club. Temper his courtship considerably. Before something happened that might get everyone in trouble. She has a full plate of suitors for a married woman anyway she thinks, what this crazy artist rebel will bring to the table but trouble.

“Well let me attempt that then.”

“Attempt away,” she smirks swallowing down her wine. He is aware that she is perhaps even more magnificent without her make up then when wearing it, he is aware that she is a wild eyed beauty and her coy happy smile never seems to leave her continence open to other interpretation.

“First let me say that I do not mean to casually lump some several hundred million of your former countrymen and women, into a pigeon hole.”

“A rabbit hole?”

“A pigeon hole, it means a stereotype.”

“And rabbit hole is a wild goose chase to no where yes?”

He smirks at the deliberate nature of her word games and nods.

“Nor am I so presumptuous as to think without speaking Russian I can mount any attempt at a psychological profile.”

“Less words man,” she smiles.

And he wonders to what extent she fully takes in any of what he will say or has said. And she takes in absolutely everything knowing the power of pretending to grasp a little less than she does in English.

“Ok then, you have no sentimentality to speak of. You have no romantic notions of rose colored thinking, you have no arbitrary beliefs. You have loyalty to no one, no country or code of law, no god, only a tight perimeter of proven personal or blood allies, and these except perhaps in the case of mothers can be severed off the minute they prove, disadvantageous.”

 

She grins at him and her eyes declare and admiration for what she’s hearing.

 

“More beyond more!” She demands.

 

“The mentality is like a cold ongoing calculation, it weighs the merit of all actions and all alliances. Its root were I allowed to play at the idea is pre serfdom, although that condition is history’s most long running subjugation of a people, by their own ethnic group. The only people to have completely enslaved your own people for over 600 years. And then the Soviet system generated a brutal regime of parapsychological survival of the fittest where by education and corruption were wedded wholly into the national character. And now, the world’s first open oligarchic collectivist mafia state masquerades as the fourth estate.”

“Why do you use so many fucking words man,” she says smiling again. She does like to hear him give these little speeches she realizes. His education is the only proof of his upbringing besides the large loft he resides in. It must be that he not only likes the sound of his voice, but also he perhaps has few people ready to hear him speak on these things.

“Because I think in Russian obviously Dvotchka,” he says.

“Don’t call me that, I’m a lady!”

“Pardon,” he says but can tell she enjoys to berate him for his verbosity and his mispronounced bevy of Russian phrases.

“Alright then. But what in the world could be attractive about that mentality that so fascinates you? I consider myself a little sentimental mind you.”

“Cultural diffusion forges the greatness of this city. The merging of ideas and the fusing of mentalities. You can learn hope and romanticism here and we can learn rigorous pragmatism and parapsychology from you.”

“We, will eat you alive if these things you say are true.”

“I am not such a patriot as to assume that in the result you describe that is an impossibility. But the mentality isn’t so powerful if it is only used for pure personal gain.”

“What good for then? Seems good only for taking care of oneself. If what you describe has truth-ness then all we are commended for is our ability to sell one another, or sell ourselves without being tricked into seeing a purpose. Here is your mentality then, you Americans see miracles in the streets. You believe in too much destiny, in God in heroes. You are not an old nation so you’ve had no time to develop any real culture, and your world views, maybe not a liberal bourgeoisie part Ivoryish like you, but most Americans don’t have a world view. I will now use my words in English to speak to you on things. I’m not sure you know just how little I like Russia, like Russian things, Russian food and people. Everything. I hate Brighton Beach, I hate living in a ghetto. My mentality if you find such things interesting, as evidently you do, is shaped by living in a world where no one but my mother and a small series of men have offered to protect or help me. I’m not tough as you say so many times. I have had a charmed life and around me have been enough people to help me along. My mentality is that of anyone who has been hungry, I have ambitions and dreams. Believe me that my American dream is bigger than yours ambulance man!”

“If you say so darling.” And he pours himself another glass of wine.

“What is parapsychology to you? How do you define this term?”

“Mind games. Clever manipulations via social engineering to get your way. But that’s just the beginning.”

“I have no idea what you talk about,” she says but that’s what anyone who has a bit of game in them fronts like.

“Well you don’t have to put your cards on display at this juncture,” he says.

You’ll never see my cards, she thinks.

“How is the food?” He asks

“It much better than I expect. I would not eating it otherwise. Terrible idea to let men get false notions about their abilities. Especially kitchen and bedroom abilities. ”

“I couldn’t agree more,” he says.

And suddenly they are kissing again. Woops, she thinks with a smile. Passionately he presses her against the sandy ground and rolling about off the picnic blanket they wrestle for dominance lips never unlocking at any moment.

He reads her another stupid poem, which he wrote for her before the train ride. This is not that poem exactly, as she has long since hidden it away with all the others, but this once has a similar cadence. They extol her, they lament the world; they beg her always to take him back near her when the world is not looking, when the world blinks.

Natasha cannot always read the hand writing of Sebastian. She knows what he means because they text prolifically, but she asks him to read each poem in the beginning because she knows he will find the right way to explain his longing.

That night past midnight, after their meal which she appreciates, but isn’t writing home to her mother in Penza over locale; she allows him to read another.

She kisses him passionately again, for what else can she do. He is a hard worker. And then she pauses under the stars and by the coast of Breuklyn to lecture him again.

She has warned him that Mayakovski couldn’t ever get Tatyana his other great love and muse to ever leave Paris for his Soviet Socialist Republic. And he could never get Lily Brik to leave her husband.

“Poor Mayakovski had to listen to them make love from their kitchen. He tortured himself. What if you come to hate me? I cannot ever do anything but travel home with you. You know I keep another man, my boyfriend’s bed is always warm.”

“I will never hate you.”

“You cannot possibly love me! I am selfish.  I am demanding! I want to live in a huge house far from the Russian quarter and not worry about you!”

“I told you I’d never beg for a date once. I told you we’d just be associates of Ernesto and the Mehanta Social Club. I’m sorry to say that I cannot be rid of you.”

“If I order you go you will go?”

“Why the tortures? Are my poems not true, are my lips not soft?”

“All lips are soft when the man is still alive!”

“Natasha I love you! Does your man have this much desire in him?”

“We have been together for 5 years. He is the first and mostly the last man I’ve known here. He is hard working and good to me. He gives me things you cannot.”

What does a man say to the cold dead face of reality?

“This tryst is no real tryst. It isn’t an affair. You have tasted me, and I have nurtured your passion, and enjoyed it! But how far can this go! Please don’t beg for love that I cannot give to you. You will meet another woman in a month, I will be forgotten between the bed sheets! You have confessed to loving others before, you will again.”

He looks her dead in the eyes.

“I do not write frivolous things.”

“What is frivolous things?”

This is always the ice breaker to what will be a series of escalating fights on whether his love is real.

“I write to you from my heart which will not beat for another ever the same way.”

She kisses him again.

“What are all these kisses for when you say you will always feel nothing?” he asks.

“I didn’t tell you I feel nothing for you! I told you that we are nothing to feel anything about.”

She shoves him, then pulls him in close to her by his collar.

“I am going to tell you how to make love to me, with dripping hot wax on my back” she says.

“I’m going to try and teach you how to seduce me with much less words.”

They stay out all night holding hands and kissing in the late night Brighton Jazz Cafes. She pours the hot wax out of a red candle and presses their hands together and bites his tongue.

When they finally part neither can stop turning around and smiling at the other, checking to make sure it really is to be over.

 

But finally she’s gone and he has to watch her go back to her man’s home and he just holds her memory close and boards the Q train back to the barricades near Atlantic Avenue, to make it on foot through the lines back to the heavily fortified district financial.

 

 

Chapter 39

9 Metro Tech, 2010ce

BROOKLYN

 

Peggy Quinn

 

In one way or another, they all have themselves to thank for being here. I just smiled, sized um up, and asked um when they wanted to start. That was the interaction they remember. But behind all that was days of thorough investigation on the part my staff, days of back ground checks, of testing, of sorts. I mean, I had my favorites, ones I knew were gonna make the final list.

We dug up everything on these kids, we drilled um with questions, we sampled their blood urine and hair, we made up take physical screens and psyche profiles where they had to answer questions about their fathers and draw trees.

Patrick Baunkin was on the phone with me every other day. This was a big deal drawing up the list for the 8000 series, I mean this was what my work was all about, picking the right candidates, drawing up with my investigators the right list.

The Academy was gonna run ‘um through the wringer after all, so if I wasn’t picky they’d just get chopped at the auction block. Class 8001 which went in on January 6^th, 2008 was the tightest Otriad we ever had put together to date. But even 8001 only graduated 64 out of 102 cadets into the force.

You have to be so careful now with demographics. We gotta make sure my Black and Hispanic numbers are up. We gotta make sure women get in. I gotta see who has the potential to really make FDNY EMS force its destined to be. And most importantly, we gotta make sure all the sample 17, genome 342, blood type 0 Positive Blue Lodge approved candidates get packed in as the countdown to the great event scheduled on February 14^th, 2010 was inevitably approaching.

Our attrition rate in massive. Each month in a force of roughly 3,000: 8 quit, 2 are critically injured, and 1 is out medical leave long term; uselessly collecting checks. It takes the Academy roughly 4 months to roll out a class of 100, which is always whittled down by 20%. The start salary being $29,700, and with the smartest quitting when the finish college, the bravest promoting to fire, and the situation of moral being what it is means we’re always just a bit short staffed.

The Blue Lodge and Local 2507 do what they do best, cast bets and make predictions. EMS has come quite a long way in 33 years because of their work. Patrick called me up one night in 2007 and said, “you gotta get my guys in the next class, this is the list we’ve been waiting for.”

And it sure as shit was. 8001 & 8002, top of the line outfit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 40

116 Ludlow Street, 2012ce

Mehanta

 

Raphael Ernesto and Sebastian are seated across an upstairs gallery booth of the Mehanta Social Club. He’s more serious than he usual is, it may be because he hasn’t been drinking.

 

“You my friend are heading for some real, real trouble!”

“So is the whole City and nation as well, watching the news you can see the story breaking. I can’t stop now.”

Ernesto give me a baby faced look.

“How did you come to need her this fast? Is it sex hanging off her body? It is because you can’t have her so it makes her taste sweeter. Don’t you know brother how dangerous this is for a man! And of course the daily street fighting and arrests, and…” he pauses knowing what Sebastian may or may not know.

“I know. I know. I have felt in like this before.”

“And the others? There were surely others! I’ve seen you drunk over them before.”

Ernesto blows a kiss with his hand, “Amelia! Remember Amelia!”

He does and he regrets that episode fully.

“What are you plotting these days?”

Raphael Ernesto is asking a highly fourth dimensional question. He is Natasha’s old lover. He is a paid member of the Perchevney Bratva, as well as Mehanata’s resident jockey of disks. He is also rebel commander of the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the Cinqo de Mayo Battalion, planning to assault District Financial by air in just three week time taking part in the general rising.

“We may soon send medical workers to train the Syrian Free Army, I continue with my paramedic studies, but may be black listed from working in New York.”

It is clear that Sebastian Adon remembers nothing.

No Maria, no Yelizaveta, no Israel, no Havana, no Haiti. Poor noble bustard.

Raphael orders another round of Astika from Martina D. also called ‘Hella’.

“Where do you find enough hours in the day for these plots and also Natasha Andreavna Skorbogatova?”

“This passion has burned hard and fast for three weeks since festival.”

“Did you take her to bed yet?”

“No.”

“Ha! She plays games with you friend. She is fearsome lover, I think I know, I did not bed her myself mind you, I have a wife, but she craves my male attention!”

Victoria Lynch is right next to them. For when Raphael Ernesto can fly off handle when their mutual friend Sebastian forlorn for the fairer sex.

“Darling! What my husband is saying about caution and taking time is valid. She is not a carnivore though Sebastian. Men buy her everything, but she always travels home on the subway alone and she is always not a floozy. She is strong and dangerous woman for you to be so smitten by. You haven’t the time or the resources for this I fear, and she certainly has a man. Somewhere.”

“Well, anyway that’s all a joke,” laughs Ernesto, “if he was so serious why is she so free to run about at such late hours?”

“More reassuring words please sister.”

Ernesto laughs off the contradiction and swills back his Astika beer. The Bulgarian bar tenders know the sober pensive Sebastian as well as the dumb faltering drunk Sebastian and they wonder what metamorphosis this tale will bring. Disaster has befallen him and glory too and he is not like all other Americans people know. But he believes in things which is dangerous.

The tavern attracts man tales and vice mongering spirits.

“Sebastian be careful!” orders Ernesto Lynch and gives him a cheers.

“Sebastian we love you as our brother, but be careful she is a Russian woman and you know well what we mean by that. You cannot compete in the ball park of things so you must just be steadfast and loyal and not come on too strong. Please be careful.”

Justin and Sasho are digging. There is hatch under the chamber called the ice cage; the wall to wall ice box where wall to wall two minutes of binge vodka drinking happens at fifteen dollars a minute. It’s all the same vodka bottled up and cut in various was. Well the floor it has a hatchway that drops quite deep into a smuggling tunnel out to Brooklyn via the old train lines and out to Coney Island.

They’re not digging a new tunnel; they’re digging a demolition bin so they can completely blow and seal the hatch and tunnel to Brooklyn behind them in the event of a raid.

Sebastian stands outside with the bouncer James.

“You’re becoming quite a regular,” says James White the former cop, “That’s what they call a poor life decision.”

“I used to come here when it was on Canal.”

“The old place.”

Raided often and burned to the ground in 2005.

The burly Fenian bouncer looks every bit like and off duty cop. Maybe, just maybe he smiles a little bit more.

They’ve spoken amicably of their blue collar nights many times previously. You see when Sebastian is heartbroken, as both Maria and Yelizaveta made him when those two relationships ended he takes back to the tavern, but his will as man is vanquished. That is a polite way of saying he was no ability or will to entice women on the dance or make small talk with young loose women that so fill the dance hall. It was in these periods he got to know Ernesto and Victoria in different capacities.

They had met three years prior at the Tabor Gypsy festival on Floyd Benet Field and he had become a confidant to Ernesto’s revolutionist notions and Victoria’s worries on her husbands’ ways. Ernesto it seemed lack anyone to palaver with on the issues of the world, philosophy or his long held beliefs in socialism, and Victoria on who’s shoulder Sebastian cried about his lost loves was also quite willing to console her about Ernesto’s alleged philander which was not quite real, but wasn’t either quite imagined.

 

“You’re becoming quite a regular I’d say for sure. Slavi lets you in without paying? I’d say that means you’re carrying the card now.”

“It’s a rebel friendly place.”

“For now. It’s quite getting bad up in the Bronx. We may switch loyalties back to those with the truest monopoly on violence.”

“Good to know.”

 

“All we retired civil servants have to stick together,” says James White, “no matter which foreign government might be paying either of our bills this week.”

 

 

Chapter 41

Station 39, 2010ce

BROOKLYN

 

 

 

Technician Rostantine Kruzuy

 

It’s 8pm, do you know where your children are?

Somebody call an ambulance!

That’s old TV gimmick form the mid-nineties I remember from when I used to be a kid.

 

My old man is a Chauffer for the 92 Engine Co. in the Bronx. My grandpa was fireman too. We got it in our blood I guess, like a family thing you know. It kills my pop I got work up all this homies in wild, wild East New York, but he said I gotta pay my dues if I wanna get on an Engine. That was three years ago.

 

By buddies call me Ross; I work 39D Tour 3 at Station 39 on Pennsylvania Ave.

 

Station 39 is not like the other places. It’s been abandoned by everyone except the emergency services. The Broadway Junction is what hell looks like, that circle for those too broken, angry and beaten to help themselves. I thought I’d be a Fireman by now. It’s the only reason I became an EMT in the first place. But the recession hit and rather then cut the ranks of the 12,000 Firemen they opted for attrition by retirement. But firemen don’t retire as fast as the papers claim. The force was real young after 911 when their ranks swelled. Now I’m pushing 27 and their might not be a promotional exam for another three. And that was how I got stuck being an EMT.

 

Pennsylvania Station is located on Pennsylvania and Pitkin, the building looks like a bombed out, one story postal depot. Single bay holds no more than six ambulances. Very few other white people here. I’m a German-Irish-Ukraine mutt, everybody Caucasian normally leaves after the initial thrill of constant trauma wears off and they become medics or opt for somewhere less dark. The city drew the ‘Bar-Lev line’ as Adon calls it at Fort Greene. The white bohemians finally moved out of Bed Stuy in 2011 and the IMPACT troops were redeployed to hold down the lines around the more ‘middle class neighborhoods’. Crime has sky rocketed here in the 75 Precinct back to levels far out pacing the 1980’s, Bed Stuy’s slogan in once again ‘Do or Die.’ East New York never had a slogan. But ‘Abandon All hope ye who enter here,’ might do.

 

I’m not the only white guy. There’s a tough as nails Irish Lieutenant, a Jewish Captain and Adon came over from 35 after he started his Medic rotations. For a guy in Medic school he sure does a lot of BLS overtime, but he’s a quick study. He tried to get me to take the medic promotional with him. Him and his little Otriad of Banshee Association guys are stacked the lieutenants exam and a few of them are gonna break through and promote eventually. They got a lot of people against them and a few more thoroughly behind them with that little brad sheet of theirs. They took over a bunch of delegate seats and keep preaching the good word of one big EMS union united with the privates. Adon once wanted to be a fireman and a paramedic; the first Jewish fire chief he’d gag. But he likes it out here, one of the few. When he went to get his eyes lazered to be eligibale for the Fire Promotional they ttold him their was some risk of losing his night vision. He opted out of it; said he was a creature of the night. He called me an hour ago and said he was doing some OT at his old Station 17 in the Bronx. Something big is going down out there.

An all hands fire.

Wish I could facilitate my transfer to the other side.

That’s exactly what I was thinking January 12^th, the 48 hours of infamy. When the Chinese attacked with strange technology that wasn’t in our arsenal, that’s what Bill O’Reiely said, and I was inclined to agree. In a barrage of fire and hallucinations, all of the stuff in the sky fell down and landed on the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

 

 

 

Chapter 42

Kings Highway & 14^th street, 2012ce

MIDWOOD

 

 

On Kings Highway and 14^th street sits the Methodist Center for Allied Health Education. Most of the rising has stayed in the Ghetto and not penetrated the Ivoryish quarter. Sebastian has easily crossed the lines with his badge and grey bandana.

 

The bath room door of the men’s room at paramedic school is locked from the inside, the Austrian instructor got his head bit off peaking in while Artstien and his ambulance partner Shamel Edge count out about 1000 green ones in various denominations all handed over by the Z.O.B. and the paramedic class for the father of EMT Monica Laljiet whose father was about a week from passing, in a coma, in a Queens ICU.

They’re counting out the money for a 10-13 emergency as it’s called. When an EMT or a Paramedic gets hurt. They are sometimes sloppy under takings so the money is getting counted by three impartial men.

The Z.O.B. is the unarmed, militant wing of a clandestine ambulance movement to unite 13,000 EMTs and Paramedics via a newspaper many secretly hand out and at least several thousand read. It is on its seven issue and looks menacing to the powers that be, but has cost a few their jobs and many more at least a few friends.

It is radical in that it demands living wages and recruits volunteers and materials for further subversive EMT training programs on the Island of Hispaniola in the Nation of Haiti.

They seal 1,000 green back dollars in a big white envelope there was no card. Only that the monies came from the Z.O.B., secret arm of the Banshee Association as they paper distribution was titled.

If there had been a card, the card might well have ready “Happy almost Ivoryish New Year, We are sorry your father has nearly passed. Under anyone’s reasonable standard of good we have delivered our passengers over twelve years to the shore. Good, bad, we’re not the team with the guns but this meager envelope of cash is our thank you for secretly handing out papers.”

But Monica Laljiet is a woman of pride and quiet dignity and didn’t even know why Sebastian was helping. He promises more support, help from the union, he tells her this is what they built the organization to do; take care of one another.

“Thank you. You’re a really good person Sebastian. I hope you know that,” she says.

Watson knows Sebastian is great EMT from when they worked together at FDNY Station 35, but he can’t completely vouch for the sanity of the guy. I mean Haiti had changed him. There were so many stories which circulate about the man, some that he perpetuates, others which his enemies do and Sebastian has more friends than enemies, but it is perhaps a weekly spiritual decision on if and when his God will destroy him.

That, realizes Watson is that the man thinks he has the power of a god perhaps. The will to save Haiti and also EMS and also Syria and also become a paramedic. Shamel has seen Sebastian in the streets be a good EMT and he seen him in clubs drunk and dancing and racing for some woman to love him and pin a medal on him with a ring and say, you are my one true. But Watson knows too that Sebastian has impossible expectations. He has had his knees kicked in several time because he tried to fly with wax wings.

Watson sees it. They count the cash. And then Monica had a real idea of just how much her class of fellow EMTs could try and give when they had nothing themselves.

Outside is Paramedic Instructor Abner Kreminzer, an Israeli Russian Pararescuemen born in Lithuanian before the Cold War supposedly ‘ended’.

 

“Safer than to just rob a series of banks I suppose,” the juggernaut declares.

A taste of things to come. Runners passed him a black satchel of cash for Monica earlier, half from Stations in Queens, and half pulled off ATMS in unlimited coding scams.

“Her father is not dead, but he is not alive, and the girl claims they have no money to bury him and that she is already in debt. So we asked all to pass the envelope.”

“What is she to you?”

“A comrade.”

“You fuck your comrades?”

“Not unless the situation calls for it. And this time not so.”

“The Bronx is burning. The guard entered the city at dawn. I heard a rumor.”

“A rumor you say?”

“I heard a bomb is going to go off in the district financial.”

“What would I know?” Sebastian asks, “am I a Chechen?”

His eyes dart to assure the coast of the street corner is clear, that no one is in shot ear.

“I know you to be a good deal of many things. You are a marked man.”

“By whom?”

“You made a lot of enemies with your paper. With that train job in 2008. They lynched you in the court after Haiti. I admire you. You’re a zealot.”

 

Mikhail likes to assure everyone he is not a man to fuck with. He has looked Sebastian in the eyes and said, “You will never work as an EMT again in this city, but history may absolve you of what you have done by not picking sides. Mikhail is a former Israeli Pararescueman and parapsychology officer for the Israelis security service Shin Bet.

“Do you ever fear putting yourself on a barricade that you cannot defend and ask all you’re closest to help you hold it?” asks Sebastian as Mikhail passes him a smoke.

The big man responds with a phrase in Russian.

“Natasha taught me that word a few nights ago.”

“Natasha, eh.”

“Raspizdia, do you know what this means?”

“A person who doesn’t give a shit.”

“I’m not such a person.”

“So you learned a little, good…but not exactly. More specifically it means the indolent leisure class choosing to nothing with their lives. I know a lot about you. Enough to know you will never work in New York City as a paramedic ever again, know that you are a known radical and working is not really your objective anyway. I know about what you did on that train in 2008, I know about the Haiti operations shall we say scope and scale.”

“What do you know about dragon fly tattoos?”

That caught Mikhail Mastrovitch off guard because he did indeed know a lot about dragon fly tattoos.

“Why do you ask me this?”

He had thought that his data on the student was more complete.

“What do you know about whores?”

“Very little.”

“Where is this young woman’s tattoo?”

“She doesn’t have one. She says she’s going to get it put on soon. I told her our people don’t allow tattoos.”

“Our people?”

“Ivories.”

“I’m an Israeli not a Ivory. And you’re more Chechen than Ivory.”

“How now! What’s it mean big fella?”

“The Bratva tattoos them on its slaves. The ones it sends to snuff and slaughter. Or a black widow job.”

“Which Bratva?”

“Let’s not step too far out of civilian clothes, tovarish. Where does she say she’s getting the dragon fly tattoo?”

“She didn’t say where.”

“I want to pass you a perhaps un-subtle message.”

“Pass away.”

“Do you have any idea the kind of monsters you’ve antagonized since you came back from Israel?”

He pauses and breathes out smoke.

“I have some idea.”

“You are marked to die. As your friend and de facto mentor, as a future brother paramedic. You are about to start a war you are not highly likely to win. And they will punish you and everything you love will burn and suffer. Fighting from a position of strength has never been your strong suit. How’s you Hebrew these days.”

 

“Ha Halom Sheli, Likhiot hoffshee.”

 

“I left you a good luck present in the third sub-basement of the garage.”

“What is it?”

“A racing bike. It’s going to get a lot harder to get though the lines tonight. And there’s clearly something you need to do in the district. Luck.”

Sebastian wonders if it’s also a remote controlled pipe bomb, like the old ones.

“Luck. Toda.”

“Stay away from Ms. Natasha she’s a honey pot job at best and there’s blood in the honey. I’m not saying you don’t lay pipe right, but you live with your parents and are in school to be a paramedic; what the fuck is she doing with you?”

“She likes my poems. Who’s she work for then?”

“Probably no-one.”

“No-one is the most dangerous fiend of fiends.”

“Even worse somehow to work for no-one, but destroy the world yourself.”

“That’s a lonely road to travel.”

“Shanah tova if I don’t see you.”

“Shanah tova, as you probably won’t, black cat.”

“What year is this again,” Adon asks.

“It’s the year 5,773.”

“No one knows anything anymore!”

“No One knows a lot a more than you think Tovarish Adon.”

 

 

Chapter 43

Station 43, Coney Island, 2010ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Technician Jon Emmington

It’s 7:42 pm and I’m racing though “the pit.”

They say on the telescreens that the Chinese somehow knocked all our electronics out of the sky and poisoned the water so we all flipped out and saw things, but frankly I don’t beelive that shit.

That’s what we call Coney Island’s little sea of Projects and Mitchell Lama between Stillwell and 37^th street. Cortes is really gunning it. We should be off right now but we got a late job, he’s the type to really cry over a late job. Cry over late jobs and crash ambulances trying to reach them.

In the last fifteen minutes of your tour you can return to station and go 99 with a basic understanding that they won’t assign you anything that isn’t a priority 1 through 3, that is to say the good shit. But from time, sometimes with just a few minutes to go we’ll get something called an unknown. As in not even the dispatcher could decipher what in the hell was going on.

An unknown generally means bullshit or dead.

It’s either some old timer who accidentally set off their medical alert system, or that old timer is sincerely gonna be in arrest when we get their door open. Hopefully it’s assisted living and somebody has a key. The Suppression guys are always pissed when they get called out to take the door this early in the morning.

When we reached Seagate the guard at the gate told us a member of the Seagate PD was assisting with CPR two streets down. Must be Terk. Terk doubles here as Seagate cop when he isn’t working 43H1. Nobody likes Terk, but Terk is the only Seagate cop who’d be doing more than guarding the wall. Some young girl just dropped to the ground on her porch and went into arrest so says the KDT, but I know better. When young people go into arrest it normally has to do with drugs. It’s too early for this shit. And I know exactly who this is going to be. I’m working the bus with Danny Cortes, the maniac, as we call him. A maniac behind the wheel. A half Italian, half Puerto Rican with less than a year on the job, still no civil service status and already on his fourth accident. He knows who were going for too.

She’s drop dead gorgeous. You might try and awkwardly get her number if she wasn’t a Russian call girl. And tragically mentally ill. And a patient. Her name is Natasha Maccluskey, the last name belongs to the man in Seagate who bought her.

It wasn’t her fault, Johnny figures: she’s Bipolar.

Everyone who worked the trucks in the Pit, our name for the Coney Island Badlands knows Natasha Andreavna. The stripper. The call girl. The whore. I mean we don’t know if she’s anything of those things, but that’s how we talk about the Russian girls out here in Coney.

The sometimes Kingsborough students. The little whore EDPs.

The prophetess some call her on the street.

I mean I don’t call her the slurs or call her prophetess.

A regular frequent flyer. She always pretended it was her first time. On the bus, or in general. She had been living in Seagate for less than a year. Seemed like she never left Coney.  She was a red head, but she’d died her hair black as of recently.

Johnny Emmington already regretted letting Cortes drive. Something heavy and wet slapped against the windshield then splattered on the pavement behind them.

“What the fuck was that,” I yell.

“Nothing man, the niggers probably just threw something off the roof of the PJs,” Cortes responds going even faster.

Then another slimy thing hits the windshield, and other.

Cortes, hydroplanes at nearly fifty MPH on Neptune Ave and nearly flips the bus. He screeches to a halt and I nearly fly out of my seat. A thud drops another something on our hood. “RIBBIT. RIBBETTE,” a sound chirping out of the darkness. There’s rain pouring down and amid the rain are smiley black-green things. They hop about around us. Cortes shines the emergency signal light out the window in front of us down a dark and desolate Neptune Ave. They’re on the houses, and in the street; they jump around like grasshoppers. Cortes, never one to flap his lips on the PA or radio, is white as a half-Puerto Rican, half-Italian ghost.

“43H, we have….it’s raining frogs,” he tells Central.

Chapter 44

116 Ludlow Street, 2012ce

Mehanata

 

 

The lights are now quite dim, the place is still cast in a dead, red light and loud gypsy Jazz is playing from the band below.

 

10 September, 2012, or also called the Hebrew New Year 5773. AR 0 as we call it now, ‘after revolt’. The Bronx was being surrounded by the National Guard. All of the bridges into Long Island, which we all now call Strong Island were check pointed close. The National Guard opened fire in the North Bronx at a demonstration shortly before midnight.

Although Hebrew New Year begins right before sundown.

Card stock place holders on candle lit tables towards the back of the third floor declare several long wooden tables: “Reserved for the Banshee Otriad”.

Thirty two core and provisional members of the New York City Banshee Association, a clandestine organization of EMTS, Paramedics and Emergency workers are drunk and loudly occupying the third floor mezzanine of the Mehanta Social Club.

Except for the club’s current Chief-of-Staff Haitian Paramedic Emile Cange, who is a nominally straight laced Seventh Day Adventist and his fiancé Praise Augustus, well it’s almost midnight and the music is blaring dancehall in their honor, and Adon is calling for a toast.

A running joke in the club was that for the past decade or so they never seemed to miss an opportunity to go drinking on a Ivoryish holiday.

There are a lot of Ivoryish holidays, approximately twenty of them resulting in X number of work days to be taken off on top of the Friday into Saturday Sabbath, which man of the club members had paper work submitted to their employers, were their shops union stating that they couldn’t work on these assorted holidays and also, Fridays past 3pm.

At some point Trikhovitch had sat down with a calendar and made the calculation that utilizing the Ivoryish religion’s observances, one could get a whole lot of rest. And it caught on. Pretty soon over half the club carried bonnifed conversion papers, certificates of bar mitzvah and briss where appropriate, kutb marriage contracts, the world.

 

Nikholai and the man named Lt. Moishe Klein, the clubs only actually practicing orthodox Ivory had made some Russian rabbis in Brighton a good price and long term agreement they couldn’t refuse.

 

“5, 4, 3, 2, 1, happy 5773!” Adon slapping Mickhi Dbrisk the back. Although, it is till two actual days to Hebrew New Year, this being the Rosh Hashanah Pregame Party for the club’s inner circle. The New Year’s itself doesn’t fall on a weekend.

Adon, with a grey flash in his eyes is now dead sober somehow. As if the drinks he’d pounded, all five Astikas and three Stoli shots, and the bottle of red, then white there were glasses real cold glasses of bubbly Borjomi mineral water.

Somehow in the Melee of the dancehall, in flashing light and flickering candles of this tavern he had tuned out his fun and put upon the game face mask of his title, Chief Planning Officer of the Banshee Association. Surely not all thirty two of the guests were beyond all pale of corruptibility, but Banshee was proto-trade union with a 10-13 fund and an underground ambulance newspaper. Anyone could sign up.

But now at the round dimly lit table at the end of the long catwalk above the main dance floor, past an easily removed barricade was seated Dbrisk, the Bajan businessman Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who always carried in his own sweet wine bottles; Mara the half pint Fenian always drunk at these things, Trikhovitch, paramedic biker Anya Drovtich, Nicholas Mapfre (only there under peer pressure and perpetually nervous), Chief-of-Staff Emile Cange, a paramedic and Adon the leadership as it were, out of sight, out of mind looking over a document printed on grey card stock, downloaded and translated just the night before.

 

The Anonymous, the vast anarchist hacker underground had circulated a cut and paste manifesto. One which Banshee could never overtly endorse, but certainly various operatives of its armed wing, the Z.O.B. were certain to lend their talents behind. It is to be a collective response to the uprising and its grievances.

At all major Banshee gatherings, there was copious amounts of booze consumed, the Mehanata Social Club such a choice place for meetings and for gatherings for it was loud and rowdy and hard to bug, or hard to track the ins and outs, hard to see who signed what, under who’s name, easy to deny anything.

 

A version of this document had circulated for weeks, the uprising though aborted on the labor day weekend had to meet the popular response, the demonstrations happening in all the boroughs; the wild anarchy about to happen on 17 September, 2012 when the anarchist federations sought to again storm the District Financial.

This ting they’re all signing, it’s written in Hebrew.

 

Declaration of a State of Emergency in New York City

Communiqué #01

 

 

Activation of all Z.O.B. cells and working groups in New York City and Abroad.

In response to mounting grievances and human rights violations here and abroad.

 

The following institutions will effective 09.10.12 be considered ACTIVE ENEMIES of our people and the human race generally. Their businesses, affiliates and shareholders shall be subject to BOUYCOTT, DISRUPTION, SABOTAGE and GENERAL SANCTION for their crimes against humanity.

 

1. OLIGHARIC COLLECTIVES IN ALL NATIONS.
2. ALL WAR CRIMINALS AT LARGE.
3. ALL INSTITUIONS ENFORCING LEGISLATIVE CAPTURE VIA CAMAPIGN FINANCE.
4. ALL ASPECTS OF THE MILITRAY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
5. ALL ASPECTS OF THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
6. ANY ASPECT OF THE SEX TRADE OR SLAVERY RELATED ENTERPRISES.
7. Pornographers
8. Strip clubs

• Escort Services

1. Brothels
2. Pimps
3. Traffickers

• Mail Order Bride Agencies
• Bonded labor of any kind

 

1. ANY LABOR EXTRACTING INDUSTRY EXPLOITING THEIR WORKERS
2. ANY GROUP OR CORPORATION WHO’S PRACTICES DESTROY OUR ENVIRONMENT.
3. ALL FINANCIAL INTITUIONS PARTICPATING IN OUR ECONOMIC BONDAGE.

 

THE Z.O.B., alongside the GENERAL RESISTANCE ALLIANCE-GENERAL COORDINATING COMMITEE (GRA-GCC) AND ALL MUTUAL AID BOUND AFFILIATED SISTER ORGANIZATIONS WILL POST BILLOTS, DECEMINATE OFFICIAL WARNING VIA THE LOCAL PRESS AND ALSO THE INTERNET.

 

ALL CORPORATIONS, RELIGIOUS INSTUTIONS, FINANCIAL FIRMS AND GOVERNMENTS WILL HAVE THREE DAYS TIME TO CORRECT THEIR INJUSTICES BEFORE ACTIONS AND GENERAL ACTIVE RESISTANCE OPERATIONS COMMENCE ON SEPTEMBER 17^th and build toward a an international general strike on THE 1^st of January, 2013.

 

1. THE Z.O.B. IS EXPLICETELY AGAINST VIOLENCE TO PROPERTY AS WELL AS PERSONS AND PEOPLE. ANY VIOLENT ATTACKS, PROPERTY VANDALISMS AND ACTS OF TERRORISM ARE NOT ENDORSED BY THE MILITANT HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND SHOULD BE PUBLICLY CONSIDERED THE WORK OF UNAFFILIATED RADICALS, AGENT PROVOCATEURS, SPIES, INFORMANTS, AND THE COUNTER INTELLIGENCE PROGRAMS OF THE STATE AND ITS VARIOUS SECURITY APPERATUSES.

 

1. THE Z.OB. BEGINNING 17th September, 2012 WILL CARRY OUT ONE OPERATION A DAY AGAINST ALL LEGITMATE WAR CRIMINALS AND THEIR AFFILIATED INSTITUTIONS WHO BY THEIR ACTIONS VIOLATE OUR UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS.

 

OUR AIM IS TO STRIKE THESE VIOLATORS IN THEIR POCKETS AND BRING PUBLIC OUTRAGE AND ATTENTION TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO RUIN OUR NATION AND REDUCE THE WORLD TO CHATTEL SLAVERY.

 

1. ANY ATTEMPT TO ARREST OR MURDER OUR ORGANIZERS AND SUPPORTERS WILL RESULT IN EXPONENTIAL INCREASE IN RESISTANCE OPERATIONS.

 

1948. THE Z.O.B. WILL NOT STOP FIGHTING UNTIL EVERY LAST WOMAN, MAN and CHILD HAS BEEN GRANTED THE FULL 30 HUMAN RIGHTS AS CODIFIED AND PROMISED BY THE UNITED NATIONS and ALL PARTICIPATING NATIONS in 1948.

 

9. WE, HEREBYE ON 09.10.12 DECLARE UNRELENTING WAR ON THE CLASS OF THOSE THAT HAVE FOR GENERATIONS RAPED, ROBBED, CARRIED OUT GENOCIDE, AND INSTITUTED SLAVERY UPON THE COMMON HUMANITY TO WHICH WE ALL BELONG.
10. NO QUARTER WILL BE ASKED, NOR EXPECTED.

• WE WILL BRING THESE OLIGARCHS, BANKERS, BUSINESS MEN AND CRUEL DESPOTS, war criminals all to their knees to stand trial for what they have done and VIA OUR RESISTANCE WE WILL FORGE A WORLD OF DIGNITY, EQUALITY AND FREEDOM.

 

HUMANITY THIS IS OUR CALL TO ARMS.

 

NEW YORKERS THIS IS YOUR BATTLE CRY.

 

THIS IS A WAR TO THE DEATH.

 

 

The People of New York will lock arms with the people of the world and the dream of freedom which has been crushed for generations will carry our uprising to its full and inevitable victory.

 

Signatories:

 

 

 

Sebastian Adon

Katusha Shah

 

 

 

Kaveh Abatable

Emile Cange

Mickhi Dbrisk

Magnus Goldbar Allamby

Hubert O’Domhnaill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nikholai Trikhovitch

Mara Fitzduff

Erza Pula Pound

Anahita Noor

Kwame Ansu

Scott Sevastra

Anya Drovtich

Nicholas Mapfre

Raphael Contreras

Siegfried Sassoon

 

Avinadav DeBuitléir

Emma Maya Sorieya Solomon

 

 

That following evening of September 11^th Sebastian and dozens of other activists using the Cely-Telegram text dispatch system, boarded the subway cars with flicker masks and blue fatigues. They took nearly every train line hostage across 5 boroughs, all numbers, letters and colors. Terror and spectacle abound! Not even one lethal bullet in the guns, which almost no units even had to brandish; the captive audiences were petrified or participatory in the aktion.

 

Sebastian’s unit A08; took over the A train Manhattan bound from the Rockaways alongside an anarchist named Spike, the actor Siegfried Sassoon, a younger women named Clare they recruited off of OK Cupid and a film maker named Nicholas Mapfre. And eight back up team members whose names and faces he didn’t have to know.

Sebastian once road this self-same train to and from his Star crossed lover Yelizaveta Perechenova, but now in his rapid speeches and flying mannerisms he dedicates this to all his injured people’s in domestic and also far flung lands. One night, this raid to redeem his American hypocrisy; to take over a train because his love is a warrior’s love. He has been sleeping for how knows how long, but it’s coming back to him slowly. What his place is in the chain.

Natasha called out to him earlier on the black berry smart phone to ask him be careful. She is no damsel in distress and he is no Shamel Basayev, yet. But she knows him much better than he knows she or she works for. She knows he’s waking up from a day dream.

Trains are stormed all over the city for mostly militant public addresses and passing out of homework assignments from big grey bags. Although, all of them are emptied right before the District financial where many cross.

Emptied and dynamited. The bankers take cabs to work, caps or ferries or are driven. This is to keep all of their surfs away. Deter servitude.

The speech needs to be cut short because he gives it over each transfer of the cars. Sometimes Spike or Siggy or Clare give the speech. It begins with, “My name is Zachariah Artstien, an organizer with the human rights resistance! Affiliated with the Z.O.B., we are not here to hurt anyone or take your money! We are here to declare that you have human rights and we must now link arms and fight for them.”

“Today is the 11^th of September, when ten years ago the Oligarchs manufactured an attack on us to secure their power and control. In six days the People’s Army of the General Resistance Alliance will attack the District Financial! If you ain’t running with it run from it!”

New York is the city of such disturbances. It’s also a mind-your-fucking business city. Its people are also heavily armed. But no on pulls on them tonight.

“Please don’t get yourself shot to ferment hope alone,” Natasha warns him and she hopes he isn’t killed because he is capable of making a woman care about him. But perhaps not her on a long enough time line.

Sebastian and his associates with their scary masks, one with a video camera tell tales of the Syrian Free Army. Of Israeli apartheid. Of the one black or Hispanic youth killed every 48 hours by the police. Of the 1 in 8 black men in prison. Of war, endless war consuming all around for the dubious purposes of Afghani and Iraqi and Persian “liberations”. The conspirators film the whole thing, in case they are captured or killed. For the viewers at home on the Livestreams.

After all the tales end, told by the three hostage taking narrators, “We are sorry for our operations washing aside considerations of your health and safety. You cannot join us, we are organized tight as drum, but go to your churches, mosques and temples, your gangs, crews and neighborhood councils, stay strong and carry on as we are all under siege together.”

“Power to the people!”

“We have a bag of homework assignments. Simple ways to assist the general uprising coming on 17 September. The best way you can assist it is to join us in the streets. If you cannot stay at home. Wall Street will be a battle field. Support the Résistance anyway you are able.”

They were mostly greeted with quiet applause, but no one shoots at them or turns them in. And in this city that counts for something. Most people take home work, perhaps largely out of curiosity.

Later Sebastian and his three cohorts are at the end of the line and the job has been carried without any of the possible predictions of arrest by the authorities or mob violence against them. A sigh of relief.

“It’s nice to see that on the eve of September 11^th, 11 years later, security is tight as drum,” notes Mr. Barr Timchenko an anarchist childhood friend of Zachariah, the nom de guerre of Sebastian Adon.

So when Sebastian gets back to the financial district and he confirms around 2am with Natasha he’s alive and she breathes back a sign of near panic. He writes poems for her. Places them on old school gold painted stationary, dedicating resistance to her, although to her, it is more like street theatre carried up on a moving, highly privileged stage.

 

She texts him;

 

“I made you a picture of your bleeding heart.”

 

Bleeding out yes, unasked for and unheeded, a mighty pump. His heart was quite known to hemorrhage over little and for nothing. And certainly at the invitation of No One.

 

 

 

Chapter 45

2507 GHQ, Long Island City, 2011ce

Queens

 

Paramedic Lt. Scott Sevastra

 

The room was filled with members of service from all 16 citywide EMS organizations, all four unions representing EMS were there, but this was a wildcat meeting. Lt. Scott Sevastra of FDNY EMS, Station 35 addresses his colleagues;

 

“We have all in retrospect interpreted the event, the attacks, however you identify them; the evets of 12 January as an attack on our city. Over 443 EMS providers predominantly in Brooklyn and the South Bronx lost their lives attempting to rescue civilians from harm’s way.”

 

“To some this work is like a calling. We were all drawn here for different reasons, some were quite noble, and some were not. Tammany Hall is fifty years dead but being an Irish grandson of a fire fighter still opens a few doors. They call it legacy. It goes in a file, then without being officially recognized other than a check box will wind a new EMT in Station 43 Coney Island then over to the Rock in a year. There are a myriad of systemic problems around here. But you have to have a fairly analytical mind to see their connectivity.”

 

“After the towers fell a wave of civil service activism-romanticism swept the nation and the FDNY were the rock Little Wayne meets the Beatles. A brief era of patriotism took hold and the ranks of the emergency services were stocked with young men and women who might have gone white collar except for the collective ejaculation of national trauma. The FDNY, the greatest full time-part time job secret the Irish and Italians ever kept were quickly re-cooping man power and by 2003 the waiting list for the Fire Suppression open competitive exam was nearly 25,000 deep. EMS was the expeditious way to cut that line if you weren’t legacy, hadn’t passed high school, and may or may not have been in the top of your physical class.”

 

“In 1995 Giuliani merged various emergency services to cut the costs of their respective civilian bureaucracies. FDNY was 98% white, catholic and male while EMS was heavily integrated. FDNY with a force of nearly 12,000 fire fighters couldn’t justify keeping that many trucks in the field. EMS was already doing nearly a million calls a year with a force of under 3,000. The merger was toxic to everyone involved and it took another decade for the firemen to even look us in the eyes when we arrived on scene.”

 

“I wasn’t here for most of that. I was a paramedic and a volunteer firefighter in the city of Schenectady upstate. I earned a degree in Fire Science and had promoted to paramedic via my volunteer company. Everywhere but NYC becoming an EMT or a Paramedic is a promotion. In the city of many lights you promote to fire fighting. I became an EMT because my uncle was a paramedic and I grew up in the glow of emergency lighting. I was built for this mentally. In the words of my colleague technician Adon; ‘I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go.”

 

“There is no money in this. We probably lose 8 brothers and sister a month. Attrition continues to thin the ranks. Studies report a disproportionately high rate of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide in EMS comparatively to Fire or Law Enforcement. We are asked and often mandated to work 12 to 16 hours a day in adverse conditions, in some of the most depressed regions of the country with outdated low-bid equipment, little public support, and virtually no encouragement from the city we serve. Moral is so low that the national statistics report that the average span of an EMS career is a little under four years. The department asks us for 25. Run the numbers and that’s why we’re always at 60%, that’s why you can find as much overtime as you can swallow.”

 

“Out of the 8 that leave each month, 5 quit, normally within their second year. 2; their number came up on a civil service test; normally PD, Sanit, Correction or Suppression. The last one sustained a line of duty injury; real or concocted to get them off the streets on LODI for a few months to collect AFLAC benefits. We lose members far faster than they can recruit. There is a virtually endless pool of EMTs to draw from, but most worth their salt go work for a Voluntary Hospital and can triple the wage we make. Others just know that the department will bleed you dry chasing a pension and a dream. They have recruiting posters in city shelters if that says anything.”

 

“The critical systemic problem is twofold. First because of low pay, hard hours and appallingly low morale we lose our toughest and bravest to the fire fighter promotional at a rate of a few hundred every three years. We lose our brighter and more ambitious members to the private sector and the field of nursing. This leaves us with a broken mish mash of skells, burn outs, a few zealots and a high rate of obesity in the ranks.”

“The other side of this is the lowered expectations to close the staffing gaps.  That means on a segment 1-3 priority call you might get a truck load of CFRs and long board trained fire men or as described in an internal Emerald Society memo “a waddling glob of minority goo with a gold chain and an un-tucked shirt.”

 

“And for all those reasons and more I helped found the Banshee Association on Block Island in November of 2009 and am here today to bring into being with you all the International Association of Emergency Medical Professionals; the world’s first pan-EMS union.”

 

And a great cheer does go up!

 

“I wrote the following article for Banshee Issue 1:”

 

“In the course of nobility in public service, sacrifices are made on a personal and familial level. Those sacrifices are seldom seen or acknowledged by the beneficiaries of great deeds. In the course of a societal shift from respect and honor to entitlement and selfishness, the value of public service has been lost on the public. We, as providers of care, hope and second chances, encounter diminishing returns of respect, honor and a living wage. We have learned the hard way that we can count on no one to provide assistance to us when needed, or even requested. In these revelations, our small subset of society has to learn to rely exclusively on each other.”

 

“In our most dire times of need and assistance on the job we utilize the 10-13 radio code to call for help. We all know exactly what it means. No one asks questions, no one makes value judgments, we just go and help. It just gets done. Why do we not have the same unmarred dedication to each other’s well-being when we are not in the streets with a radio in hand? We must provide this support to our own, and not just at memorials and funeral services. “

 

“EMS providers know what they’re in for when they sign on for this life. We’ll never drive fancy European sports cars, we’ll never have a summer house on the lake, and we’ll never be on the cover of a magazine. We live paycheck to paycheck struggling to make ends meet. While some people are deciding between the V6 and the V8, we are deciding between the light bill and the grocery bill. Dare we think about sending our kids to college, saving for retirement, a down payment on a house or god forbid we get sick or injured and can’t work at all? Well, we probably can’t give each other educations, retirements, or homes but it’s not unreasonable to think that we can help our ‘brothers-in-arms’ keep the lights on and some food on the table when times get tough.”

 

“Efforts have been made for years to help one another in times of need but let’s be honest, the reliability of charity is scarce, regionally limited, agency limited and sometimes popularity biased. Specifically in this great city of New York, the world of EMS is quite conflicting, territorial, convoluted, hierarchal, and tribal. Any attempt at joining providers together for any reason is traditionally an act of futility and serves to embellish the juvenile portrayal we strive to vanquish. While we perpetuate this 100 Years Civil War, the powers-that-be look at us humorously like a joke and reinforce their notion that we are undeserving. We reap what we sew. In the meantime, those of us in the rank and file still need a hand and in the thick of battle, the only hands around to reach down and give us a boost are our own.”

“In seeing the need for self-sufficient assistance for our ‘brothers-in-arms’ and recognizing how entangled we all are in the modern social interactivity of the technological world, it seemed only obvious to take to the web. The first step of this movement to reach out to all providers in a uniform way is information. The focus is on putting information in everyone’s hands. If you don’t call 911, no one knows you need help. The same applies here, if the community doesn’t know one of our own needs help, no one will. Modern social networking is the perfect platform for getting this information out to the whole EMS community.”

 

“We are all familiar with 10-13 parties and fund-raisers. We should also be familiar with the fact that advertising for such events traditionally doesn’t go much further than a particular agency, station or maybe borough and that unfortunately usually depends on the popularity or name recognition of the member in need.  In the municipal services of this enormous city, it is not uncommon for providers in one borough to never hear of 10-13 events of other boroughs. It is almost unheard of for individual agencies, whether commercial, volunteer or voluntary, to expect their call for help to be heard outside the walls of their own garage. If we as a service and a community are to progress to a better quality of life, these deficiencies need to change.”

 

“I present to you the first step in the journey of change, One Big EMS Union, whereby all 13,000 City EMTs and Paramedics might lock arms just once year after the catastrophe of 1-12 and declare our right full place in the city services, top revenue generator and top saver of human life!”

 

“An individual won’t be able to feed a comrades family while they’re out on medical leave, but thousands of brothers and sisters pitching in what little they really can afford to spare, now that goes a long way. Before that can happen, the brothers and sisters of this community need to know who needs their help. I call out to all of you, take off your patches, put down your shields, dust off that pink and blue card that unites us all and join me in doing what’s right for our ‘EMS family’.

 

 

Chapter 46

Brighton 5^th Street, 2012ce

BRIGHTON BEACH

 

 

The Russian Quarter is always teeming with life. Were I to put my finger in it; my nostril to the whiff beyond her buxom chest; it smells like potato pancakes, cherry perfume, cigarette smoke and fish. Smoked fish. It runs along and below the above ground Yellow Q and Orange B Express train line which rumbles above like a mechanical wave breaking in the six story tenement row houses made of red brown brick. Following the Q line above ground the architecture of the quarter goes from a mix of these artless, durable six stories inter mixed with modest suburban homes running towards the coast. The Northern most boundary of the quarter is Kings Highway because it is here that street signs appear in Cyrillic. Although the overlap with Midwood Ivoryish zone overlaps with the Russian quarter until avenue H where the Haitian Bar Lev line was drawn in 1996. Drugs nor guns nor traffic can move north of that line or south. District Midwood is one of eleven Ivoryish ghettos in the greater New York area, a place of prayer and tunnels and coming and going. Sebastian Adon lived in that district for eight years on Ocean and H. He knows its comings and goings

The Russian quarter is awash with small restaurants with live music sung by comical tamidahs and various slender, busty, well made up on every level Slavic goddesses. And prix fixed meals. Its western border is Coney Island Avenue, which at Kings Highway becomes a Pakistani district where Shar’iah law is enforced.

 

Coney island avenue runs parried. To Ocean Avenue to the east and ocean parkway to the west, and these three routes had to be thoroughly barricaded to turn back the advance of the National Guard and the 104^th and 116th tank column of Christmas Eve; 2015 or in the parlance of the rebels AR 3. That is still three years to come.

 

The eastern border if the quarter was Nostrand Avenue. Where the Russian quarter ends and the West Indian quarter begins, largely composed of Haitian s and Jamaicans. There were never walls around the quarter, not before the revolt or after not even when the southern rim of Brighton and Coney Island because the internationally famous green light district once the Soviet was recognized by Russia and China in AR 7, or 2019 ce. There were not physical walks but perhaps linguistic mental walls that trapped the mentality of those.in the quarter somewhere between the 18th and 21st century. Perhaps between the old world and the new. Perhaps rendering the seditious place it was and is, a place unlike any others where by huddled refugees and expatriate radicals were walled in Brooklyn habitations in a space that was neither Russia nor America, a purgatory. For had the three million souls of the future Brooklyn, excuse me Breuklyn Soviet ever been embraced by the Americans perhaps they would not have enjoined the rising. For what solidarity did those in the quarter have with Ivoryish spies and black revolutionaries? Nothing. Less than nothing. So little nothing that the majority of the quarter might have seat the whole thing out, we’re that an option. But with all the other tribes in arms and the National Guard shelling so indiscriminately well most joined in the rising before long simply to avenge or protect their own.

 

That is a characteristic that certainly embodies the Russian quarter. They rugged are social individualists. As in their circle of live work and loyalty contracts rapidly even in the face of minor hardship. No other race has ever been fully enslaved by its’ own people first via serfdom then via Stalinism. It ruined them as a collective or idealist species. That circle of loyalty contracts down to one. Themselves in away few other races do. At a certain point they might throw their children and wives into the raising seas. A wretched generalization but their individual will is harder than any. It is impossible to break. The social nature if their individualism is the solidly of the alliances they form. With anyone that properly secures their ends of individual betterment. They are turtle loyal and truly blind for those that aid them. They go inside a hard shell indeed and not god or insects can crack it. It is made of strongest stuff

Perhaps never not even ever having anything but predators as presidents and thieves for kings. Often the Russian quarter was festive, often feisty often a place of lawless abuses. You couldn’t ever know unless you knew the name of a song in Cyrillic.

 

She met on the boardwalk, I stood there smoking a Newport sizing up the Green from the Blue Tatianna’s nothing knowing how different they were. I was sleep deprived.

She had told me this rambling story about being the great granddaughter of a German baroness. This seemed like the kinds of stories all White Russian women concoct to erect a regal lineage that the revolution had maligned. Yelizaveta and Maria hadn’t made up such stories, they had others though that were comparable. But Yelizaveta and Maria’s fathers had been Red Russians and inner party members. They were less fixated on the 19^th century it seemed.

There were always these vague and ambiguous narratives Sebastian noticed about what their fathers did or didn’t do during the Soviet Union. Maria’s father had completely disappeared in Chechnya, allegedly been shot by friendly fire; he had been a General, but was dead before she was four or the family joined the exodus. Yelizaveta’s father had been a dentist. Or perhaps an expert interrogator. It was hard to deduce. What was the truth and what was the darkness that creeps out into his world any time he encounters them, these post and former Soviets.

Anyhow, Natasha was claiming to be part Ivoryish via her German Baroness Great Grandmother and that was her story for now. Her father apparently had just been a tramp and run out on her mom at fairly a young age.

She kisses him on each cheek and takes out a picture, wrapped up in papers and a bow.

“For you,” she states.

He opens it and it’s quite something, so black and dark and vivid. A heart. A black, black heart. But, his or hers? To what symbolic level goes it?

“Amazing, I love it,” he replies.

And for the nearly the first time in his life, he means it.

“I’m so glad.” She says with her big blue person eyes beaming?

“Shall we go get wine?” she suggests.

That night long after midnight, late, late after a few shots, and some wine and a few dozen shared cigarettes in Cafes in and around Manhattan Beach they walk their walk, tumbled really toward to yacht yards and mansion of Sheepshead Bay.

And one point she yanks his collar close and says; “taste me”; she puts wine into him mouth to mouth.

The night gets early, he’s lost chasing her.

He runs his fingers through her thick blond lion’s mane. She leans into him on bar stools or when they go outside to spoke, let’s her tits rest on him, brush against him.

“So you’re really a Ivory?” she asks.

“Yes at least part.”

“I want to ask you silly questions and you will answer them of, she smiles rolling up into his arms, “and you will get a prize if you win, understand. True answers only.”

            “Would you denounce your Ivoryish God and become an Eastern Orthodox Christian to please my mother?”

“I don’t believe in either God’s monopoly, why not?”

“If we were poor would you work on Saturdays to support me?”

“As I have for years.”

“Would you steal for me?

“The moon itself. And whatever was needed.”

“Would you make love to me with my husband sleeping in the next room?”

“Your cries of passion would wake him, so only if he were drugged.”

“Would you kill to protect me?”

“Without a thought.”

“If I killed someone would you help me cover it up?”

“Yes of course I’d try.”

“Try?”

“Try. Depends on the mess not the risk.”

A mental picture flashes in his head of a memory. Was it real. The two of them dismembering corpses and melting them in acid?

“If I asked you to kill for me would you do it?”

“Are you in trouble?” he asks like a stupid American.

“You know I’m a married woman?”

“I’d like to suggest it lacks certain integrities.”

“Does it? How could you known. You’ve known me what, five weeks?”

“Time is relative.”

“Maybe. My husbands a monster and my boyfriend is boring,” is all she says and pulls away from him.

She shows him marks on her poorly hidden.

She has black and blue marks on her chest and under both arms. Like she got herself fucked ruthlessly. She has hand cuff marks on her wrists.

“What do you want me to do about your situation?”

“There is nothing that can be done.”

“I could take you away.”

“You could try.”

“You have to tell me what you want me to do, not what you assume is possible.”

“What’s the thing you Americans say, oh yes: You and what army.”

“What are those marks from?”

“Me being loved by three men.”

He looks sad, it breaks through. Sad for her and him both.

“You could leave with me. Tonight. I have enough money to get us away.”

“I doubt that.  I have expensive tastes.”

“Curb them?”

“Are you going to give me new clothes? And a beautiful home; and pay for my school. And give me a credit card. Give me money to send my ailing mother in Penza? Ivory.”

“I think I could give you a better life than this shit, this life. In this miserable city.”

“You can’t give me what I need. As sweet as you are.”

“I don’t think you’d be with me if you didn’t think I could try.”

“You’re broke. You’re in school. You’re up to shit, I know. Don’t think I don’t know what you and your friends are up to. You’re all gonna die.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you think I don’t know?”

“What do you think you know?”

“I got to know a lot of guys when they brought me here.”

“Who?”

“The Perchevney Bratva.”

“You’ve told me so many fucking stories about how you got here, who keeps you, what’s true. What! You play mind games like the best of us.”

“My girlfriend and I were hired to let a couple bankers work us up two nights ago. When I told you I was studying. I was being fucked by two Wall Street guys, swapping my friend and I for hours. These marks are from them, not my fake ass paperwork husband. Not my boyfriend.”

He wonders what if any of the story is real.

“The wall street guys were fucked out their minds. They were going at us for hours. Taking long breaks to do coke and talk about shit they own.”

He has been asleep because she keep feeding him booze. He wakes up sometimes and knows his role, but then goes to sleep and forgets what is about to go down.

“They know you and the resistance are going to attack the exchange on 17 September. In two days. They know that you’re all going to try and take over the whole district and provoke a state of emergency. They know. The cops know. The National Guard know. The FBI know. The Bureau of Homeland security knows. Breria, knows. They are going to lure you all into those narrow streets and spaces. They’re going to wait one day. They’re going to kill every single one of you with gas. Now you tell me. What horse am I betting on? My fat American husband. My Russian accountant boyfriend washing money at the biggest hotel in midtown? My boss, the Israeli pimp who pays me one grand every night I take a Wall Street guy, a banker or celebrity out to dinner? Or you? The bipolar ambulance man, who has less than 400 in the bank, is on the BHS kill list, can’t buy me a new life, and can’t save me. All you have is happy noble Amerikanski ideals and some poems. You probably shouldn’t see me again.”

 

He knows she’s right about at least what’s in his account.

 

“I can get us out of this city, I can take you away from this life,” Sebastian says, “I…”

 

“You are going to tell me you love me?” she asks him.

 

He doesn’t respond, that word means nothing.

 

“You better not even fucking dare.”

 

“I’ll give you my life and I kill anyone who is hurting you. I’ll bury your husband, your boyfriend your Israeli pimp. I’ll bury Breria himself.”

 

She kisses him hard. Fuck it, she thinks he’ll be dead in a couple of days.

 

And that was how she began to suspect that he truly was the man she’d dreamed about as a younger girl with the powers she was born with, from a line of old souled sorceresses; and she of course recorded the entire conversation on her smart phone recorder as evidence for her handlers.

 

Shortly they could cross this very, very loose and erratic cannon off their growing shorter list.

 

“I know a hotel at the boardwalks end with mirrors on the ceiling,” she whispers to him, “I have to sleep at home tonight but he’s not gonna come home tomorrow. You can’t save my soul or fix my life, but you can do what you want to body.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 47

Major Deegan, 2010ce

South Bronx

 

 

Technician Leacroft Walters

 

 

I’m the grim reaper, I’m the angel of death man. Feel like me ‘ain seen the sun fo’ long time. I sit next to the Deegan man, I sit in 17Adams atom so those lazy girls get hit first, I sit right next to the Deegan so I can get up and out quick.

 

I got me like seven years at this job, on this unit, I do the minimum asked. 17 Charlie Tour 1; I Walters. Nobody call me Leacroft but me wife.

 

I worked with Adon briefly, no problems. It was the summer’s end in 2008. People hated him ‘cause he’s self righteous. Thinks he’s doin’ favors for us being here. I don’ care ‘bout station politics.  One night a crack head wanders out into the Deegan right under the Macombs bridge where the lighting is bad, some Puerto Rican kid plows him down goin’ close to 85 an hour. Tears the crack head right in two. Drops his organs sprays his blood volume over fifty feet.

 

So the policeman shuts down the Deegan, seals it all off crime scene like.

 

First unit on scene out of Station 14 takes the babbling traumatized young man off the scene in psychogenic shock. His car was covered in another mans blood, think he thought it was a child. Wasn’t a child, it was a crack head I told him. Didn’ listen. We were second unit on scene. Not much to do. Adon was green then, less than three months. Might have been his first of second DOA, maybe not dem bodies pile up in the South Bronx quick like.

 

The cop made jokes, thaz what they do. Stupid jokes if you ass’ me. We don’t carry body bags I told um’ not no more. They try an pass the body on us body that ain’ how ite work. They stcu khere as long as the high way is closed.

 

Some vultures from one of the Daily’s, prob-ly the Post like, were takin’ pictures of us. I hate that shit.

 

He took a sheet out our truck and with blue gloved hands he wrapped that sheet around the upper torso of the fallen junkie, the lower extremities of the crack head were fifty feet up the road. He went and covered those too. Now there were just two piles of blood splattered sheets, and a trail of blood and organs.

 

“You like touch the bodies eh?” I said breaking his chops.

 

“What if it was your son?” he asked in anger, “you’d want the Post camera phoning your son on the Deegan?”

 

“Me son’s no crack head, would know better not to run out into highway traffic,” is all I told him.

 

 

 

Chapter 48

Light House Inn, 2012ce

Sheepshead Bay

 

 

The following evening came and he was hard.

 

Natasha arrives in the cold of night, met him as the usual place on the boardwalk.

One astounding thing about her was the variety of looks she wore. The way she carried her out worldly self, as well as her firm control of her surroundings via her deliberate metamorphosis from often carefree nymph to a severe and serious instructor of social etiquette and use of language. This perhaps this was the result of being born into the tender firm and earthly body of a non-aging and busty school girl, while her memory of events could trace its analysis across four centuries of wax and waning hardship were she ever to stop drinking. Her analogue disposition was that of vast kindness, but she resorted lately to various manipulations. It was the temperament best suited for dealing with savages and bonobos alike. For she was not descended from monkeys and her soul was not like any other he’d encountered.

They walk briskly toward the Sheep’s head bay, which looks madly like a destitute and run down Tel Aviv, he always things so.

He kisses her hard before she even closes the motel door behind her. He thrusts her against the wall clutching her tight and he smells like cologne. She likes his taste. She can smell on him the desire to fuck her good and hard. He’s tender until he drinks a little, or gets her ass in his palm.

She pulls him in and tells him, “You miss me a lot baby?”

He always misses her now.

She’s all he thinks about. Her big blue eyes. Her stunning baby face. Her devil smile. How she fits in his arms. How he hopes he barely fits in all of her tight little spaces. He longs to suck on her big perfect breasts.

He hangs her coat and she grabs his ass.

He carries her over to the bed. All he can think about is how tight she is every single time he enters her pussy, how hard she kisses him, how much he thinks he loves her, and just how long she can take his cock. He’s insatiable. And she can fuck him for days he’s sure.

It’s interesting to think such things about a woman you’ve only just kissed. He’s had three weeks of dreams about it. About what it would be like to have her.

The motel room has off white walls, poor lighting and smells like scented candles. There are indeed mirrors on the ceiling and walls. But it’s better than the ones before, the gypsy tents and beach blankets. It was just under $ 200 for the room, almost half what was in his account. In the room is a new red desk and queen sized brown wooden bed with posts. Nothings on the desk. He lays her on the bed and kisses her hard again. They make out and she rubs his big cock through his jeans wanting to taste it. Wanting to suck him off twice. She’s wearing a short skirt and red lace panties; a black short skirt and tank top which makes her thick pale tits look quite perfect. He’s already rock hard thinking about taking her. He rubs her breasts.

He wants to rip off her panties and fuck her brutally until she screams. He wants to take off his belt and put it around her neck and fuck her over the red desk until his hot cum fills her pussy. She’s so prim and perfect. She’s young and luscious and graceful. He wants to put her on her knees.

“Slow down,” she whispers anticipating his hungry lust, “we have all forever. Take your time baby make me a few times cum and extra hard. Seduce me.”

He starts rubbing her pussy with his fingers while she sucks his thumb. He likes her to take him all the way down her throat to gag on big cock. He’s looking up a voodoo spell to double himself so she can suck him while his twin fucks her on her knees from behind. She’s not sure if she can take two of him. It’s hard to slow him down. He just imagines always the tightness of when he enters. Like she’s fucking for the first time. That tight. What an illusion. That tasty and pure. Once he’s in thrusting all he can think about is pleasing her. He loves her amazing pussy. Its taste and its shape and its fit. She always shudders when he goes in. He wants to fill her with hot cum and break her in. He wants to fuck her hard and everywhere, put her legs on his shoulders and ram his cock as far as it will go make her beg him for to empty load after load inside her…

“Slow baby slow” she whispers.

He breathes deep. His mind can’t stop running ahead.

“I’m going to suck your cock dry tonight baby,” she whispers, “I’m going lick that cock and stroke it so well. But first you gotta play with me right.”

She takes his index finger and shows him how she’ll suck him. He’s beside her. Takes her panties down and puts a finger in her pussy. So amazingly tight. He rubs her up and down and wants her to be his baby forever. He wants to please her so well that she can’t even remember the faces of other men. Men like her pimp or her husband. He can’t think of anything but her all day at work. She sends him pictures sometimes in her lingerie and asks him to tell her what he’ll do when they get to the hotel.

Since she started class she only fucks two or three men a day.

He plays with her gently rubbing her pussy. Whispers in her ear, “I’m gonna fuck you hard tonight.” She moans and say, “Please daddy please.” But hopes he is gentle.

Her shirt is still on and she’s rubbing is cock thorough his jeans. He licks down her leg and rolls up the shirt. He grabs her thighs and licks and licks and licks. She moans and tells him again what she’ll do on her knees. He’s got one finger in her working back and forth, can barely fit a second. He looks up and she’s her happy moaning face.

When it seems like she is about to cum, which is charade for she can cum on demand, he whole body contorting in ecstasy; he pick her up and pushes her over the red table.

“You’re gonna take my cock everywhere tonight baby.”

Men say that shit all the time.

She looks like a sexy little foreign school girl when she wants to or sometimes like a grown ass woman of the night. She can also be anything else, but always beautiful and dignified and pure at heart for him. He wants her to be his boss outside. He wants to be her servant and student he knows she’s wise beyond her years by a hundred. But in their inner rooms of that Sheepshead Bay motel he wants her to let him break her in as his for now. He wants to tie her wild ways and fuck her so ferociously that she cannot remember another man but him.

He wouldn’t be the first of last to try.

He lifts her skirt and guides his thick cock inside her. He moans, she’s incredible to taste and even more so to ride. He big pale breast are in his mouth one by one. He likes her to keep sucking his big fingers while he tries to go slowly back and forth pushing deeper.

“I’m going to try and break you,” he says.

And then for the next few hours he fucks in every single hole in her body.

She’s bent over the desk now with her panties in her mouth and can she feel herself convulsing as his penis rams up her ass cumming for the fifth time in seven hours.

In the candle light in the mirror besides the bed and one the ceiling. She wants to civilize him. Make him her slave. For sex and smoothies. Can he be taught? Where did she learn to fuck like that?  For an agitation propaganda officer he’s quite good. He finally slowly pushes deeper and takes her hands. He begins going faster one last time. “I’m gonna fuck that tight ass baby. I’m gonna you beg for my dick for days,” he mutters in Hebrew.

“Fuck me harder Ivory pig,” she yells at him in Russian.

But she loves to beg him. Beg him to serve her. Beg him to make her cum again. She likes him to treat her like the goddess she is. He begins pumping faster. And cums in her ass. Lying there awhile then he bathes her. Washes all the blood and shit and cum off them both. And they pass out eventually before dawn, on the motel bed.

 

Dead men get a last wish in every great culture she thinks.

And then she sucks him off again.

 

 

 

Chapter 49

9 Metro Tech, 2011ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Demands to the New Commissioner

 

Let us make it plain, regardless of who is appointed to the position of Fire Commissioner, our demands remain the same. We say demands, not requests because those with nothing, not even a living wage for our highly profitable toils are in no position to be patiently making requests. We hear the PBA and the UFFA; the power house labor unions of Police and Fire Suppression make war cries over whether their men and women have to pay into pension, or whether their salary will jump from start pay 70,000 to start pay 80,000. Their demands and their requests, when compared with our own, are to pit the claims of further appetite versus those of starvation.

 

Compared to Fire Fighters and Police we are a rabble, politically and economically speaking. While an estimated 12,000 women and men hold the EMS blue card in the Tristate area, no one speaks for us collectively. We are unable, and apparently unwilling to throw votes and money into political races so we reap the benefits of more of nothing. Listen to the votes of 38,000 Police officers and 12,000 Fire Fighters and their children and spouses for change and these are suggestions the New Commissioner might listen to. But we have demands.  Let it be stated again, as the simplicity prevails:

 

We need parity with NYPD and FDNY Fire Suppression.

 

In simple terms all objectives and tactics in our struggle as a work force may be summarized as such: We require a 20 year Pension, we require base entry position pay equality, we demand reinstitution of promotional exams on all levels of command, equity in our benefit package and civil service status established before hiring. That is to say, what the other two services have possessed for years.

 

The Commissioner must understand that if we are not given these things we will grow critically distressed and we will grow bold. We will become not a tale of a young service given the respect its due in proportion to its municipal contribution, but instead a political liability.

 

We are the life savers, as we must always remind the public and ourselves. We are not the trash collectors, the law enforcers, or the fire suppressors; our job is to always be there when the public falls down sick, injured, maimed or broken. Lest we forget there is a green cash money side to things. Other than Traffic Enforcement, no single city agency generates near the green cash money we generate in revenue each day. To the ballpark figure of $473.00 for a basic, no frills BLS transport up to nearly a Grand for ALS work, each day our units bring this Department many tens of thousands of dollars in revenue which certainly does not seem to trickle back down to us.

 

We see that most Police Officers and Fire Fighters own homes in the five boroughs, hold second jobs often at a business they own, have happy marriages and can put their kids through college. Can the same be said of EMS? The answer is ‘hardly’.

 

Honoring promises to construct new facilities, replace antiquated accident prone equipment like the two person stretcher and the stair chair, renovation of our tenement training facility and the more expeditious maintenance of our fleet. There is a laundry list of desired changes we can suggest/request later. But now is a time for urgency. Our women and men generate your revenue with their blood, sweat and tears, they pay into a pension they may never see for 25 years. Yet rates of injury and extended LODI leave do not come close to those of the other emergency services. Beyond that gut, visceral reaction that the life savers are being paid like pizza delivery boys or a simple look at the state of the EMS union; times are lean it’s true, but we are pulling more than our weight.

 

Civil service titles may be stripped from us right under our noses. This pandemonium over boots and the efforts to grind us under heel are moving faster than you know. To not mince words, a fireman knows every single gain EMS makes is a dollar less for them, as sad as that paradigm is. But we are not in a position where we can bandy about waiting for another measly 4%.

 

We walk a fine line, but let us make it plain; WE HAVE DEMANDS and we MUST organize and struggle until they are met. Whoever is appointed as the new commissioner must know that we are not a playing card in his deck, we are a powder keg of despair and frustration. You cannot ask a woman or a man to toil for 25 years of their life and keep telling them ‘they are special’, ‘they are heroes’, and they are ‘moving at the speed of life.’ This city loves us, and it will rally behind us. If the city knew the truth about the conditions in which we toil, and the luxuries a fire man enjoys they would support our aims and our struggle.

 

In conclusion, there are human wants and human needs. A want is perhaps not to be based out of former single engine fire house hand-me-downed to EMS after the suppression boys were upgraded (17, 55, 44) or for that matter to be based next to a medical waste/trash extraction center (35). A want would be for the dangerous apparatus they tell us is called the ‘two man stretcher’ be systemically decommissioned and replaced with the current standard. A want would be to have leaders promoted based on merit.

Alas, we are now in times of need. We will not slave for 25 years, break our backs, scar our minds, poison our relationships, lose our ideals, lovers and friends to keep 12,000 firemen with rights, privileges and pay we don’t come close to enjoying ourselves.

 

The new commissioner, if he ever reads a Banshee paper in his life would do well to heed these words; EMS has been beaten, mismanaged, underappreciated and almost broken. Be forewarned, broken women and men have very, very little to lose.

 

Commissioner we have simple demands, must we prepare to fight for them? Will you do the right thing to prevent this battle?

 

 

 

Chapter 50

44 Banner Ave, 2012ce

Brighton Beach

 

 

 

One old soul Cold Night,

It was pouring again on her low rise,

High risk hell by the sea shore.

I’ve always said that the waters will wash the rats away,

But not the deeds-done by all in middle passage.

She says we will be ok, one day.

I’ve never been a killer.

She’s never been a whore.

The sky broke open like a shotgun burst in Grozny at close quarters to the knee cap:

An ambush, oh well.

Who keeps score?

It all came down in a freezing deluge,

Dripping like a sweat soaked sheet after a good ravishing tear about of a violent fuck.

The kind that breaks bed stands best reserved for last stands.

Cue thunder bolt Bang!

In a sky-break-the-jaw free for all with no sign of stopping:

Good luck, better duck.

Soon you’re back in Eastern hands.

 

All torn asunder_ and brackish above.

 

She says:

 

“Real Men don’t waste their weakness via their liquid.

In the company_

_Of those they are claiming to love.”

 

-Good Night Moon! –

 

I drank too much Astika,

Now I’m wasting my blood, sweat and tears!

No fuss. Really_ No fuss.

 

We’ll get back to heaven soon.

 

And-if-hard-rain-is-the-piss-and-the-wrath-of-the-gods,

Then lately the gods_

Are beating the shit out of us.

 

Looking up out the train at the sky falling out_

Rat-Tat-Tat_

On the pock-marked-Plexiglas windows_

Looks as though I could get out and swim.

 

I say:

“Dorogaia, I’ll go home when I get you home_ from the City right back to him.”

 

Take warning!

Or should I say Good-Gracious to the latest early morning,

Escapade_ this train is my casket,

An empty bed is but some temporary grave with sheets.

A wasted youth on some lonely barricade.

-“Who offered you redemption?”

– “Who asked it?”

Good warning.

She doesn’t give them now.

I fear nothing_  Not even total destruction!

Re-execution_ the wrath I daily incur,

I’m just an arrogant devil, who’s stealing an angel from hell_

_Defying the last thread of reason:

Commandment Ten too so it seems

To make some destination with her.

 

And then she says in her pre-Brooklyn post-Soviet Cyrillic:

 

Her eyes switch blade sleep deprived to silver,

From blue.

“Awake–on-the-Q-again-my-devil- tovarish_ Boxing-the-demons in-you.”

If you play you play to win.

Night train to Brighton.

With-Vodka-in-our-vessels and pumps.

Come-on-in-sin!

Rationale swallowing,

Morals repressing

I’m no longer giggling.

Or humoring your rough handed caressing,

Dripping wax after gradual tantric undressing.

Your attempts at beseeching

My former soviet teaching,

It comes out like preaching sometimes.

Break the siege!

We’re clawing with word.

I’m an occupied country.

You’re re-opening wounds,

I’m your devastation_.

Fuck what you know about me as some angel,

And forgive me at least half that you heard.

 

She said “Man go home.” (Sung)

 

Again I implode.

And thus flew by the Beverly Road.

 

She thinks:

 

We-were-fighting-about-feeling,

I can beat him with my eyes.

More fun than bawled fists or a knife.

Sometimes I tell bright, white, victorious lies!

About various financial or legalous men in my life,

He doesn’t know Nothing!

But “former soviet” pillow talk.

I say: “You call me Bright Eyes!”

Why fly off the handle at first or last tries?

Why even run_ when first you must master the walk.

 

Bright Eyed Angel_

Take back the blood you bled.

I’ve wounded, you stabbed, but you’re Russian

You’re taking your time!

This place is far beyond heaven though laid out like hell,

Are we alive or are we just the working-half-dead?

 

I’m on borrowed clock:

Face punched bloody, long overdue.

Remember September when we almost died?

What if we did?

– “What’s it to you?”

– “What’s love when you’re already dead?”

Eternity is just the name_ Of a long waiting game.

If I ride this train too long_

I will never beat the dawn rise to that place I keep my bed.

You’ll draw further attention

To the contradictions in my head.

So speak of morals,

And logic,

And devotion, and never of my latest-wild-plan!

 

She says:  

 

“Do you know how far you’ll have to go to steal me from this man?”

 

To kiss is so easy.

But to take me with you is dire.

Don’t you know_ we have no place to go_

And my kisses seem to set your fragile devil heart on fire.

 

She says: 

 

“Man go home!” (Sung)

 

And there just went Cortelyou. Everything she says is mostly true.

 

I say:

 

“I’ve got no home except when I’m with you.” (Sung).

 

She reviews the balance sheet:

 

I-cannot-discern_ your-truth from-your-lies,

Romantic –propositions-are-getting-bound-in-reckless-adventures,

Picnics on steeplechase beaches,

Epic half tries!

Defiance in the face of my torturous lies!

Your life: Pledged fearlessly_ naively to mine!

Our hand cuffed, bloody hands bound together at the foot of the Partisan shrine,

I asked for seduction!

You’ve brought complication and pain.

What the blat happened on the roof in September:

Remember!

There’s no reason to think we have something to learn_ or to gain!

There’s a contract, but there is no obligation.

There are no witnesses to what I call proof.

I could have killed me and you could have killed you,

And we both would have died for not a damn thing!

And then you went and took on all those cops on your roof!

• “You put on masks!”
• “I was born with the face I wear now.”

No more last tries!

I’m nothing like former Soviet women!

I still have my feelings intact.

You have only your bloody ideals and a cause:

So you’re certainly not like other eligible American guys.

 

She says man:

 

“It’s all mostly true.”

 

I sing “I have no home, except when I’m with you.” (Sung_)

 

And-that-fight-in-the-night-was-the-same-old-fight,

That has kept us up and awake since the first blue moon in September:

I said to you_ won’t you run away with me_

And we’ll see if your husband will even remember.

 

She slaps my face with her eyes.

She says:

“I don’t take this kind of bullshit_

From much more gracious and generous guys.”

 

         She says: “Man go home!”

 

I’ve survived for this long in this country of yours,

I came here with nothing but blonde hair and dreams,

What do you know of my man who keeps me on this coast?

Who feeds me_ and clothes me_ and says that he loves me,

I will go home to his arms and you know what I’ll do

I’ll do it until he screams.”

 

“Man!

Find your way back home!”

    

I said what do you know of me?

She says I know you’re weak because

You grew up much higher up on the hill of life,

You grew up privileged in this City.

“Does it hurt the hear that? Does it scar?”

“I know that you should be much stronger than the peasant that you are!”

Now find your way back home.

I retreat

No heartbeat.

An epic defeat.

And the failure of deeds to woe her-to love her-to see her again.

I know she’s away from this husband every night of the week,

Running and hiding and dancing,

Mostly in the arms of other men.

 

“Don’t you even look at me that way”, she says.

“Don’t you look at me again!’”

Man find your way back home!

 

You kiss me each time like you’re going off to war!

You talk like a poet,

But don’t you understand yet,

Words are useless to me_ and anyone else who has ever been poor.

Listen, MAN I’m doing this because it’s true.

I can’t go home to Penza,

I can’t feed myself on poems.

And I can never be,

In epic love with you!

 

The Q train rumbles toward the coast,

Brighton Beach arrival!

It’s like I’ve died before,

And this hell is mine alone,

Russian roulette with a ghost.

She says:

Keep to the contract,

We wrote it ourselves,

You know the rules man,

Do what you should.

If you love me and kiss me and steal me away,

You’re breaking the tenth rule:

And as your muse and tovarish;

_We cannot allow our evil to triumph over our good.

 

“I will always love you.”

“You’ve said that to other women before.”

“I wish there was a way to go back and undo,”

She says, “At least when the storm ends you’ll be back in your bed,

And the roof was a dream and I didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill you.”

 

“What was this even for?”

 

I walk her brisk umbrella’ed down Banner Ave as the rain cracks down,

I bring her Q train to bombed out lobby door.

Hard-times-and-sky-falls-and-rivers-run-over-red_

And this nation erupts in on itself white and blue.

“You could learn to be as good in deeds, as you are in speech”, she says departing.

I said “I hope there’s a will for that way.”

She says “I’m doing this for mostly for you.”

 

The rain beats my brow.

Exit the hazel haired devil,

Angel’s got wild gold locks on fire as she looks back at the torrent from the door.

Our flirtation has been on fire from the start.

And now, I show signs of first submission,

And the storm smolders my position.

As I can no longer tell heaven from hell or

An angel or devil apart.

 

Poem #039.

“She says: Man_go_Home! “

Dedicated to Natasha Andreavna.

 

 

And the doors closed on me at Avenue H and the Q train southbound to Stillwell Ave. carries her home, to her husband on Banner Ave. Like I shall never see her alive again. That is what all nights have felt like since I have known her, but these four of five weeks. Parting with her is a type of death.

Knowing she returns to such an animal neither she nor I can control or break from. I begged her many time to leave with me to somewhere, to anywhere really. She only quietly laughed and loudly judged me.

The cabs could take us still thorough the Battery tunnel, but we often had to board the trains to get deeper into what was quickly becoming the most heavily armed and barricaded urban stronghold barring perhaps Baghdad and Mogadishu. Every ethnic group, every gang and mafia, every faction was warming up observing what was about to occur in the city the morning afternoon and next week days and weeks after 17 September. September 1^st had been a Great Disruption, all listening to the f IRE switch, fire station radio broadcasts knew what was soon to happen; a great slaughter.

 

So in Brooklyn, Queens the Bronx and many other places the innumerous factions of resistance dug the hell in. They got ready to hold ground, room to room, block to block. No one thought it would be feasible to storm the district financial. A real one way trip. But Anarchists are always after hard, symbolic targets and by that stage the city unions and student movement were behind them in the raid.

 

The blood of the left would spray into and open the eyes of the right and the center so went the brinkmanship of the Planning Section chiefs in the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club called also called the Banshee Otriad.

 

There would be no Anarchist Trials here, who even had time for such warnings; only massacre and atrocity. Followed by deceptions like ones perpetrated in 2001 and 2010.

 

 

Chapter 51

The Deep Nightclub, 2001ce

Tel AVIV

 

 

We’re watching a speech given by Avinadav DeBuitléirs at the Deep Nightclub, Hip Hop Speakeasy after hours in the summer of 2001. Throw it back way back;

 

“Let me tell you something about Pharisees; the holy pretenders. No one appointed them to interpret g-d. No one gave them the right to what Muslims call Shirk separate the unity of the higher power into inexplicable, incomprehensible parts.

 

That is what Pharisees excel at; making themselves powerful by making the unknown overly complicated, but still derive profit from their complex explanations.

 

Now, why speak us of Pharisees now with so much underway? Are there not enough complications; the former Soviet mobsters, the American revolutionists, the gangsters, the Haitians and the Ivorite sleeper cells; No-One is holding all the cards, The Name, HaShem, if such a force is one our side; surely it utilizes a most motley band of executioners and opportunists to achieve equilibrium.

 

Pharisees now days where white coats and white collars. They demand huge fees, tributes to “keep society running”, keep “development advancing” they perpetuate a mythology that tribute to them is tribute to the gods of science, technology, engineering and mathematics; to law and management, to economics and medicine; these are our Pharisees. And despite their brilliance half a fully 3.5 billion half of the human race is starving, perishing and sick. The Arc of development is led by these technocrats. It floats on the backs of the rest.

 

Did you know that there is no such thing as time?

 

It was invented to make your work weeks, you work lives in fact more cost effective. In Agrarian society the sun and seasons were markers, but they were not part of the countdown to the sweet hereafter. Your lives and all the parameters formed to hold you in your cage of identity, your work plantation and bind you to your toil was an irrational constriction of space and energy into something called time; that fails to exist to any other species or sentient race except in ours. Curiously, time is the most precious commodity we have; for work absorbs a vast percentage of our life span.

 

It is believed that if not for malnutrition, poor health, disease and environmental pollution the possible human life span, as reflected by the Buddhists and ultra-rich is 125 years. The life span of African American males in the United States is 53 years. 63 for Haitians. 70 for white Americans and 80 for Advanced Welfare States. Where did your time go? Probably working like a wage slave.

 

Did you know that in the year 32 CE; a raiding party of several hundred Zealots overpowered both the Roman guards and temple custodians of the Second Great Temple in Jerusalem and put to sword dozens of the Pharisee collaborators? Extorting alms while enabling Roman occupation. Were these Pharisees murdered, or were they driven out peacefully? A matter of both revisionist history and Ivorite logistics. Were there money changers in the high temple because the high priests commanded it or The Name, HaShem? Were they all drugged in a feast and removed from the Temple alive, or were they lined up on their knees and beheaded all? As we think we know; the prophet Yeshua ben Yosef, later called Jesus the Christ was executed a year later on Passover; crucified in 33 CE; that he was reborn three days later. And the Great Revolt against the Roman Empire commenced on 60 CE and continued until total dissipation, decimation of the Hebrew people and their allies in 117 CE, X years before the total fall of Rome shortly after its embrace of the Prophet Saul, Paul’s heretical transfigurations of Yeshua be Yosef into the so-called Jesus Christ. But there are all these things that we do not know, and these things are what modern Pharisees divine for you dressed in their white robes and collars. No matter what they say on that Goebbels level TED talks serial.

 

There exists a serious unquantifiable problem of measurement. Foucault did not believe we had proof of measurement of objective history prior to 1948. Pinker on the other hand in his recent tome uses so-called hard data in a very lengthy work to state that the better angels of our nature are driving us to more peaceful and equitable times. Claiming times are more stable and improving when compared to Crusades, Mongol Invasion and World Wars is indisputable to those who believe that Yeshua ben Yousef was a white hetero-sexual male, born in 0 CE in a Virgin birth to redeem a perpetually sinning species from war and poverty.

 

The new order of Pharisees exists to create the illusion of time and most importantly the illusion of progress. Which are matters of monopolizing both socio-economic measurement and communications; revising history to fit the political narrative of the day.

 

Because they, they being the privileged 0.0001% of the upper 2 billion humans consuming 80% of the world’s resources while owning 50% of the world’s wealth; they have a story they need to believe and require others to accept. They need to believe their ethno-cultural if not racial superiority earned them this development; they need to advance the narrative that they give as much as they take.

But, this is a lie. For if wild, unprecedented wealth concentrations are now such that 87 individual people own the wealth of 3.5 billion; well perhaps the great Pharisee deception is also a matter of linguistics; taking control of words to make them mean nothing.”

 

 

And then the video ends and past with it, and it is the year 2012ce again.

 

Time stopped it seemed for Sebastian Adon between the double blue moons of Labor Day Weekend and the 17 of September, the date of the General uprising. It was as if the bite of Natasha Andreavna, through his index finger to the bone had altered his very electricity and chemistry. Was it the moon; perhaps for we are but 70% water; or was she something clandestine, if not supra-natural? With so many variables, no many players and plots vying for the most cost effective means to the biggest slice of the apple; well it makes a dizzying narrative.

 

But from the minute she bit into him, the night they perished in a fourth dimensional sense on that roof; the days became long. Sebastian had forgone the gift of sleep. At some point he had had taken some pills that abstracted his world, deduced him to a broken shell. The glory of his early life and past lives squandered, but Natasha knew his face; knew his capabilities; knew how to wake a sleeper sleeping. For four straight weeks neither she nor he slept. The one or two hours of snooze was purely for biologics sake; they flattened out time.

 

On 15 September they walked down the Coney Island boardwalk towards Manhattan Beach; towards the strip of mansions and yachts in Sheep’s Head. They came across a shrine. An iron torch wrapped in barbed wire about a pillar; around the base which extended out in a marble slab as if for human sacrifice. There were dozens of low cut tombs with the names of villages and families and entire peoples wiped out in the Nazi holocaust. Upon each a short story of things Sebastian knew, knew as if experienced. And they paused there in the dry docks and canals of Sheep’s Head, with the jazz cafes and lounges lined up on Emmons Ave.

 

Time stopped.

 

“What is this poorly maintained shrine,” she asks him, “why do we linger here?”

 

And everything about his life he then knew to be a fabrication. His name, his parents, his religion, his country of origin. All a clever, highly cultivated disguise.

 

He was suddenly in many places and times at once. He was explaining to her the significance of the Partizan shrine; he was teaching her about his people’s history. She was telling him that her Ivoryish grandmother married a German baron and hid a Ivoryish lover in the manor for the duration of the purge. He told her about how when he was young he used to train with black guerillas in the shadows of these shrines all over the city; as if the younger he knew more of his past life than the man now; the man who has his face and memories wiped out repeatedly after being used by both sides of the war? Yes, the war. The oldest war; between humans and those that prey on them. And those humans which help the predators exploit us. The collaborators. They begin cleaning up the Partizan shrine which is gratified and defiled.

 

“What about the hatch?” she asks.

 

“The hatch?”

 

“I heard that under every holocaust shrine is a hatch to great behemoth craft; a black freighter ready to carry your people out to sea. If the purge, when the purge begins again.”

 

There appears to be a hollow in the base of the pillar upon which the flame site. She reaches in to brush the leaves aside, looking for the hatch. She cuts her hand on glass and bleeds out all over the shrine, until he goes in his jump bag for some bandages and iodine to pour. He secures her, she never cries out; just bleeds on her pretty dress, bleeds on the shrine.

 

“My personal paramedic,” she says, “no hatch.”

 

He is using much more of brain now. Able to be several places at once. He has seen the hatch open, seen that it needs a hand grenade to break the shrine and controlled explosion to pop the layer open to the great craft; the 24,000 person capacity nuclear powered black exodus freighter. And its sister crafts in Star City, Fort Totten, Fort Washington, Waterside and Seagate. And the corrupted one under Richmond Plaza. He thinks the freighters have been there since the 80’s. She shouldn’t know about them; unless, unless.

 

So it’s hard to describe fourth dimensional time; being in numerous reality states and historical times. She was her great grandmother he was the Ivoryish lover in the closet space hidden away. He’d been to Vienna; he’s bombed the theatre there also bombed a police station. So now, now in this state he knows that he’s not just a three dimensional man; 29 years old, a petty bourgeoisie of mixed Caucasian race in a paramedic program after the fire department put him on trial for Haiti, after the Israelis locked him up briefly and deported him for treason; he’s self-aware. He remembers the camps. He remembers the Sharashka Waltham, which is to say remembering things that haven’t even happened yet.

 

“Where are you right now?” Natasha asks him.

 

“I’m in the Waltham Special Engineering Camp, inventing the blue print 5 module training system, three years from now.”

 

“Good. Well finally, you’re awake. Five weeks under man.”

 

There was this whole other life happening all at the same time, happening while he slept and the rational mind cultivated by the Pharisees told him that his delusions were delusions but the world was sane. And several times, several times Lt. Moishe Klein asked him, “a sane man in an insane world is what?”

 

And the least complicated answer was, “insane.”

 

“What are you after?” she asks him, there in the fall, there in New York, there in front of the Sheep’s Head Bay Partizan shrine, the pillar covered in barbed wire and former Soviet looking torch.

 

“I want to know the truth about our, nature.”

 

“You need to process the truth about yourself Old Soul, you need to ask why other men sleep and you are awake, ask why you attract the others with the full range view; ask about why people like us don’t die; we just get reborn in new realities or vessels, over and over and over; why? You tell me because you’re older.”

 

“Emma?”

 

“Man, I’m not your dead wife.”

 

He sees all these things and times. The Black Freighters levitating into the air with the waters rising up and over the ramparts and swallowing up the bay. He sees massive flying fortress ships gas rocketing Brooklyn, Breuklyn? Breuklyn Soviet; the citadel of the un-born messiahs’ the son and daughter of the Mahdi?

 

“How many times have we danced?” he asks her.

 

“We’ve been dancing a lot since the 17^th century poetic little gun slinger. I’m not as old as you, I’m just currently more self-aware. Ochen Bolshoi.”

 

He remembers another time and place when she found him sleeping at the base of the Shrine; Vienna maybe, 1804? 1886? Hard to say all made up dates anyway. She found him and he drew for her and they were lovers for a year until the secret police murdered her. And there was the German baron, there was another time in the 1990’s maybe when he refused to leave the park because Italians would come every year and sacrifice a virgin Ivoryiss there by gang raping her on the marble slab; the cops would never be there. They would be asleep. And she showed up the morning he was sleeping there and she said she’s help him defend the shrine, prevent this year’s annual Yom Kippur rape atrocity. And Mickhi Dbrisk showed up and the three of them with bats guarded the shrine so when the Italians from Garretson beach did show up to decorate and foul the shrink; they three of them reinforced by forty Crips with bats really fucked those nasty kids up, broke out a lot of teeth. Was that the 1990’s? Was that during the Crown Heights Riots, the Ivory-West Indian mass hate crime? Was it reality or should I say linear Pharisee created three dimensional reality.

 

“Are you setting me up for someone?” he asks.

“Not me, No-One is setting you up,” she replies.

 

 

Chapter 29

Zuccotti Square, 2012ce

Financial district

 

 

On 16 September the clock counts, ticks, trickles down. The demonstrations are growing in size across the city stoked by the mismanagement and brutality of the National Guard and local police. There is no Federal control in most of the outlying city boroughs. Sebastian and Natasha wandered around the District financial, which appears all but empty. He took her heart painting to be framed by the one armed Egyptian Musa the fantastic framer. He took her to a small Cuban restaurant near the South Street seaport for late lunch and then his bank account said over drawn, so she paid with her husband’s black Amex.

Wondered were it a taste of things to come?

He’s wearing a blue pin stripe suit and looks handsome for a nearly broke dead guy. They wander around the district both knowing from different sources what is coming down hard tomorrow.

 

Eventually Sebastian calls a Mexican Express car service, she drags him into the long ride easily.

 

Grim sureality sets in further. They split a cab through the lines back home for her, towards the Russian quarter again via the Battery Tunnel the only passage still open, the Arab driver asks them if they want to fool around back there ‘people do all the time, it’s like I’m not ever here’; the shmuck says. What do you even say to that? They don’t even react, it’s banal to react to savages.

 

The radio said that a Hurricane called Sandy would break ground next day. But you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows as they say.

 

The cab had to stop at a barricade across Ocean Avenue. The orthodox Ivoryish militia and several Haitian sets of the Bloods were stopping all traffic from moving south of Avenue H. Only because Adon had lived on H and Ocean, only because he encountered a man he knew well Lt. Moishe Klein; were they allowed on foot to disembark.

 

“What a looker,” says Lt. Klein in Yiddish, “I’d hit that tookas for weeks.”

 

And once they clear the tertiary barricade wall on the Ocean Avenue Bridge, past the Avenue H bar lev defense lines staffed by hundreds of orthodox Ivoryish watchmen called the Shomriim as well as Garveyites and newly converted Crip and Blood sets; well they board the Q train toward Stillwell Ave.

 

 

The towers on Banner Avenue and Brighton 6^th, the Soviet style high rises put up in the Russian quarter in 1988 to absorb the million plus Ivoryish, claiming to be Ivoryish and Ivoryish-ish refugees that took boats and planes, but mostly planes to New York City in the years that the Soviet Union collapsed; those concrete towers looks like purgatory on a bad day. The rains that used to be early snows were hitting them hard. Nothing worse that cold, wet New York rains.

 

He’s seen pictures of her house. The place is white and low lit and clean and god only knows; is anything about her life real. There are no books except the ones he’s given her. He’s been in the lobby and there the sureality of the whole affair ends, each night for four weeks timeless.

 

“Once last kiss,” she says and lays it on him and they turn the corner to arrive at the departure point of the 44 Banner Ave lobby.

 

But tonight something was different. There are nine Slavic man in grey and black suits waiting in the lobby. They aren’t smiling, they aren’t taking any prisoners except the two they planned to take. Eight sets of muscle fall on them and grapple them both to the ground. They resist as best they can, but it happens quickly. One of them punches her in the face. Hit her in the stomach and she doubles over and is brought the ground.

 

A boot stamps on Sebastian’s face and his fake teeth fly out.

 

The last thing Sebastian Adon sees before electrified black asps crack against him and he falls to the ground stunned is the grinning baby face of Dmitry Khulushin, his nemesis.

The ruthless Shtarkers quickly zip them up into body bags and carry them out to the running black bullet proof armored Escalades.

 

 

Chapter 30

Under Foxy’s Nightclub, 2012ce

Brighton beach

 

He wakes up somewhere. He was walking on the Tel Aviv boardwalk, running into all these old friends. Everyone was going ok. He was heading back to his wife and kids.

 

And then he wakes up upside down. He’s fixed up on leg manacles conjoined to the ceiling. He’s chained up in some dungeon, in some sub-basement Bratva torture center, maybe. It’s not a large chamber; just enough space to hang upside down toothless and naked from the ceiling. He chemically sedated, that he can feel. There is a black X tattooed over his heart and small black tattoo marks indicating placement of chest tubes and central lines. Like this is going to be a really fucking drawn out ordeal. The light is off. They are probably not even going to ask him any questions. Most ominous in that there is a king sized bed and small stage and a boiler furnace below him. Evidently the plan to make him watch a rape and then burn him alive. That’s how these things go. Paramedic save thyself.

 

He wiggles a little, cold and bloody in the darkness.

 

The difficulty with Mr. Dmitry Khulushin Koch is that is he is a genius but also a cruel and most sadistic animal. So whatever torture he has in mind will be protracted. The last time I saw you I burned down your home with you parents inside of it, thinks Adon. Was that a real memory? This was a most timeless beef.

Do I do things like that?

Hanging upside down above a low burning gas furnace, in the low to no light of this rape room, Sebastian Adon reflects on his feelings.

 

Did Natasha set him up? They are going to torture him very badly and there is nothing that is pleasant about that, but he would feel very guilty if he had gotten her roped in without cause. He thinks he loves her. Well whatever that means. Loved her in another life? He has these memories of seeing this all exactly before. Of forty men raping his wife? His brand new lover? Forty men raping her until she could never look in the mirror again. Then they slit her throat and covered him in her blood, lit him on fire while they desecrate her corpse.

 

Romans, I think.

 

The past and present are fluid things. And he knows they are not interested in anything but his pain and humiliation. Her total degradation is their policy towards those with the chosen blood line. All the blood is going to my head.

 

White lights come on and they strobe. Yep, they’re going to rape the hell of us and burn us alive for sport or Christian ritual. Forty men in animal masks and red robes enter the room and they’re carrying Natasha in white bath robe bound and in manacles struggling like she’s aware of how this Cult performs its sacrifices. They bind her to the king sized alter.

 

Filthy fucking non-believers after a taste of the blood and body of their Christ.

 

And I’ll tell you, I don’t pray a lot like I used to. Even moments just like this where a lot of the pieces line up and you realize that they took so goddamn much from you and your people. Here I am upside down and helpless while they defile this woman I love, I love? Yes, I love because she is one of the Tzadikk haDror candidates; the potential candidates for our generations messiah.

 

   “Let’s fuck this little busty bitch to death! Then we cook their bodies and eat their essence!” yells Dmitry Khulushin unmasked dropping is pants to penetrate. He starts fingering then fucking her. She’s gagged, I’m gagged. The strobe lights are flashing, some horrible screeching dub step is playing. There are men hitting me with electric batons. Dmitry is raping Natasha and punching her in the face.

 

One of these goons flicks on the low burner and I begin to cook.

 

They have this all set up for their sick fun, I am rotated to be barbequed and held feet over flame. I can feel the searing of toes. I can’t scream out were I inclined. I smell the cooking of my own flesh and it sticks to you forever that smell.

I think the worst part about a rape room is that you realize they just plan to make others suffer at your expense until you do what they want. But Dmitry Khulushin is a vampire; he’s a demon and he just loves his work.

He begins hitting her in the face as he fucks her. Getting off on her helplessness and mine. The humiliation of seeing those your love suffer. I know it well.

 

And then suddenly Dmitry, (or really the flimsy husk holding him) has an enormous hole in his chest. And then his head ruptures and bursts brains all over the place. And his blood and guts fly out all over her naked mid-raped body.

 

Gunfire erupts:

RATARAATARARRATARRARATATRATRATRARARTARTARTARTARRATRATRATRATARATATRTRATRATRATRATRATRTARATRATRTARTARTARTAR!

 

Because Watson Entwissle has raided the ceremony with Adelina Blazhennaya and she has put a powerful spell on everyone. As is his way Watson and a twelve person crew in flicker masks and Uzis are preparing to unload live rounds on every single hostile they see in a red robe.  Kill every single person in that bloody cult ordered Emma Solomon. And burn that white church to the ground.  And Adelina was only using majik. They had gunned their way into the bowls of this enormous white church in the heart of Coney Island; yet another Catholic front for the work of these murderous devils. They had encounter minimal resistance, so as she took point and pushed open the doors to the sacrifice;

 

“Davaj,” she exclaimed. And with a small motion of her wrist, Dmitry’s heart exploded in his chest mid fuck, then she snap her fingers and his head blows off spraying blood everywhere. And before Watson Entwissle, the Mullato Haitian and his fellow rebel gunman for the Z.O.B. can open their fire; forty devil rapist heads pop off. And forty dead cult members along with the latest husk of Dmitry Khulusin fall dead on the ground in crumbled bleeding piles. As if it were just that easy to dispatch evil.

 

Adelina pushes the latest body of the ancient devil Dmitry K. off the despoiled and now covered in blood pale busty body of Natasha Andreavna. She unlocks Nata manacles and hands her a bathrobe to wipe herself and then tosses her a grey multiform. They will have to fight their way out of Coney Island, best believe.

The two women say nothing, not even hello or thank you. They know they are in competition for a lot more than the time, gun, sword or pen of Sebastian Adon.

 

Watson turns of the fire and cuts Sebastian down, and he gets a hug and a thank you, and he can barely walk from the fire to feet. Sebastian has full thick ness burns to both his feet. They had flipped him vertical to cook and cook he did.

 

“Thanks for the nearly perfect timing frère,” Sebastian says in Haitian Creole. Although Dmitry raped his lover and they cooked his feet until he can’t walk. Other than that the timing was nearly perfect.

 

They leave the ‘White Church’ in flames and all the ghouls headless like it is Paris 1789 all over again. With Sebastian on a stretcher they load up into three ambulances and take off for District Midwood, because even in this near lawless state of emergency you can’t just burn a big white church in Brooklyn with no reactions.

 

There are almost no cars on the roadway, a curfew was called on the radio. Which make is easier for the government drones to light up the convoy with air to surface missiles. And the missiles blow this ambulance convoy right off the parkway.

 

Around Avenue U hellfire rockets take out the first of the three ambulances in the convoy. The third shortly after. Natasha and Sebastian are in the middle of the convoy. She grabs the side arm off one of the rebel fighters and shoots him point blank in the chest. She sucker punches Adelina as hard as she can, and she goes down. And tires to put a round in Watson, but the gun jams. So she picks him up with her mind and throws him out of the back of the crashed ambulance. She tells Sebastian, “be cool, this is not a fruitful rescue party.” She tucks in note in Adeline’s bandoleer for later, explaining herself a little why she’s struck a candidate and country woman. “Sorry” is all it mostly says.

 

And she pressure strikes Watson in such an ancient way with four fingers, vasovagal and he goes out too.

 

She knows Sebastian can barely walk. So she throws him over her shoulder, like she was taught in the Black Cats Unit 669, when she trained under Abner Kreminizer back in 1999ce; and she hauls his ass across the parkway before the drones can make their second pass for pick offs. She has no cash, no documents, no weapons, just was raped, but her mind and the extraction point at the Tavern is nearly 24 clicks north, across the barricade lines.

 

She has to get this man to her latest employer Sasho Alexandre Perchevney, bring him fully alive to the Mehanata Social Club so they can sit out this sure to be disastrous first phase of the American uprising alive and get the hell out this reality before it implodes. Either she has to carry him through the sewer and subway tunnels or listen to yet another disgusting Arab cab driver make degrading comments all the way back to Manhattan.

 

 

Chapter 31

1 Wall Street, 2012ce

Financial district

 

On 17 September over 144,000 demonstrators and over 10,000 cops (who knows where the papers got those numbers) battled across the tight & narrow ravines of the District Financial with bottle rockets, gas bombs and by mid-day were exchanging gun fire. The trade unions and socialists called in reinforcements around noon and soon the whole district was then awash in tear gas and broken glass and Taser fire and then quite live fire and protesters being beaten bloody in front of the stock exchange and the Deutsche Bank, something hit the mainstream prole feed media about a bomb going off in the Stock Exchange, and then, the TVs all switched to sports, commercials and giggling tits.

 

The rising on the anniversary of the occupation a year ago suppressed and the attempted recapture of Zuccotti Park was under way.

 

A national General Strike was declared in relation to the State of Emergency called for by the Anonymous and newly christened ‘Résistance Alliance’. It was observed only in L.A., Oakland, Detroit, and Chicago and partially in Boston, D.C. and Miami but then the internet went blank at 14:00. And the TV news babble junkied out misinformation, prole feed.

 

So then no one knew who has fighting where, resisting where, what was even happening. And so things then got a lot more violent than anyone had anticipated. Purge orders were issued by dreaded Director Breria of the Department of Homeland Security. Amidst a media and internet black out martial law had been declared. The District financial was surrounded. The Occupiers and unionists and students and innumerous others well over by then 600,000 demonstrators had over run most of the district and barricaded them streets leading into it.

 

The New York Stock Exchange was set ablaze around 22:00. A massive General Assembly held in Battery Park called for a full blown national revolution.

 

But, most of the country didn’t even know what was happening. The Department of Homeland Security activated FEMA, the Militias and the Guard. Then, just after midnight; sweet repression.

 

The Special Security Services, the NYPD, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, and the rightist Patriotic Militias moved in; they gassed or shot virtually everyone. By the next day, there were corpses all over the streets, blood all over the trading floors and god only knows how many movement people were dead. No one knew. Almost nobody made it out of the district alive.

 

17 days from the initial rising at the Labor Day Parade the U.S. government had massacred over 50,000 activists and leftists, no one knew human many for sure; thousands of students and their supporters all but disappeared in the weeks to come. FEMA and the DHS under the strict leadership of Director Breria fanned out across the country and slaughtered 500,000 plus rebels and supporters, students and people they happened to know. It was as if these 500,000 persons had never even been. Or was it 50,000? 5,000? Or had there just been a storm and a flood.

 

And by the time in early November they finally cleared the streets, the waters had resided and most of the left and progressive opposition was gone. As if they had fought and planned and died for nothing and their countrymen had never even peeled away from the television tuned to sports or tits or adverting.

 

But, Sebastian Adon and most of his friends did not die in the purge, the historically hidden democide regularly committed by states! He survived because he and Natasha were ambushed by her husband and her husband’s friends in the lobby of her building which resided on 77 Banner Avenue.

 

And the comrades of Adon, his dearest friends; many of them survived the next 48 hours by fighting their way out of the district financial as it was overwhelmed by flame and gas; they shot their way out and managed to escape to the borough of Brooklyn via the old tunnels, guided by mole people and Oleg Megved and Mikhail Mastrovitch the Ivorite special operations agents sent to rescue them.

 

And it was young, wispy Adelina Blazhennaya that rescued Natasha and Adon, much to her better judgment; for it was not meant to be that leftists would lead the Great Revolt; it would come from the renewed consciousness of human kind, not old ideas or even new ones. But while Adon and men like Mickhi Dbrisk, Watson Entwissle and Michael Goldbar Allamby would all have great and upcoming roles to play; it was women keeping them all alive with pistols and magic the nights of 17th, 18th and 19th September well until early November when the U.S. Federal Government carried out Operation Garden Plot 2 to murder almost every single rebel in the country in one stomp of the iron heel.

 

As so many were fleeing the carnage of Manhattan; Natasha Andreavna with Adon in a body bag was hiking her was in heading straight to the Mehanata Social Club dragging him over her shoulder.

 

 

Chapter 32

116 Ludlow Street, 2012ce

Mehanata

 

 

Hanging above the main dance floor across the third floor gallery area is a clothesline and from it hangs a wide variety of female under garments that were not there when the club opened and the evening began.

 

The origin of these under garments is a source of amusement for the casual patron and a source of unspoken shame for a variety of young women hired as trial waitresses and bartenders, also unseasoned patrons left drinking heavily and unattended.

 

Sometimes a seemingly small place can become a vast labyrinthine and impregnable fortress when inundated with a bit of black magic, vodka and immigrant elbow grease. Perspective is but a cheap pair of sunglasses after all, paradigms are but Costco contacts to be shed and quietly replaced at will.

Were you to visit Mehanata on a Thursday you might come to think it only a single story lounge. Friday and Saturday patrons might access the basement Ice Cage and third floor table galley, but when it gets past 400am Sunday morning, not only can carriages change to pumpkins, but the depth and girth of the rabbit hole here can delve expansively into the fourth dimension.

 

Oh yes, the tavern is a vast entrapment.

 

Its 4:09 am. And everyone that isn’t meant to be in the club has been pushed, cajoled or driven out like a herd of drunken cats and those that remain are only staff or spoken for card carrying regulars.

Astika and Corona bottles litter the establishment on any number of table booth perches, the dive bar black piss fluids of spilled drinks irrigate all floor space.

A flurry of activity directed at securing the premises from external assault comes quite suddenly.

Justin Azello bolts the door with the pull of a large metal brace and shortly after James White and James Behemoth begin piling tables against it. There is an urgency with which they carry out this task as well as efficiency. It is not the simple and previously observed urgency of men and women working long hours and just wishing to go home. The three man Mexican kitchen staff lines up and begins stacking crates and kegs and assorted furniture against the storm shutters now pulled down and latched closed over the second exit to the tavern.

Martina the bartender begins placing bottles of liquor below the bar, vigorously. Conspicuously absent is all of her clothing and in the strange new light of the bar her wild black curly hair for some reason appears fire red. How curious, thinks Sebastian through the haze of his own vodka and pilsner soaked observational capabilities, which maintain some attention to idiosyncratic detail.

Ernesto Lynch looks as though he is half asleep, a zombie casually examining his drink seated at the bar on the swing seat, taking dainty swigs his head drooping, intermittent half singing accompanies the dull steady thumping of his palm to the bar. Victoria Lynch is also entranced so it seems, seated beside him on one of the four two-person bench swings abutting the main bar.

The lighting has completely changed. It’s become eerie in here on the eyes. Everyone who smokes is now smoking which is absolutely everyone except the Mexican kitchen staff, the Lynches and James White the Fenian bouncer who used to be a cop and still carries himself like one, except more jolly. The plumes waft about like ghosts of tobacco island taking on shapes most various in the doldrums of the shifty light which remains other worldly, blue tones and greyscale which emphasize reds of Martina’s lick stick, reds of Natasha’s large pocket book satchel, and the reds of the wine.

Sebastian without using words makes a quiet Hebraic motion of his hands pantomiming a peace signed puff and his eyes go half black wolf, half-drunk rabbit and so thus alerting Natasha Andreavna that he wishes her to retrieve the packet of Newports out of her deep red pleather purse, and share one with him.

Her hand bag seems as though in contains an endless assortment of things that cannot via the laws of normative physics fit inside it. Were a sledge hammer to be passed out of it he wouldn’t even feign surprise.

As of lately they seem to share all their cigarettes when they are happy with each other and tonight the are indeed happy because she has plied herself with eight types of vodka infusion and he has sipped on enough Astika to be doing an accomplished impersonation of Latin American dancing all evening.

Sasho is watching everyone and everything from the end of the bar, his back to the wall of the kitchen. The boss is wearing a black leather jacket his face stern and commanding; he snaps his fingers and fire takes form off his index finger. From this miraculous flame he lights a long cigar.

An uncanny display of black magic, thinks Natasha.

 

If anyone else notices this trickster subterfuge, then they hardly seem surprised. Martina takes from below the bar a chalice of usual size, Byzantine even in proportions and pours him off a tall glass of what is presumably a thick red wine, although the lighting, quite unusual as said, makes it appear as though it is thick sanguine blood.

 

But he doesn’t sip this concoction, just leaves it out.

 

Sasho remains at the head of the bar with his unusually large chalice of blood red wine having ordered the entire fortification effort with simple subtle nod.

 

Misha Korovyov with his flowing brown hair and one eyed squint, and playboy bi-winning manic grin with some European designer cigarette dangling out his mouth throws his arms around Natasha and Sebastian. It was a though the eccentric Bulgarian materialized behind them.

 

“Joyous epic times new friends! Where but five weeks ago we were all merry strangers now we are intimate coconspirators!”

 

As if to coincide with the subversions of reality and convention already underway, Natasha and Sebastian although aware of phantom lights, of the mezmerization and stupor of the Lynches; of Martina’s brazen nakedity; now also it appears James Behemoth mostly called “James Brown”, to differentiate him from “James White” the former cop in casual conversation, the sly and charming Puerto Rican bouncer; well for lack of a better description, he has now transformed into a hippopotamus sized black cat! Walking upright still in his leather jacket, James Behemoth is now at the bar and Martina is pouring a pint glass sized frothy frozen vodka shot and leaving him the bottle.

“Are we in the secret company of angels or demons?” asks Natasha in a whisper.

Misha grins, “That’s the spirit! What my lovely Mademoiselle if I told you that the combination of man’s primitive brain with his powers of creativity with his latent albeit savage thirst for self-importance, self-aggrandizement creates an ongoing wildly unstable variable where bye all manners of mythology have been generated turning vastly complex phenomena, into well, cautionary children’s tales?” rambles Misha K, the wild eyed Bulgarian millionaire.

“I’d go even further to say, to caution even the arrogance of making Judeo-Christian spiritual assumptions in this day and age. The utter epitomes of self-absorption most grand that would make you all assume that you were either the center of the universe figuratively. Literally or neurologically; more so spiritually. Even now putting these base ideas into Amerikanski I must use nine words when in my own native tongue I could use a hand gesture, a syllable.”

 

“He speaks a lot while not saying anything,” notes Natasha.

“Indeed.” says Sebastian.

 

“Good, Evil, Angels and Demons! Flabergashy I say. Well I’m sure someone from the former Soviet Union once has explained how there is no such thing. No such thing as either. I’ve never seen an angel before I laid eyes on this woman” he says taking Natasha Andreavna’s hand and kissing it gently.

“Enchante,” she responds facetiously doing her famous micro curtsey.

“To which I attempted to refute that with my American understandings of hope and heroism there are both angels and demons battling everywhere, and certainly good and evil are quite real I assure you,” Sebastian retorts.

“Mere devices in service of the ego sir, you see there may be deeds that cause pain or deeds that cause pleasure, but all of them get accomplished without some god or the devil whispering in the ear of human kind.”

“I’ll believe what I believe and you believe what you believe,” Sebastian says paraphrasing the Prophet Muhammad.

“And I’ll believe what I’ve believed all along which is that you men say a lot of drunk bullshit when you all drink!” Mutters Natasha, “darling tovarish let’s leave now, these wily tricksters offer us little besides their temporary refuge, their wine and some vodka.”

“Darling tovarish, it looks as though they have sealed us in,” Sebastian notes.

The fortifications are very much in place.

It even appears that the enormous vodka drinking black cat that was once James Behemoth is welding the metal door behind the barricade right to its frame. Ernesto is singing some old folk tune in Spanish as he gently swings the bench back and forth. Sasho has not left his standing perch at the bars end.

“It is not to seal you in. It is to keep the law enforcers temporarily at bay when they arrive,” states Sasho.

“Well sit down,” Sasho commands.

There is age as well as gypsy wisdom expressed in the features of this strong man, though his Semitic black eyes burn with casual madness. But, it is also as if he has not aged in ten years, will not age in ten more. Perhaps he has never aged at all thinks Sebastian as a remarkable feeling of de ja vu over takes him. He had wandered into this tavern many times over the course of the decade, but when had been the very first time?

 

What had that original indulgence cost?

 

Sebastian Adon and Natasha Andreavna seat themselves on the plank of the bar bench swing closest to Sasho. Martina drops shot glasses in front of them. Her nakedness is ignored by virtually everyone. Natasha notices. And out of his corner eye Sebastian does too. And in this noticing of her pale, curvy and naked Bulgarian body he sees although flawless in her nude form she has what appears to be a subtle ecchymosis of the neck, a hicky perhaps, but black and blue. The only deformity to her naked perfection.

 

“I have plenty of doubts about helping you,” Sasho begins. “Just because you’re adulterers doesn’t mean you came to play with a full hand of cards.”

“They’re not consummated adulterers, just wild reckless ones with intent to achieve adultery,” Martina interjects.

“Please do remain quiet, Hella,” Sasho commands.

“What is it you want from me again?” Sasho asks.

“A trade,” says Sebastian. “A job,” says Natasha.

Their answers came out at once.

 

“You have nothing that I cannot just take, either of you.”

 

“I respect you sir, your powers I mean and this establishment generally, but we are not afraid of you,” Sebastian says, “Unlike many others we are neither enthralled nor intimidated easily. Our regularity has not indebted us to your, tavern.”

Sasho grins and his smoke trails take form before then, out his lips the smoke becomes a floating diorama of urbanity unraveling into anarchy.

Misha K. interjects himself into the palaver with wild hand motions and flailing;

“You ought to be more afraid of your fellow humans. And each also other since both of you albeit human are both vigorously more endowed. There will not be dawn breaking in two hours. Outside lawless mobs are looting and burning, the whole city is on fire. Heads are being cut off as though this were Jacobin France. The police are killing people in the streets. Sheer and total anarchy! And as we speak cordons of police are marching their way across the Lower East Side, heading here! They are after you two who they wrongly suspect of being key players in this bloody revolution being carried out. The Authorities dejour mean to arrest you both for high crimes, conspiracy and treason! In any number of minutes they will be banging on these doors asking for your heads on platters.”

Martina pours shots for them from a deeply frosty unmarked bottle.

“Do you love her?” Sasho asks pointing to Natasha.

“Of course I do,” Sebastian says. “Of course he does,” she responds simultaneously.

She turn to him as if surprised, although it’s come out once before.

“She doesn’t love you at all.”

“I realize that.”

“She most likely and I say this respectfully but with great faith, she never will. Not in this lifetime anyway.”

Sebastian turns to Natasha and takes her hand. She doesn’t pull away from this grossly sentimental display.

“Well as we all know. It’s not as if you only get one try.”

Sasho grins and breathes about smoke.

“I’ve run out of people to help me run and places to hide are running short as you know. If I am not mistaken many of my friends and associates have been taken or killed over the course of this black night. If I am not mistaken, the authorities think I am higher in the non-existent chain of command of this uprising than I really am. If I am not mistaken some rather grisly crimes have been committed over the past five weeks, my alleged role the general uprising not withstanding; it seems that the authorities wish to try us not just for treason but for sick, an heinous offenses committed by some rampant cult in grey.”

“Well it is certainly not Behemoth and I who are the poster children of the uprising or the slaughters of young wayward women,” notes Justin Azello.

“We may be an establishment of handsome devils, trickster Gypsies and seductresses and thieves, but we are not sick fuck murders,” states James White seated now at the long bar with a Corona which is also the neighborhood in Queens that he lives in.

 

“Are you asking me for help?” Sasho asks.

“We don’t have anyone else to turn to, at this juncture” Natasha says.

“Are you saying your g-d is ignoring you?” Misha K. asks with a grin, “are you saying you tried to pray and nothing happened?”

“Imagine that,” says sly Martina.

“Look here,” interrupts Natasha, “we are not at your mercy. Although he doesn’t exactly look the part right now per-say, this man is or was; Vasa the gunslinger.”

“Vasa the gunslinger!” echoes Martina.

“Vasa the gunslinger,” repeats Misha with glee.

“Yes, yes I know the human protégé of Archangel Michael, guardians of the unborn children of potential messiahs,” states Sasho.

“If such fantasies are still believed in,” says Misha K.

“I believe,” declares James Behemoth.

“Me too,” says James White, the injured and retired cop. A mortal and a Catholic too.

“Martina, my Hella, what think you of us assisting agents of, the other side?”

“Well now!” She leans her supple frame over the bar painting up her lips deep blood red as she does, “Well most interesting is that neither of them reports to remember anything of their past lives and associations, in a word, sorcery made them mortal this round, but who’s sorcery? Not ours surely or we’d have known about it.”

Justin Azello with a cowboy killer in his mouth is now also seated at the devils bar table and declares, “We definitely would have known about it.”

Martina continues, “The mystics long believed that in each generation would be born one hundred and four candidates out of the bloodline of King David, house Judah that these candidates would be hidden from the so called forces of good and evil, that then three would reveal themselves by their 33 year as the Tzadikk haDroriim, the three potential candidates for messiah. Only these three; a warrior, a sage, and an oracle might reverse the tide of human suffering and usher in an age of reason and compassion. Suffice to say, a good much was invested to snuff this nonsense out. Many factions have at one time or another joined hands to abort this prophesy as close to the womb as possible. Mostly by killing or corrupting them before the year of their revelation. Often by getting at their mothers before they are born. Have you heard this Old Soul mythology before?”

“Emma Solomon!” yells Justin Azello suddenly and neither Natasha nor Sebastian flinch or appear to recognize the name.

“Who’s Emma Solomon again?” asks Sebastian with a poker face.

Sasho, with a poker face says, “Never mind.”

“If I told you that you were both super natural beings with auspicious births and no biological fathers, at least not genealogically speaking what would you make of that?” asks Sasho.

“I’d say stop fucking around with drunken people and get down to business,” Natasha retorts.

“Alright then, if it is in my power, I’ll make you both a good deal. For a job I require you to follow this man to the cross roads and keep him from selling his third soul to anyone, anyone at all. I will help you escape and you will be in my employ for three years of human time which is considerably more or less fourth dimensionally speaking, though cost no more than three life days here in this reality. As for a trade I will trade you her contract to me and help you both quite literally disappear if you will go on a little field trip on my behalf once you escape.”

“So my job for your establishment is to escort Sebastian on some mission into exile?” Natasha asks.

“Exile isn’t any place to hide. We offer you improved fourth dimensional time travel,” states Misha.

She looks at them all blankly, this cohort and Otriad of thieves, whores and devils.

“What in the fuck are you talking about!?” Natasha asks.

“Let me blunt, before I am specific because time is for once not really on your side tonight new friends,” says Misha, ” Sasho might I be so bold as to lay out the terms?”

Sasho makes a hand motion and a shrug indicating the international indication of; carry on.

“Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. We know what your keeper will do to keep you! He’s found Mr. Adon’s letters; he has your passport and Adon’s parents address and your mother’s too. He’s not going to let you just walk away, he’ll make all the people dear to you suffer first, that is the man he is. Sebastian; Vasili, whatever you’re calling yourself this epoch. Since the little melee on that train and in the district your little band of black brothers has been hunted down and exterminated down to almost the last woman and man. Not only are you all being accused of being of house of subterfuge and treason, when you are arrested they will accuse you and she and your associates in the Z.O.B. of being sadistic vampires cannibals! They will drag you before trial and say that the thirteen of you were kidnapping, raping and vivisecting young girls for sacrifice.

And then they will line you up and execute you all to make an example. Under any scenario your little five weeks of romance have yielded impending catastrophic dividends.”

Natasha shrugs. Sebastian again with a different Bulgarian hand sign often utilized by Sasho and Misha asks Martina to fill up their shot glasses and get Natasha a red bull chaser.

“How now?” he says.

“Most basic. We will hide you in the past and the future. She will belong then to us, and you can auction her freedom with your abilities. You will thus work under a contract with a devil like me for three days’ time. Which will feel to you like three years over three past lifetimes. And when it’s done you’ll both be free and your friends will be alive and your city will be secure and spring time will be near. Instead of torture, prison, murder, death, not just yours and hers but your friends and families, instead of another victory for one side or another, you get freedom. You get to absolve yourself of the burdens you were born into, and in five weeks flirted your way toward courting oblivion.”

“What does he have to do, for us to get that?” Natasha asks.

“Three day’s work,” claims Sasho.

“But three years in the eye of the mind,” warns Martina always quite a fan of Sebastian’s hopeless romanticisms and writing, also the way Natasha moves men.

“What is it that we have to get done in these three days, or lifetimes or whatever to save our families and friends and each other?” Sebastian asks.

“Hella,” says Sasho.

She open her pouty lips and pulls out a tiny scroll and on it reads: “Die, steal the moon, kill a lesser demon, and take good notes of your comings and goings. Return to life.”

“Miraculous levels of detail here,” says Natasha sarcastically.

“If you sign yourselves to me and my gang I will not only harbor you but I will aid you at all stages in getting this job done.”

“How will we convincingly die?”

“I will put your souls in new vessels and leave convincing corpses for the authorities and your husband to find.”

“Dance magic dance. The implications of your voodoo are not as interesting to me as what in past lives and other times you want us to accomplish,” exclaims Natasha.

“I want you to see for yourselves what happened to the man Yeshua ben Yosef in the year 33, I want you to kill a certain demon I compete with in 1933, and I want you to steal a diamond of enormous size in 1996 and trade it with an old Ivory who will give me something I require.”

“In just three days, what the fuck man,” Natasha exclaims, “What expertise do either of us even have for this black magical undertaking?”

“Three days here. Three years there. Over three lifetimes. Understand what you’re signing,” says Martina.

“And what is it you want from the old Ivory?” Asks Natasha as if the notion of time travel and other lives doesn’t perplex her in the slightest.

“I want leverage. I’m bargaining now to open a second tavern and I require a bargaining chip.”

“And on your three day journey you will take care of three variables I need adjusted.”

“What’s on the list?” Natasha asks.

“Names of women he wishes to employ at the new tavern,” Martina smiles.

“It’s a rather tall order. Infiltrate and revise the New Testament, wack a lesser demon, and steal a precious stone to get a list of women’s names. Fourth dimensional mission impossible,” Sebastian says likening it to a great American film.

“The things a woman will do for a man in the name of her freedom, sounds like Master and Margarita,” says Natasha likening it to her favorite novel.

“We’re going to help you,” says James Behemoth.

“It’s not as if we’re just going to burn the social club to the ground and quietly plant your lifeless corpses about the city and vanish into blue smoke,” says James White.

“Although that was one plan,” says Justin Azello.

“Oh no-no, were gonna to that and transmography the entire tavern down the rabbit hole of time. We’re gonna help you run three mighty-mighty epic miracles,” claims Misha.

“For leverage,” says Justin Azello.

“With whom?” Natasha asks.

“The man who issues liquor licenses and cabaret licenses for the city,” smiles Martina.

“We’re not stupid,” says Natasha.

“And we’re not demons,” says Misha K with a smile adjusting his glasses.

“You’re definitely not angels,” says Martina.

“I am a devil though,” states Sasho, “not the devil, because there isn’t just one anything in a universe so vast, but know that if you two don’t live up to my powers of intervention, then the Bratva your keeper associates with, and the security apparatus of the American state investigating you, and the cult that pursues you will be the least of your problems,” explains Sasho.

“By far the least,” says Justin O’ Azello.

“Why us? Why help us though. What makes you think we can do what you want?” Sebastian asks.

“Because you’re Old Souls,” says Misha.

“Because I’m not dealing with paramedic student Adon son of a privileged bourgeoisie, and Natasha Andreavna, accounting student debutante, property of Bratva,” exclaims Sasho, “once you leave these bodies I’ll have put two very powerful creatures on my pay roll: Vasa the Gunslinger and Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova Maccluskey; Candidate 64.”

“Candidate?” she asks.

“Oh poor unfortunate souls, the ethanol clouded all your past lives and pasty accomplishments,” says Martina pinching Sebastian’s cheek.

“Moonstruck until they can’t tell an angel or devil apart,” says Justin Azello quoting the prophetic verses.

Martina leans in, “Why, you’re Vasa the Gunslinger, student of the archangel Michael, the greatest killer of demons in Gregorian time! And you,” she says leaning into Natasha, “well via the blood line of the house of Judah traced only in part by our little gang, well you have Ivorite blood, you are candidate mother of a Tzadikk ha Dror.”

“What does that even mean!!” Natasha half yells.

“You might bear the messiah of your generation and he is the man in the grey mask, a historical serial killer. Your blood and your womb and your collective memories will take us where we need to go and his deadly-deadly aim will let us acquire the things we need,” says Misha.

“If we do as you ask we can save our families and his murdered friends and we can return in three days and when we do what we change will set us free?”

“Precisely. And when the new tavern opens I’ll rehire you both happily,” states Sasho.

“Albeit in far more glorious capacities!” declares Misha.

“Absofuckinglutely!” yells Sasho.

“All this for a cabaret license,” mutters James Behemoth.

“For a cabaret most subversive to the elites of this world and lucrative for me. For all of us. So if you would, Hella!”

Martina Hella Dubryska pulls a ball point pen of solid gold out her red lips.

Rising out of nowhere from each shot glass emerges a rolled scroll.

 

Natasha takes the one in front of her written in Russian. Sebastian’s is in Russian too and thus he cannot even read it.

“You trust her don’t you?” says Martina with a wink, “she’ll translate it.”

“What’s it say?” Sebastian asks Natasha not even thinking so hard about the content.

Slowly she translates:

 

“..I will own you and you will own me and the Perchevney Bratva will own us both until completion of our duties to Mehanata which include documentation and surveillance of the man Yeshua be Yosef and his wife Mary Magdalena; the assassination of a demon in the form Mr. Breria head of the Stalinist secret police; and the theft of the blue moon diamond. Once said duties are in order we are free people and all calamities unleashed by our brief passions will be un-made allowing us at that juncture to part as associates or should love or passion grow strong enough to marry and allow Alexandr Sasho Perchevney the honor of hosting our happy marriage.  It specifies that under no circumstances are you to be allowed to sell your third soul, nor am I to have sexual intercourse with you with results in child,”

“Avoid vaginal sexual intercourse!” interrupts Martina, “we don’t care about the rest of it. No babies made between your races.”

 

Natasha without even squinting continues, “And we are prohibited from drinking alcohol while under contract as it will lead to babies being made.”

 

“And what does mine say?”

And she looks it over.

“It says almost the same thing except for a sub clause which establishes that should we fail at our tasks you assume full responsibility for all resulting actions.”

“Bro, just sign the thing, the cops are gonna be here to kick in the door any minute now, I have a good tip. You’re gonna get accused of harvesting and eating women’s sexual organs. Just sign the thing. Its three days of work and it your only way out,” says James White, who as the only human privy to the sorcery at work is rooting for Sebastian as a former civil servant.

“I love you,” Sebastian says looking into Natasha’s big blue eyes and he signs the contract totally unable to read it.

She marvels at this then calmly signs hers.

 

A banging on the metal doors shakes everyone out of their surrealist stupor.

 

“Welcome to the staff,” Martina says extending her hand.

The banging continues muffled shouts through a public address system declare everyone must come out before the homeland authorities come inside. It sounds as though a battering ram has been deployed.

“‘James White and my noble Companeros please exit via the roof and see to it that the body doubles are put in place before dawn,” commands Sasho, “Tomorrow is Friday thus this is when Natasha must be found lifeless in Brighton and it must be believed that Adon murders himself on Saturday. And please call the Lynches a cab. Everyone else! To the Ice Cage.”

James Behemoth still in the form of a cat kicks over an enormous canteen of petrol as does Martina. Everyone forms a line behind Sasho and then go down stairs. The stink of petrol is over powering. Justin Azello opens the freezer door. A hatch in the floor is then unlatched and they behold a bottomless pit.

 

“Down the tunnel you go, we’ll be right behind you as soon as we burn this place to the ground,” Misha K. declares.

 

“Remember, no matter where you end up find the tavern and there we will be,” Martina says.

Natasha turns to Sebastian and takes his hand as they enter the freezer box with wall to wall vodka for the very first and possibly last time.

 

“No drinking, no fucking and no selling his soul,” Justin Azello repeats.

“I’m sorry that I’ve gotten you into this whole mess,” Natasha says to Sebastian.

“Did you do it on purpose?” He asks her as they stand at the precipice.

“I did. But I had no choice.”

Contemplating the utter madness of the past five weeks, the misadventures the brushes with death, now the signing of a contract with the devil and a step into the unknowns of the past!

 

“Bze platnee syr ve mishalovka,” Sebastian declares.

 

The only free cheese is in a mouse trap.

He pronounces everything correctly this time, for the most part.

 

“If you do a good job, and we get them what they want, then I promise ill make love to you until you don’t even know the difference between your wants and your needs, between lust and loving, I will give you everything you ever wanted from me.”

“For how long?”

“Three days or forever.”

“Natasha, no matter what happens I’m glad that you found me on that roof top.”

 

“We shall see,” she says with her famous poker faced smile.

 

Holding hands they step out and fall tragically into the abyss, a hole in the ceiling, in the floor.

 

 

Chapter 33

Stillwell Ave, 2012ce

Coney Island

 

The Uprising and subsequent mass killings were over after just three days, most of the rag tag resistance forces wiped out by the third week after except in Bronx and Brooklyn. Very few people made it out of the District Financial alive. Blood and bodies were in the streets. The Stock Exchange didn’t open for a week later. A super storm hit the city right before Halloween, washed all the filth and failure away.

Sent most of the Russian quarter under the black brine of still water. They later found Natasha’s body in the Stillwell Station, over dosed on god knows what. Cold and dead. Rumor had it at Mehanata that she’d left with Adon, last anyone had seen them.

He had turned up in the Bell House, loony as hell. Totally mind fucked. Got discharged, allegedly. He was unintelligible when Rafael and Victoria went to visit him. Somehow all he knew was that Natasha was dead. A normal Bell House stint is three weeks easy, but then, the wire said Sebastian was also dead. Two shots to the head and dumped down that very same abyss where he and Natasha had almost died.  But, now. They were both confirmed to be quite dead.

As the super storm tore apart the city.

Amnesia and the weather setting in.

As if there had never been an uprising. Never been a massacre.

Never been Sebastian and Natasha.

Their funerals of course were very separate, but held on the same day because gentiles are sit out on death display, but Ivories go right in the ground.

 

“They’re with Jesus now,” says Victoria gripping her husband’s hand. But didn’t she mean Maya?

 

Her husband is more a Catholic than she is. But the irony here, in a statement like that, is that if Jesus was now reincarnated and returned  to us as both a Haitian revolutionist and a Sephardic warrior goddess;  and heaven was to brought to an island archipelago in the Caribbean then the story is evidently going to be harder to explain, and the plot will thicken like blood. Because the interesting thing about an idea whose time has come, when supported by old souls; killing the messengers will never silence the intention of their words.

 

The last thing Sebastian heard before his soul left his body after two gun shots was: ‘put them in the memory vats and torture them again and again, and again and again.’

 

[1] This national uprising was crushed completely with infiltration, batons and tear gas within the first three months.

[2] In 1965 with logistical support from the CIA, the government of Indonesia brutally killed upwards of 500,000 people with explicit or inferred Communist beliefs. At the time the Communist Party of Indonesia was the third largest on earth, behind USSR and China.

Scene 10

High Bridge Outpost, 2010ce

Bronx

Technician Castro

 

7:14pm is 19:14 in military time Ambulance speak.

 

It’s Friday. I think. The job plays tricks on you with time.

Your loved ones never understand how your weekend moves through the week on the eight hour units. On five, off two, on five; off three.

It isn’t rocket surgery.

It makes cheating easy though.

Which I get accused of far more than I ever get to do.

Someone heard a crash in the night on the unpaved service road between the Deegan and the Harlem River called Exterior Ave. A bump that jolted us to sudden tachycardia, that is to say a fast heart rate, at our true 89 above the Deegan and Harlem River; which is to say where we are supposed to be stationed during our tour or within three blocks of. With the current staffing crisis we’re one of only six BLS trucks running in the South Bronx tonight.

It’s gotten bad like that.

I have my twelve years in the making; thick brown dreads tied off in stocking cap behind my head. I’m working straight time 17Boy Tour 3 with Leon Goldstone the ever eager emergency worker. The most enthusiastic employee we have. They sent me a notice today that I have to cut my dreads. It’s been an ongoing battle for the past two years. I had to claim “religious observance” and join a Rasta Mansion to get some papers! These cock suckers.

Enough to make me Banshee disturber, and accidental founding member.

Every time a Captain sees them I get more bullshit.

Now the Department is claiming it interferes with me getting my gas mask APR on.

As if I’ll ever use that thing.

But I’m civil service now. If they want to restrict me for my dreads I’ll take the four month vacation while the EEO lawyers sort it out. Not like I can lose my job now. You’d have to take titty sounds on an underage girl to get fired at this stage.

Which someone just did of course.

Rumor has it were functioning at 45%.

It’s a veritable skeleton crew these days. The rumors move faster than the ambulances; and they’re mostly lies and exaggerations. Excuses to complain.

We’re posted up at 17 Adam’s 89 location, on an off ramp no longer active above the Major Deegan right under the infamous High Bridge.  17A is the laziest goddamn unit in the whole South Bronx and that really says something. It’s a mentor truck so when they aren’t skelling out of their own devices they pass all the work to the rookies. I’m out here with Leon Goldson who’s doing overtime. Seems like he’s always doing overtime. Doing overtime or working out. Guy’s a freight train. Sometimes we’ll work out during facilities, irregularly mind you; and dude is diesel. And a nice guy too. Real refreshing having a partner who still like the job, probably cause he knows he ain’t gonna be doing it forever. He’s at Lehman College for Social Work. I tell him this is a lot like Social Work. ‘But without a defiant result’ he responds.

I have no idea what he means by that.

“I can’t be sure I’ve ever helped any of these people,” he continues.

“With social work there’s more hands on,” he says from behind the wheel, “there’s a real feeling you’ve gotten up in their life and given um some resources. Something more substantial than air and aspirin.”

“Sometimes a little Oxygen therapy is all a person really needs,” I respond sarcastically.

“Come on now. Even if we drive fast they done mostly fucked up their bodies well before we even met um. And more to case; nothing you or I can say in the so-called golden hour is gonna make um hold off on the stoags, and the poison, the fast food, the red meat, the gang bangin’ ways. We’re a non-factor, is all.”

 

But he knew that I knew that.

 

We’d known that all from way back the first month we started. When the expectations got dramatically lower once in the field. From presumptive diagnosis to vital vision as it were. Sometimes Leon liked to pontificate. He and Adon were perfect partners because they liked to take turns pontificating. Going on with yarns spun by things they saw on the job. Not common war stories mind you; no trumped up version of strange days or odd jobs; I mean the two of them liked to talk it out. Me too, just not all the time.

Leon, apparently getting restless began to drive the bus down the off ramp to river level. Around the bend we’d go off ramp-off road and end up in the badlands under High Bridge; an interconnected mess of Amtrak storage/repair depots, industrial waste sites, a trailer park on the Harlem River, and a damn good place to lose a body. Used to creep me out down here. Adon always came down here. Always taught his partners was the back door to Richmond Plaza. Going down this service road you’d circumvent the anarchy that sometimes prevailed when doing a Richmond Plaza job.

 

Leon kept gamily talking. 17 Boy rolled off road along the river bed through the mist.

 

I had a wife and kid back home. It made everything a lot simpler. Wifey made more than I did; emotionally high maintenance. Kid was real cute. I made one beautiful boy; sometimes I thought that it was the only good thing I ever did in my whole damn life. The only thing I was proud of. I didn’t love my wife any more. We hadn’t made love in a year, I’d fucked her senseless out of blind rage a month or two back, didn’t do much besides make me cum. She’s crazy I think, can’t place the madness.

Bipolar disorder maybe.

It’s a bad co-dependence now.

I don’t love her, but I love my boy.

Sometimes things will get real rough, we’ll fight, she’ll fucking break things. But I gotta make it cool ‘cause I can’t have my crazy fucking wife run off to Indonesia with my son.

I think if it hadn’t been for my son I’d never have stepped foot in Peggy Quinn’s office down at 9 Metrotech. And I made moves to be a fire fighter, next promotional list that goes up I should be on it. I had to join the Rastafarian Church to keep my dreads, but mark my words, the day my number comes up; I’ll shave my goddamn head. Anything for a little respect and a living wage.

I say it makes things simple because my vices, my social life even are a day dream. I go online to Lastnigthsparty.com and viddy pictures of beautiful women doing debauched and compromising things in bars and clubs and lofts and where ever. I jerk off sometimes thinking about a couple strawberry blonde twins sharing my happy cock enthusiastically. I have fantasy life, that is to say in another life I’m the guy at last night party, I’m a rock star, I’m the artist; the next big thing. No terrible, evil draining city job, never got her pregnant, never got married to keep her sane, never moved to Harlem, never drove an ambulance.

In my day dreams I do Capoeira, and I bike a lot; used to me a messenger, and I still remember thinking my whole life is front of me. Not just a countdown to pension. In my day dreams I’m still the kind of person who believes in things.

I’m in the mood for a cigarette. Leon doesn’t smoke, only unhealthy thing he does is balance four girlfriends. It’s dark out tonight. The lights from the bus hit a sort of low mist that’s rolling over the speeding cars below us on the Deegan up off the Harlem River. We quite a lot of sitting around. That’s the worst part. You sit around for nonsense a large percent of the time, then right out of nowhere, right when you’ve hunkered down, then you get the arrest, the shot, the multi trauma right when you let your guard down.

I remember the first time Sebastian Adon and I went out on this unit, before he fucked up and got shipped to Brooklyn, or pulled strings and got shipped depending who you ask.

We were real eager two years ago. We both wore ties and collar bras then; part pride, part defiance. I’d long since taken mine off. Rumor has it he still wears his.  He’d quit smoking back then and I still biked to work every day. We were as eager as Leon still is.

I suppose 17 hadn’t gotten us yet. But Adon eventually got transferred Brooklyn side to Bedstuy and Leon lives ten minutes from the station.

They call Division 2, that is to say the Bronx; “the gentleman’s borough”; what goes on in the Bronx stays in the Bronx. It’s a big front. Most people at 17 aren’t from the city much less the Bronx, and ones that are from here; like Leon, or Watts, Ortiz, Medina, Santiago a few others are hardly proud of the neighborhood. The worst are the ‘kids on Safari’ as Leon puts it. He might have gotten that phrase from Adon. That’s all the Up State, Long Island, ‘Suburban trash’ as Adon calls um that came out here to play tough guy in the ghetto, forget they aren’t cops, and aren’t shall we say, ‘sensitive’ to the pluralism and diversity of the city. Basically Battalion 17 has a lot of good old boys loose with the words nigger and spic. Not the greatest formula for patient care.

But at Battalion 17 a lot of things fly that don’t fly in Queens or Manhattan. Like how Andrew Celluci wears a gaudy gold chain on the job, like how Jenny Jones never wears her boots Tour 1, or a myriad of small ops guide details that don’t ever become a disciplinary problem here.

Leon was in the middle of a yarn about social work and the importance of physical fitness to the welfare of the black community. I cut him off tastefully. ‘Look,” is all I mutter.

It’s where the trailer park is, was, should be normally. There’s a skinny crack head without a shirt flagging us. Blood dripping out the side of his head. A tanker truck has careened of the road, plowed right through the tenement camp- shanty town that congregates in this little trailer park. Leon flips on the left light bars illuminating the whole area in white light. There’s blood on the torn tanker. There’s blood on the wheels, the tanker overt turned on its side has taken out half the encampment. The crack head bellows something unintelligible then sits down on the ground his face in the mud. I see what looks like the arm of small person; a child underneath the tanker.

 

There’s still a fog that hangs in the air. Leon jumps on the radio to report a possible MCI and possible Hazmat incident. I think to myself this is little beyond my level of training. The light bar illuminates the whole scene.

 

“There are dead things floating in the Harlem River. Dead people, dead parts, dead fish,” I say.

Leon took the high power lantern and shined it on the scene of the accident on the river itself.  The river was blood red. Its crimson tides crashed against the overturned tanker truck. It was as if the very composition of the thing had changed; its texture a frothy oil of arterial red blood in which ten thousand squelched out creatures floated to surface. And anything that had once died in that river floated upwards too.

 

Units synchronize your watches it’s 7:25pm, 2010.

 

Scene 9

116 Ludlow Street, 2012ce

Mehanata

The lights are dim no matter what happens. 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 116 Ludlow Street.

This is its second location since many times police raided and finally burned to the ground in an ugly incident that took place in 2005.

At an infamous establishment such as this you ought to always know the names of the men “standing the watch” or women “pouring for your drinks” or the “holding down of your bags and coats. Most importantly you ought to be cautious of the seductive forces marshaled via inexpensive vodka and black magic to lead you to things you ought not to be playing around with.

There might was well be signs on the wall telling you anything not tied down will be carried away into the night, bags, souls, virginities.

Come to think of it, there are such overt 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 bar earn bottle.

It’s a Gypsy Bar. And it lives up to that designation splendidly.

You wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it. You’d only be looking for it is someone told you about it and perhaps you’d hate them for it later. But, in the wilderness a tavern of wild foreign and domestic people dancing to the tunes of the Roma can draw angels and demons by word of mouth and since 2001 it has been surviving pogroms, police raids and venue changes via fire.

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 Romania. The cast of characters around here boggles the mind.

The club has the look of a vast lawless pirate ship or a wilderness brothel.

The waitresses and bar tenders are skinny or shapely, Bucharest or Sophia girls just arrived recently though generally well educated and for now, un-indentured. They mostly don’t stay long and the reason for that is partly because of the demands of the work, and because their boss is the devil himself. The club is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday. There are private parties in the basement you’d do well not to crash unexpected or uninvited. The talent is highly various. There’s a rather pal-mal esthetic of transcontinental bacchanalia.

The booking agent 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. The primary live acts are Gypsy. Roma meets Latin American mostly. You get dance hall and reggae tone periodically.

The doughty wine.

The salsa, the tango, sometimes even a little Zouk.

The most popular disk jockeys are Raphael Ernesto Contreras Lynch also called the “DJ Rafflex” and Georgie from Bucharest also called the “DJ Mishto”. As stated “Romanian” but “not a Gypsy”.  The most famous of the bartenders is Martina called Hella Dubreskaya. She has been here a good deal longer than the others.

She has the special constitution that a bartender needs to work the shit show around here longer than a month.

Outside and inside are James White, the retired Fenian cop on ¾ pension after his ACL was torn chasing down a perp and James “Behemoth” Brown Pérezes a smart talking, burly Puerto Rican. Always outside is Slavi, the stone faced until a sneaked grin Bulgarian collecting the irregular admission wearing a Soviet wolf fur hat except during the time of summer.

You pay cash up front for everything unless, unless you’re a card carrying regular. James White and James Brown are sometimes easy going on admission and fierce to squash the fights which happen, generally around 2 AM, but often before and after.

Justin Toomey O’Azzello is the general’s manager. He has wandering hands. He is jovial and likes to tell elaborate stories about his days in the “air force”. 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 wander though.

 

The owner of this place is a fearsome Bulgarian Ivory called “Sasho”, but is real name is Alexandr Dmitrievich Perchevney.  He has a soft spot for revolutionists, 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. The cooks are all from the tropic of Capricorn but nothing is ever very good eat except the soup or the salad; white cheese over fries or some type of Borscht which is rumored to sometimes contain menstrual blood. 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 American engineered mega tunnels that run under the country in case of insurgency or general emergency. 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”.

Also that patrons must have at least three teeth to enter the establishment.

The music is always playing loud at the Mehanata Social Club where Natasha makes eyes then orders a Vodka energy drink confection, then slides up to Sebastian at the bar. He is wearing a black suit.

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

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

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

“That you did. You remember nothing?”

She just gives me a devilish smirk. And shakes her head.

“I drink a lot for fun. I don’t always remember my Fridays or my Saturday nights. I was told I was bad. So I’m saying the sorry. For the being of bad. What are you drinking? This is our custom.”

“Nothing? No recollection.”

“No nothing at all. Oh, 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.”

“Well we all have our demons in here don’t we. I’m good. Until I 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 thirty 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 cage by a second bar and dance floor.

“That looks like if would hurt,” he notes.

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

But that’s a silly thing to say. Seductively. She is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen with a proclivity for homicide. Describing just how beautiful she is almost doesn’t fit in a short play. 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 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, the grandeismo also the confidant of Rafael Ernesto and Victoria.”

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

“And on the bad nights?”

“Vasili Pveada.”

“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. 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.”

Martina the bartender comes over and gives Natasha a wink.

“This is sorry alright. Now I again reserve the right to be rude to you and forget about it later. Fair game yes?”

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?” she asks.

“Astika.”

And she thinks, terrible piss but of course she orders him one from Martina the raven black haired Bulgarian bartender. Because Russian apologies are based on acts not words.

“Are you coming to festival?” she asks then 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.

“Don’t call me dear ever again, I’m not so old. I’ll alert you that I may well come to some of it 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.

“Natasha, 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 comes on and she thrusts herself into his arms for a last dance.

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

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

She sashays him across the dance floor muscling out the other couples with her buxom. She lets him lead and he does a fairly good job.

“You dance like you’re from the Caribbean,” she says.

“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 replies.

It is 4am 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.

“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 patrons, tight except around his circumference.

“Hasn’t changed his cap 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 dancing with Natasha, good for him! She’s got great big ones.”

“He’s always dancing with Natasha.”

“You’re thinking of…” notes Justin.

“No Azello. I’m thinking exactly what I mean to be thinking. He’s always dancing with Natasha right before thing get interesting.”

“They just met boss.”

“You’re thinking of things three dimensionally and I am thinking of things fifth dimensionally 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 burnings of bodies.  It’s time to call up all our troops, every single man to the front.”

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.

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 NYU 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 three 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 in the Bronx.