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I was watching the news from the safe house. They’re killing Palestinians in Jerusalem again for the third day straight over metal detectors near the Dome of the Rock. Syria is completely on fire; the Russians are making slow, and decimating progress. Iran is fighting Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Iraq is on fire, the Americans are directing the Coalition of crusaders, and Mosul has almost fallen. Libya is on fire; they say life was normal just five years ago. There are rumblings about a major American troop increase in Afghanistan. The entire region is one powder keg after another. One group of after another ready to kill each other so the big powers get their oil.
The temperature reached 112 degrees today, the power goes out several times a day in this city. I’m on the roof of a housing complex to the South of the 60-meter road in Erbil. A referendum for independence is coming in two months. It’s a two-hour drive in any direction to an atrocity, but I’m bored. I’m drained, and I’m bored, and I’m wondering what my place in this is. There are things I can tell a person, and they think I’ve read a lot or traveled a lot, but mostly there are things I tell people that they can’t see and they can’t hear, so they shut down. They can’t believe the conclusions I’ve come to since they condemn me, they condemn where I’m from; they are uncomfortable conclusions about why this war is happening. Why it has always been happening. Who and what are to blame.
I have about 48 hours before the car picks me. These Kurdish gangsters with sympathies toward the resistance are going to put me and four duffle bags of supplies in a car and bring me to another city, to wait for a truck and then I’ll be moving on the road to where I’m supposed to be. Where I’ve been invited to work. I have many detractors. But I also have unfathomable love for the game.
Erbil is stunning in its dull mediocrity. It’s wasted potential and its sprawl. I’m seated in the fading dusk and dead lights; I’m about to make my last broadcast before I go over the border and then really, who knows. The city is shaped like a melted clock, a 7,000-year-old time piece with a citadel at its center. I’m on the roof of the New Ishkan apartment complex; I’m about to try and explain what’s happening here. For anyone who cares. Probably a couple of officers in the underground, only my mother and maybe Daria watch the whole broadcast. No, I’m lying to myself, probably I’m only talking to myself on the roof.
The trouble with seeing things no one else sees is that they call you insane. But, I’m not crazy. The world is crazy, the world is fucking insane. I don’t have a broad audience, and I have a small, devoted following from my previous works. I wonder what to say this time at the fire station; the rebel radio I send back to Brooklyn and places outside this wasteland.
Is there a message from all the things I’ve learned? Is there anything anyone needs to hear? Isn’t there anyone left to tell a story too? I don’t think so. Everyone knows what I’m doing here and how it will end. For I am not writing a novel, I am diffusing a series of dreams into a manuscript in English for a tiny chapter of the book of life that was manifested a year ago.
I smoke a cigarette. I comb my hair. I imagine she’s watching me. I look out over the city that never was and probably won’t be ‘the next Dubai.’ I pick up my notes and turn on the camera. I try and explain to the resistance and those who love me, the context of massive events that brought my unit here to Kurdistan.
I read and record segments one minute apart. As if anyone actually follows my posts on social media or has anything vital to contribute.
When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smart phone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had. One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re are deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance and social policies that enable an endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost have always to deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. Which allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate a Godly protection to a set of scriptures always provably re-written and re-translated by fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed of much of humanities manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let’s try and be dispassionate, objective and ration without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I could only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Moscow. The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in the similar style of homes. People that own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own the arms or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear are of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kid’s drive are all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank God the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course the West “won.”
We are supposedly all very democratic in the West. We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90’s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it’s a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It’s hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In reality, we all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands in populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. So America is a two party state and Russia is also two party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. Which is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war can’t be just about oil at all.
China has a one party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing of State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contester to the Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs which American and Russia can meet in their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The USA invaded Iraq in 2003. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but has returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long term client relationship with Syria and it’s only Mediterranean Naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm water ports. They key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle and the remains of the ISIS held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijab, Deir-Ez-Zur). Most people here call them Daesh, the ac
For over 2/3rds of the human race the very events critical to their respective, overlapping and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each this is where their very prophets were all born, raised and communicated with the source.
From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, accept for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred year attempt to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Catholic foot hold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other or the long running Sunni v. Shi’a wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts though the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold Wars brought humanity closest it has come to total self-destruction. But, there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-American from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war which changes locations, ideologies, factions and names; but is in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile an equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus towards the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny something in the human nature is self-interested, violent and cruel.
But, we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919 and it is irresponsible to pretend that has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is in itself simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the innumerous religious believers who convolutes the basic thesis, but is the third pillar to the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims in a desert and absolutely no Western powers really care until high profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there couldn’t be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its land mass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed contain the Iranian Revolution than the West armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and American created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001 and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in 1990’s where 1 in 7 Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crises. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars which leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave its sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistan coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan.
Then Islamic State took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity.
It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, who planned it. Some say Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all fueled its development and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is child like to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.

I take a little break to watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the city. The whole roof is lit up in white neon lights. I continue the broadcast.

It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region. Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold it next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian based firms.
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States that claim they are Western Allies but can call be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The Kurds, who are world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safe guard their long abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter. Or places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophesy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine) and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically and genetically. There is deep rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchy’s created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country of the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists’ borders on being a crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petro-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State.
And frankly the enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza takes up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, mostly intolerant, male dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call a claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ on a range of practices and beliefs, but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son in law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah, or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of the human race.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually and often militarily Kurds are great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran which is a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, is about 65% Persian or say 50 of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Shar’iah law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya and Israel all sold arms and also secretly advised the Iranians. An 8 year war occurred fought in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” the nation. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part hate the United States. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that.
It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point, or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Hewler (which again is Erbil in Arabic) is a city of 2-3 million, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. It has a tall mound fortification in the very center. The Citadel which has been the fortress defending Erbil (Hewler s all Kurds call it) for nearly 5,000 years. Like Moscow, Hewler is a series of ring roads; the 30 meter, the 60 meter, the 100 meter and the 120 meter which are punctuated nearly every other block by a 5 Star Hotel. In 2011-2014 a building boom erupted and everyone was making money.
By the time I arrived in Iraq, or Kurdistan (as it is called by most of the Kurds living in this KRG zone); ISIS was fully driven back into Iraq proper by Peshmerga forces. Mosul was completely besieged by the Iraqi Military with nightly airstrikes hitting the positions in the Old City and Medical City.
The city of Hewler was once dubbed “the next Dubai”, but that’s a very dubious claim. For one thing, Hewler or Erbil isn’t any fun. For another, however you define that word fun, Erbil is not either pretty or architecturally impressive. That is because it is estimated that under the region of North Iraq; called the Kurdish Regional Government, autonomous since 2003 and home to 5 million Kurds and various minorities such as Turkmen (former Turkish administrative class of the Ottoman empire), Assyrian Christians (Syriacs & Chaldeans), Yazidis (recently genocided by ISIS), whatever is left of Iraq’s Baha’i community and a growing community of Western expats; the KRG sits on top of what might the fifth largest proven oil reserve.
But, in 2014 ISIS got about half an hour west of Erbil and was stopped by Coalition airstrikes in Makhmar. Everyone panicked and had begun evacuating their family’s hours before. ISIS had taken Mosul, then a city of over 2 million and Iraq’s second biggest with under 400 fighters. ISIS had invaded Sinjar (Shengal), the historic home of the Yazidis, murdered over 5,000 men; carried an unknown number of women into sexual slavery and trapped most of the remaining Yazidis up in the mountains. The Peshmerga, the military forces of KRG’s two main parties; KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan which controls Erbil) and PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan which controls Sulymanyia, which is also called Slemani) had basically retreated from both Sinjar and their positions in Makhmar and were incapable of repulsing the 2014 ISIS offensive. What is now a matter of historical records; the US air force hammered ISIS positions in Makhmar and stopped the advance there and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) proxies; YPG Militia (People’s Protection Units) and the PKK armed wing People’s Defense Forces invaded Sinjar, cracked open a corridor for safety and by all accounts saved the majority of the remaining trapped civilians there.
Speaking on the subject of claustrophobia. There are an estimated 35-40 million Kurds; 14.3-20 million in south east Turkey, 8.2-12 million in Iran, 5.6-8.5 million in the Kurdistan autonomous region in North Iraq and 2-3.6 million in Northern Syria (Rojava). Armenia, Azerbaijan & Georgia all have populations which total under 50,000. 2 million Kurds live in the diaspora; particularly concentrated in Germany, France, Sweden and Netherlands. As well as in Russian Federation, Belgium, United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Denmark, Jordan, Austria, Greece, USA, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Finland and Australia (highest to lowest concentrations).
As you can see from the spreads of these numbers; no on actually knows how many Kurds there are. Politically speaking these numbers are very problematic, since Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in their own various ways and strategies would all prefer the Kurds not to even exist.
As stated in 1988, towards the end brutal eight year of the Iraq-Iran War, in Chamchamal Iraq, the Baath Party under Saddam Hussein began a genocide against the Iraqi Kurds. 180,000 Iraqi Kurds were loaded onto trucks, placed in concentration camps, driven to the south of the country, ordered to dig a ditch then shot and buried. Poison gas was used in the city it Halabja. Tens of thousands of villages around Chamchamal were emptied. The majority of the Kurdish population in that region fled to Iran. Only the US invasion of 1991 slowed the genocide. The invasion in 2003 basically allowed the PUK and KDP to seize northern Iraq and make it autonomous. In 2014 the KRG was fiscally cut off from Baghdad and began selling oil directly to Turkish, Russian, American and Israeli companies.
There are only Iraqi flag in Erbil inside 5 Star Hotels and most government buildings. But the red, white, green emblazoned with a yellow multipronged star is virtually everywhere else.
The Kurds a saying, “Our only friend in the mountains,” which related their historic persecution at the hands of an unending series of foreign occupiers’ particularly but limited to Arabs and Turks. Whenever invaded, without fail in thousands of recorded engagements Kurds fall back to the mountains which make up the majority of their imagined, and historic territory; and promptly begin guerrilla wars.
In Turkey, the Turkish government has long banned Kurdish language and culture for years. It has been described as “highly effective cultural genocide” For decades the Kurds were assimilated, repressed and told they were “Mountain Turks”. In 1914 the Ottoman Empire conscripted the Kurds to help carry out the Armenian genocide. Because of official apology, long running dialogues for reconciliation and a common enemy; Turkey, Armenia is one of the biggest supporters of the PKK’s (Kurdish Workers Party) war against the Turkish state. In 1984 the PKK began it’s insurgency against the Turkish state. More than 50,000 Turkish citizens, mostly of Kurdish descent were killed in this still running war. In 1999 PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested, tortured and placed in solitary confinement on an island prison near Istanbul. Reading the works of Murray Bookchan; Ocalan renounced Marxist-Leninism in favor of his own non-state, pro-democratic, gender co-equal, ecologist vision called “Democratic Confederalism” which is now the official PKK ideology. After several failed rounds of ceasefire and peace talks, after the arrest of all Kurdish parliamentarians after the 2017 Coup in Turkey and after repeated bombardment of PKK positions in Iraq, Turkey and Syria as well as great complacency if not active support of the Turkish state to allow ISIS fighters to come and go over its territory; the PKK has been physically pushed back to mountain bunkers in the Qandil Mountains of Northern Iraq and positions in Sinjar, but enjoys enduring popular support amongst Turkish and Syrian Kurds. Its political parties repeatedly are elected to Turkish Parliament, subsequently banned and their leaders jailed.
In 2004 the PKK Syrian affiliate PYD (Democratic Union Party) began rapidly organizing a militia and administrative structures which later protected, then effectively occupied Kurdish areas in Syria during the atrocities of the Syrian Civil War (which has led to the deaths of over 550,000 people largely civilians and displaced over 13 million internally or into neighboring countries in vast miserable series of camps.
In 2014 the PYD (Democratic Union Party) and its militia force the YPG/YPJ (YPG is People’s Protection Units [male] and YPJ is Women’s Protection Units [female]; now numbering around 45,000 light infantry fighters) defeated ISIS in the Siege of Kobani with Peshmerga, PKK and coalition air support. In the past three years the PYD, through its civil society organ the Tev Dem (Movement for Democratic Society); is for the most part governing a 4 million person non-recognized parallel state; three cantons in Northern Syria called the Democratic Federation of Rojava- Northern Syria.
Afrin Canton (to the West of Rojava, but still land locked) is isolated by a Turkish supported incursion toward Aleppo, Syria. Kobani the central canton is connected by land to Jazira Canton which borders the Kurdish Regional Governorate (KRG). Because the KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan), majority KRG party based in Hewler/Erbil is incredibly dependent on Turkey for exporting oil and development assistance, actually most of the 5 Star Hotels, apartment towers, and consumer goods in Iraqi Kurdistan are a product of that economic relationship; Rojava is quarantined on all sides. The only people getting in are well resources journalists, NGO workers and people getting smuggled mostly over the Iraq-Syria border through a combination of bribes or Kurdish family loyalties.
The Turkish border to the north is completely sealed. The Free Syrian Army/ Turkish forces occupy a land strip from the Turkish border to the city of al-Bab, which cuts Rojava’s Afrin canton from the Kobani & Jazira Cantons. Jazira borders Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar Mountains are partly under YPG/PKK/PYD control and partly under Peshmerga/KDP control. All flights to Qamishly go through Damascus. Most of the Syrian territory south of Raqqa is in the hands of ISIS or the Nusra Front (another Al-Qaeda rebrand). The Assad government and its military control of the Qamishly airport make it possible to have supplies airlifted in and about 20 NGOs, can go over the Syrian/Iraqi border.
The YPG/YPJ making up the majority of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) has pushed ISIS back to Raqqa (which is now completely surrounded by Syrian Democratic Forces). The YPG/YPJ has been politically dressed up as the SDF incorporating varying smaller militia forced from ethnic minorities and various rebranded Syrian Free Army groups. This pluralism for US Government and military intelligence foreign donors has occurred because of two reasons:
1) Virtually every Western nation has declared the PKK a terrorist group, so overtly supporting the PYD militia YPG/YPJ is outrageous and offensive to Turkey, a critical regional ally. Who spends way more time bombing the Kurds in PKK and YPG rather than do anything constructive to oppose ISIS. So SDF is a thinly veiled way for the United States to say it isn’t directly funding a group it called a terrorist group to fight another terrorist group, but that is exactly what is happening. Turkey has bombed Iraq and invaded Syria by proxy forces cutting off the Western most Rojava canton Afrin from its two eastern cantons Kobani & Jazira.
2) The YPG/YPJ is along with the Iran controlled Iraqi Shiite PMU (Popular Mobilization Forces, also called Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi the only credible ground forces in consistently rolling back ISIS. Without the PMU, ISIS might have taken Baghdad in 2014. Without YPG, Rojava would have been over run. The PMU is regularly accused of atrocities and is controlled via Shi’a clerics loyal to Iran. The YPG/YPJ should be viewed as a military asset of the PKK militarily expedient to the U.S. led Coalition “Enduring Resolve” Operational needs.
3) When ISIS is defeated, the PMU will be used against Peshmerga in Kirkuk. Turkey, the Baathist Military and NUSRA front will be attacking Rojava in different configurations. SDF is an effort on the PYD part to make the militia forces more multiethnic.
Mosul fell to the Iraqi military around July 9th, 2017 after nine months of fierce urban warfare. Raqqa is expected to fall by the end of the summer. ISIS redoubts in Tel Afar, Iraq (a historic Turkman city) were predicted to fall by September, but mysteriously the city was found to be empty after just eight days of fighting by the end of August. Hawijja, Iraq historically a Kurdish city long emptied and Arabized by the genocide is widely believed to be one of the most pro-Wahhabi Salafist centers as far as the population’s sympathies. Its population supported Al Qaeda, currently supports ISIS and regularly launches terror attacks in neighboring Kirkuk. There is desolate barren zone in the Anbar a province (outside Kurdish zone) which also needs to be pacified.
All of this leads analysts to conclude ISIS will be militarily defeated in all major remaining Iraqi and Syrian cities by January 2019. Importantly Raqqa, it’s only remaining official headquarters could be over by November. The mop up operations in and around Deir Azure will pale in comparison to the possibility of war between the Pesh Merga against the Hashid al Shabi and Iraqi Army in Kirkuk.

We have to get the unit into Syria and remain on the ground for around two years without being captured by the revolution or the enemy. There’s eight of us scheduled to go in, I recruited all the others one by one over three years. This entire context will not be affected by the tiny move, a maneuver of smuggling in foreigners into the Rojava Federation; there are many much bigger plots afoot. The commitment on the part of the resistance being minimal, this is a campaign of medical force multiplication. Surely any faction is worthy of the training and the system; this one is most in line with the fundamental analysis I have presented.
And that’s all I have to broadcast tonight. Probably not anything most analysts didn’t come to in varying degrees. If Daria saw it she’s bored. If Polina Mazaeva, my Russian lover and confidant saw it she’s annoyed, or worried or both. Daria is my old partner back in Brooklyn. Polina is my editor and my lover in theory. She lives in the City of Nizhny Novgorod in Russia. In reality Polina only has a little bit of emotional skin in this game.
I had my tongue between the legs of a foreign correspondent at a party a few weeks ago and she told about a room she found in Mosul filled with Turkish visa stamps, it was just the latest piece of conspicuous circumstantial evidence.
Everybody thought Talafar would be a battle not a ghost town.
The forces assembled in Rojava are democratic, feminist, ecological and non-aligned. They are multi ethnic, they are armed for defense. They are on good terms with the US and Russia alike. There isn’t any room here for mistakes. I will leave in two days with my companions are we will begin implementation of the training program as soon it is possible. My time in Iraq has been a series of disappointing nightmares, but that is not all fair. For I have seen some very heroic things amid all the catastrophes. But I will first the stories of many of the heroes and villains I met along the roads here as I awaited by passage to a place that inspires so much hope and fear. For everything out here is a circus of death, but it is not as though this is unusual for the region or the world. Life continues here amid all this. For both the foreigners, the colonists and locals all have human intentions. Human lives that the media and carnage obstructs the story of.
There are things I could teach you about politics and religion, that are lost on the great mass of self-interested and self-serving antagonistic protagonists described here. But those things are the back drop for our tale.
This story will attempt to provide a glimpse of the people that lived in or were drawn toward the fires of the killing fields when one world ended and new world began.

Prologue

Welcome on the morning of Ramadan 2017 to the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. It’s busy and modern and very, very secret policed. The Kurds and their Peshmerga militia of the KDP; Kurdistan Democratic Party based here almost fled in sand person baggy mass when ISIS got within half-an-hour away and got turned back by the god fire called coalition airstrikes.
When I leave this place, it will be in hand cuffs or a bag. Or I will walk out the door of a plane in Cuban made linen shirt, with a fake gold watch and a green partisan cap. One of the brothers will show up with a stolen car and get me at the airport. A Russian woman is going to throw her arms around me, and then I’m going to go to medical school. Or I’m gonna die here ingloriously and get buried in an unmarked grave, probably after being badly tortured.
But this is what they trained me for. Grandiose dreams verses nightmares.
The other night I helped the Kurdish Mafia sell a list of 5,700 ISIS fighters to an unknown foreign intelligence buyers in Beirut, probably Russia or Israel. In return for my traffic and troubles, they gave me the keys to an empty apartment in the South of the City or Erbil, and $300 to buy some food. Since I’ve been here about two months; I arrived on the day Ramadan began in late May I’ve traded medical skills and cunning, also hard drives and flags for food and shelter. The supporting mini-brigade of volunteers will all be coming in on different flights, on various days. I’m the second man in. The rest will come in the summer and fall. Some are healers and some a professional killers, but I think we’re all a little crazy to be doing this pro bono.
I arrived in Erbil, called Hewler by the Kurds, with $200 dollars American and two black boxes of cargo; the necessary instruments I need to establish a clandestine camp for emergency medical training somewhere inside Greater Kurdistan, but most likely in Northern Syria. In the autonomous zone called Rojava. The quickly expanding liberated territory with what reports describe as an obsession with Abdullah Ocalan, and his paradigms about women’s liberation, ecology and non-state democracy. Anything could be happening there, but all I know is they are crush the ISIS Cheta kilometer by kilometer at rapid speeds. Raqqa is completely besieged by the YPG, which stands for People’s Protection Units, the largest mostly Kurdish fighting force the U.S. backed coalition fights through in Syria. Cheta, means bandit, which is what we all equate the Islamic State fanatics with being.
I am a non-ideological man. Well, I was until recently. I have to say much of the writing of Abdullah Ocalan is very compelling. Though I play an activist of sorts on the stage of life, I’m not one to take a creed and make it my religion. I am also a non-sentimental man. Though I cry sometimes for myself and my predicament as an agent of progress. An aspiring revolutionary or a real one maybe. Though it is my profession to indiscriminately prolong human life. I’m a paramedic. Waiting for me back in Russia, though how long she will wait is anyone’s guess; is a lover with a young son who isn’t mine. An age seven Syrian Russian Druse, his father fucked off to Dubai. Waiting for me back in New York City is a mother and father who are scared, my father is also slowly dying. My brother runs a racket in Barcelona. It’s a growing but benign racket. Waiting back in Brooklyn and Haiti is an underground army of nearly 2,000 ambulance workers and their sympathizers. My 33 birthday was very well attended as was my Passover Seder. Though history if it remembers will both absolve me, but call me a Jew, it is only half of me. My sentimental half you ask? No, my cunning, ruthless and deceptive half. You will have to forgive me when I say that out here I know I am completely alone. What I see, and what drives me day by day up the treacherous mountain out of this wasteland toward my goals is bigger than me. But it is not a political theory or an imaginary friend.

#24:
Looks_Like_a_Love_Battle Field

Cold Warriors come out and play!

“If you’re feeling a sudden rush of strong emotions for me, I recommend we act on them, immediately.”

Quick draw, action hero!
A pass was made on the Aryan side;
She’s SO far half past buxom, radiant even, and I’m 3:5 past Yuma to dashing.
Everyone else is awash in our tumults,
Just swept along for the ride!

Shoot, shoot_bullets, bullets: my love for you is a deadly game aflame!
Chess with switchblades, Risk with ruthless Russian armies, mongol whords,
Make Americana gladiation, look mighty-goddamn-tame.
Ironclad is your hard heart to the jousts of my chivilraic offensive. No white flags here!
Yet how now still so apprehensive?
My methods are asymmetric, but surely my motives are clear.
Coming going, running throwing, your gold locks spill down a window sill on Banner Ave still:
I am to blame, for these wasted exuberances_ however I’m glad that you came.
We are but hopeless star crossed buccaneers. We have little shame.

You plunder my City for treasures. While I bare-knuckle-box devils alone for my name.
You play a dagger merchant danger game.

And I have a six shot and it’s a Mexican standoff at point blank range, no holds barred!
I know to shoot from my hip, but it’s you who have mastered the aim so you claim.
Now nothing, not nothing, not-one-single-speck of thing, will ever turn out the same.

Cupid’s gold pistol unloaded a whole clip: My vest was only stab-resistant, smitten, bombarded, rendered-retarded,
I drank from your chalice more than a sip_
_If I was flying before I’m the Hindenburg now! If I was sailing the Titanic is the name of my ship.
Bang! Bang!
Big things are brought down. Using katushas, or using atomics, or using whatever is lying around:
Whatever vulnerabilities show.
Your defenses are airtight to the rats of this town.
Appearing on radar not even one blip? Mountains of trouble to steal you, I know.
Torn by the yaw, bystanders made victim! Viewers at home traumatized by the flurry of things that they on the telescreen saw!

If you ever feel emotions that aren’t on demand or command, please dorogaia do let me know.
What missiles must we be asking the tax payer to lately equip?
Warfare with words, above and below!
And I am a slave not a captain it’s never my calling to sink into oblivion, hellish abyss_
_ Going down on another man’s ship.

And red buttons were pushed, on both sides of the Black Sea_ unleashing a cascade of hell fire_ a passionate dire fight melee.
I’m dangling above the floor of my flat, an American Romeo swinging tied gently.

Bound up in Cupid’s cuffs, two feet from floor suspended, I am her captive, this is a bad war_ and I am a prisoner now, a lost cause vow is at first-cluster-fuck-frantic_
But after expending all ammunition, this is my tragic position, made vaguely pedantic, a hung man hanging helpless: your poet paramedic, a hopeless romantic.

There were spent cartridges_ littered about the hard-wood-floor of the single bedroom flat,
I find that_ I, in my_ devil rages of self-loathing_ clawing outward_ I apply propensity for carnal carnage! the shedding of my clothing, not withstanding,
The use of a body is only a landing, for tactile obsession,
_Erzuli Danto’s possession_
to extract a typed, albeit useless post-mortem confession:
“My organs and flesh are but parts of a whole_ as I, cry out in bestial throws, she takes me, she levels resistance, she binds my hands without further insistence;

She tells me to “trade_ the lush of her lips for the thick of my soul.”

That’s what she said,

Then acted in battle with vigor, my belt as a collar some cuffs and a mind game playing out in her post-Soviet head.

“Missile defenses are Reagan. Cowboys cannot last long in Molotov’s cold,
I use dragon-fly-eyes, I use attrition, I’ll hang you cuffed from the chandelier post; swing you and stab you and beat you”_

_It’s just that fucking good, says all who have bought what she’s sold.

Lust is just lust, flesh is just flesh, and the crux-of-a-fuck-in-this country is only based on endurance and rubber band showers!
But love takes more work, work makes one bold, it consumes a soul whole_ it devours!
I have been shooting at her for at least as many lives as we could fit in our fate of the late Brooklyn hours_ as the days do allow or caution recommended, defended her fortress so no vulnerability shows,

Suppose as a fire grows,
A good man who knows prose_
Can discover_ just how deep or how wanton the ravish-a-rabbit hole goes.

The Cold War is over, but the weapons are warm_ bed breaking frights from our rooftop fist fights_ she said “just one night” but it certainly turned into more!

Her curiosity bought a conundrum she wrought a soul for a heart with a tumultuous mind, with not even the keep of a score.

Five months and no yields: Camped out in the double blue moon bright; in Elysian fields_ partisan Jews amuse, for former soviet bragging rights.

All agree;

We are like something not ever meant ever to be;
_guarded by 300 black Spartans with shields!

And she turns her back now on our war of Peony ambush.

And the smoke never clears: capsized carriers catapulted in vanquish of quite valid fears, an underground army of quiet devotion that will likely go on for the rest of my years.

Sirs and my dears, I must yield;
How-now companions, I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier,
And this was a love battle field.

#038

Moscow Hostage Crisis

Part One

Life of the slave show!
I will remove you from your castle and make you watch the way we live in the wilderness below.

And she slips off her high heels into a star-crossed stare down,
She always calls the shots,
Gun shots to blood soaked makeshift cots.
The shots she calls are complicated.
She must find me highly dedicated.
She mostly deals with the haves, and I am the have nots.

The rules are anything goes, but no know one “knows”.
If she’s been known to steal the weapon from my over coat,
I’ve been quick to remove my clothes.

I spill_ for the thrill of those invited, I can kill on compunction, I still have the will;
To activate the full facilities,
Of word play, and use of allegory_
To execute deliverance of a blue-blood-bleeding testimony_
A Former Soviet love story.
Involving a Chechen peasant and a woman once of Penza now mostly of night.
It will be of little glory, the way I tell the story.
It’s based upon real people. Real blood_ and real bleeding_
Of taking-of wanting-of feeding the need.
Of fucking and fighting and the will to survive in a City of glass, steel, and greed.
Real emotional explosions_ her eyes are always so bright,
She has long since urged me to put down the weapon and give up the fight.
But I have a last name that is easy to place,
I could buy some new papers, but not a new face.
They can spot us on site!
It’s the ongoing struggle of those who lead:
A tragic_ unyielding life of night.
We’ll sell a sordid tale.
I wish I had found her back when she was nineteen or twenty_
Before she had to do what she did,
And does what she still do,
To keep from starving in the shadow of plenty.
My objective and travail_ is to recruit the members of this audience into a clandestine apparatus_ And harness our collective clandestino_
To force a mighty train to prematurely jump the rail.
I wear suspenders with buttons, a Mayakovsky cap, and iron plated under shirts.
I dreamed up a plan to get revenge on a man, or a series of men, hit them in their pockets,
Hit them where it hurts.

I called her late at night_ bleeding all over the place,
She said don’t get your bleeding heart on my red carpet,
And her mother fixed me midnight supper.
Herring, beets, Palemni.
And she wiped the cake of crimson off my bloody Chechen face.

(Small talk)
“And the snow fall is phenomenal this year”_
She retorts”
“Don’t get French with me my dear.”
_They really punched yer ticket_ did a number on you in the district, this time.
(She loves the way I make the Ameikanski noire lingo mix out elequently with a touch of old Fenian rhyme.)
The pay phone call cannot be traced_
The weapons hidden in the drywall_
In the space your men replaced_
The ice cold taste of 9 proof Baltika is refreshing, albeit haram_
Those good patriot informers_ those zombies_ those follow-follow men.
They beat me for a fortnight,
Demand I sign a grim confession,
Attesting to the building and/or placement of some near but unexploded bomb.

“Why can’t you be like normal men?”

I told her: “I’m hungry for my freedom and I’m never going hungry again!” (Sung)

And she says;

“I cannot love you if you’re dead.”

Please put the house in order,
Use the lithium,
Use Russian Standard Vodka; use my lips if necessary,
To rectify the madness as it expands inside your head.
I’m not saying that I love you now or later,
Simply I refuse to cater_
To all the “incidents generated lately” when you do not behave_
Explain how you plan to court me_
From a black-bag-disappearance.
In frosty, shallow, unmarked open grave.
If you’re going to dedicate, in your exacerbation,
Resistance efforts to a woman (me) who can only love you out of pity,
In this bleak and foreign city_
Even if the words sound epic, also pretty_
Fuck it man! You’re doing it again!

I sigh and then reply:

“Did I tell you lately you’re my dorogaia and if not for loving you_I’d surely be dead a thousand times at the hands of ten thousand lesser men?”

Oh, when last we wrote I spoke of devouring her, for hours.
To tease her- to please her_to want her to need her- amid a bed of hand-picked, Peonies; or provincial-wild-flowers.
She isn’t one for single serving dancehall roses, she moves too fast for poses.
Her bright eyes beckon as they dart about the room filled with bluff and imitating glee_
“Accelerate your tempo of evacuation_
The checkpoints separate the have everything’s_
From the people who are dressed like you_
And carry paper work like me.”

I suppose you and only you_ the woman that I trust and choose_
Can entrap these men of business with their whoring,
With their thirst for further treasure_
With long lines of china white running from the mouse trap to their nose.
How many slaves does it take to keep this neon play ground running?_
I know via your profession you can undertake a series of transactions_
Blonde dynamite distractions_
Before any know exactly what’s in store.
Reduce the need for automatic weapons,
Acquire us the proper routes and channels_
And guide us through a tunnel to the vile trading floor.

She looks at me and rolls her eyes and says in Russian “Lord have mercy.”
I said “I don’t have imaginary friends; there ain’t no need to curse me._

Where we met is unimportant.
Did I mean to enlist her?
I couldn’t resist her.
I had causes and struggle and vengeance and plan.
I shouldn’t have kissed her
And longed for her touch,
For surely she lays nightly in the arms of some husband, some man.
We have become a most curious spectacle_lately.
You hate me? Push further,
Took you home from the bar stool,
Bite me_
Kick me_
Bait me.
She could have killed me that first night, just with things that she said:
I looked at her once.
And the wheel was turning quickly but the hamster was dead.
The wheel was her cold rationale,
The hamster was the morals that once governed the wheel.
And there were bright lights, that up lit her eyes_ and whatever that implies.
Separating what she does_
From that which she’s still willing feel.

“You take up so much clock!
Blood from a rock!
I must return to District work which begins at moon rise.
And the steel trap will slam shut_
And bind me behind those District walls.
And the men of that vile district,
Will use their credit cards_
To try and pay for my flesh and access to between my thighs.”

She said “root for me.”
I’m going voodoo out tonight_
To earn my money the City.
If you truly are my friend,
Understand that I’ve been hungry and I’m never going hungry again.” _(Sung)

I am looking down the barrel at my pin striped enemy.
And the columns we’ve been shaking
And lives we’re always taking,
I was seeking sweet surrender and I sought it at her feet.
You think you’re not a target? You pay your taxes don’t you?
Are you blind to their transgressions?
A cavalcade of charging bulls rampaging down the street.

Everything from here out, it’s true,
My bones rust, from your star dust, your fairy eyes_
I loose myself to you.

She says, “Oh the things you might do,”
Our harsh and untenable positions have emboldened us_ as we know no one cares or pays attention, or even has a clue.

If we want it bad enough we can get it:
“For the rest of our lives_
_we do.”

Even if that life, she says, will last no longer than another a day or two.

Kiss me _fight beside me Dorogaia,
Even if to you my name and words are sometimes strange,
For what they do to your body and mind,
And what they did to my family,
Help us create a major crisis at the Moscow Stock Exchange.

You’re crazy she said,
You’re crazy won’t get me dead.
Well talk about your ridiculous plan in the morning.
It’s all a slave show, and if you didn’t know.
Russians who help rebels aren’t even given a funeral, much less a warning.

 

#33

_And who can really know, how far a man must go_

To take her away from Brooklyn.

Listen, my dorogaia!

My so-called tovarish in a yellow cock tail dress!

The-dame-was-so dear to me, somehow-so-quickly;

That just one night turned into a four month chase across the fall.

When I told her later that I loved her.

She shot back from the hip, at the Steeplechase pier,

“Do you think yourself a jealous man?”

If I now get accused of poor decision making,

The moon blindsided me, the vodka made me pliable, and for a former Soviet she gave more than she asked for.

But our balance sheet is not bilingual.

She hates it most when I try and keep score.

When it comes to this shapely dovotckka,

She thinks mostly in enthralling ultimatums.

I know her as a golden eyed terrorist.

A goddess with a temperamental nature,

Once the ethanol hits her engine.

When in the morning, up until recently, if she’d broken my heart the night before, she often took the high road back to mercy.

Her motives were everyone’s guess.

Over and over we go!

After hours when the tavern closes out its books:

One step to the train,

Two steps to the long kiss good night.

Three steps on my misplaced feelings.

Held tight together we often ride the night train to nowhere,

Both perfumed in tobacco smoke but her still like the fragrances of smashed up rose petals I’d used on the dance floor to try and tease her smile into submission to passion.

She swears no simplifications, could possibly stand in the way of her creature comfort ambitions,

But she is not completely immune from daring, talk of lusty great escapes and love that comes with everything.

Because nothing on earth of value comes without much cost in sleep and sacrifice. Not even love and its associated gestures.

Poems pressed, hand holding to teach a man to dance.

Forbidden but repeated tongue dueling.

“Get out! Come back!

It’s hopeless and you just can’t win.”

She pities me it seems as a mad man of good character.

But she has no sympathy for poorly laid plans.

She says keep to the contract, but I cannot.

My promises are subsumed in passion time and again.

At times it seems she knows not what she wants,

Suffice to say that her current wants are un-met by all she has so far encountered.

 

That’s not true entirely.

Her wants are sky high.

And why not want the moon itself when one is so wanton.

Or so wanted

The moon was our loves maker.

Its double barrels down my throat the reminder of this explosive calamity that has so upset my life of night.

The Gods of War are sometimes known to play the fiddle and pass a tip jar.

Those notes once fed my soul shards of hope and propelled a corpse to grandstand.

And up a mountain road toward heaven up upon the Brooklyn coast.

The-road-itself is littered with my bleeding hearts casualties. Secrets, shames and ghosts of glory scattered as a product of her shake down.

 

And an empty gun strapped to my rip cage is now a talisman of my shame.

And mad ideas of great escapes are but zealous demons which pander to an empty closet of promised deeds neglected in their doing!

Her eyes make foot prints on my spine.

She saw something in my second soul that spoke to her of goodness, which through my orbits reflected my awe for her back upon my works.

Enticing me to prove a role in her life was a valid exercise of time.

For-a-man cannot truly see himself without loves reflection dancing out upon the mirror of his desire.

SOUND THE ALARM!

If a hunted man can only be bound by the shackles of longing by a wanted woman than allow me to speak of something brazen.

I love another man’s woman,

And just when I delude my senses into thinking I will be the victor in this duel which pits-in-pistol-play rationality and Raspizdia against reckless abandon to passion:

A train wreck and crawl ‘til dawn,

I am forced by her ethics and her calculus of needs to return her to his company.

It’s an old and sordid tale.

Lusting causes reckless action, but once the heart is pierced by love’s dagger discontinuation makes a man bleed out.

She is everything.

I know her not fully to claim this, but I shall attempt it.

I know her moods manifestation’s thinly veil contempt for all things Russian. And America is just a playground for her not an ideal.

I like when she flies off the handle.

I like how she handles a den of wolves in cheap cologne.

That gawk at her vibrations.

An angel on a bar stool, a devil with a charming grin, a survivor with little need for protection. She lets me pretend.

She looks over at my scribbling creations from a rented room in purgatory.

Which on a cold night seems like hell.

She has cut me at my knees, from at which I can recover,

But ascension and the dreaming of forbidden things,

Like a jackknife to swan,

A gunslinger with no bullets.

Better to die in a last stand with one’s reflection,

Than an Icarus plummet when her wings are angel wings,

And yours are wax and feathers.

And who can really know, how far a man must go, to steal her away from Brooklyn.

American
Refugee

The First Play by
Adler S Walt

Manuscript completed on 12 August 2004.
Consolidated 10 December 2014.
Dedicated to Joanna Kocab,
As to relate the events that occurred immediately before we met.

PROLOGUE

8 November 2001

They are sitting quietly in a Haifa hills café that is small and dimly lit. The last light of day falls softly on the Carmel. A fleeting splendor ripples over the harbor bay.

The boy is too thin to look American. His eyes have a lean and hungry look and are bad eyed and deeply sunken. They are filled with hate. His clothing is worn and torn. He might even be mistaken for a Russian street kid. The dirty gray corduroy cap on his head is encrusted with sand and sweat. It conceals his natty brown hair and gives him the appearance of a child like Che Guevara, perhaps in his own mind alone. The loose, blue pin-stripe suit he wears had been kosher cut in Golder’s Green, but is now a patchwork of torn threads and desert dust. He removes a crumpled green pack of Noblisse cigarettes from the inner pocket, puts one in his mouth and lights it. He takes long drags.

Like he’s learned to smoke by imitating some noire movie detective.

It looks as though he might cry out at any moment, or lash out across the table throttling the chubby preacher with his bare hands. If he lets down his guard down long enough though, he might have to admit defeat.

Occasionally the boy looks up to stare across the table at the man who is so determined to save him. This true Christian soldier has a cherub-like face even though he is in his forties and sports a brown scraggly beard. The chubby man is a proselytizer disguised as a tour guide. The man is uncertain whether this meeting will lead to more violent outbursts. His last encounter with this boy in Jerusalem was a debacle. The man says a quick prayer and begins to talk in his soft Midwestern drawl.

“I’m sorry,” the preacher says.

The boy looks up. His response is steady and calculated despite his condition.

“They fucked her within an inch of her life before they killed her. They ripped her to shreds. The body was cut into pieces and they dumped her along the southern highway as if they knew there wasn’t even any use in covering the thing up. Where was the man Jesus then? What do you know of good hard pain?”

It is a sharp and biting response. There is a quick pause and the flash of yet another silent prayer as the fat man’s eyes dart up.

“I know plenty about plenty. Do you remember what I said that first evening we met Sebastian?”
The boy’s eyes focus intently. He is uncomfortable with anyone using his real name. No one has used his real name for a long time. Suddenly there is some frustration in his voice.
“Why do you insist on calling me that?”

“Because it is your name.”

“My name is Zachariah Artstien.”

The preacher give him a ‘boy don’t talk crazy’ look.

“Your name is Sebastian.”

“Bu there is no such a person anymore. If you wish to carry on this conversation you will not refer to me by the name of a man who is rotting in the ground,” he responds sharply.

“You know I don’t like to humor your devils.”

“You know I do not like to humor your just about anything,” the boy retorts. “You cannot save me. I don’t believe in your religion. You are wasting your time on me, yet again.”

“Please calm down, Sebastian.”

The boy gets up to leave.

“Sit down!”

There is authority in the man’s voice for the first time.

“I told you the first time we met that I saw a well of pain in your eyes that was so deep that you might drown in your own sorrow. The night we met I laid awake praying for hours in the hope that you might find peace.”

“Redemption being some man called Jesus of Nazareth, of course. Shut the fuck up.”

“Could you please stop?”

He looks like the kind of person who says ‘darnit.’

“What do you really know about me? About this Sebastian you’re trying so hard to save? I grow very tired of people these days. Especially those with penchants for doing the Lord’s work through lost children. There is nothing you can say to me to make me forget everything that has happened.”

“You can forget the past, Sebastian. Even the immediate past.”

“Well thank you, you quintessential, self-helping faith healer!”

“I killed two people last night.”
The preacher stares into him and knows that cannot possibly be true.
It’s not in the prophesy.

“Not everything you saw actually happened to you. You are not a corpse, but you have allowed hateful demons to possess your body and speak on your behalf. It is time to go home!”

“My home is a place near two flaming towers where men of finance sacrificed three thousand of my former country men to their false god and those that rule this country collaborated with them!”

His words sear the man’s heart as he continues.

“Thank you for telling me what everyone always tells me, just in case I had forgotten the misery and grind of things since yesterday? Perhaps another brilliant cliché is in order like ‘be myself?’ Or forgive my enemies perhaps! I’ve been trying. I swear I have. In all honesty I think your coming here was a waste of both of our time. I have no home at all.”

The man’s tone changes.

“I figure you tell lots of tales. Throw around theology at people and radical rhetoric. You’d tell your secrets to any stranger who’d care to listen if you thought it would teach them something. But that doesn’t make your secrets true.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“How many people speak out of your mouth boy? Who’s that imaginary friend whispering in your ear? It’s gotten worse since you arrived here in the land hasn’t it? Can you tell anymore who is talking, you or the devils?”

“Don’t worry your neurons. So what’s the moral, Brent Avery? The take away?”

“What I want you to do is to tell me how you came to be the way you are without Zachariah doing the story-telling. Why are you so angry at your tribe and country of birth, the world in general and even God himself? ”

“You would never understand that story, Brent. It isn’t set in places where the wind blows lightly on the plain.”

“Try me then, boy. Believe it or not we’re not so different. God cries for all of us.”

“Oh really!? I don’t believe that for a second. He spits on us with his indifference! I doubt that there are two people who could be more different than you and I. You have your Lord, your God. You serve him blindly like a sheep. My only higher power is the coming revolt. I will get what I contribute.”
“They are one and the same these higher powers you speak of.”

“Really, Brent Avery? Do you think I believe that?”

“No. I don’t think you don’t know what you believe in anymore. Other than in the hate that never leaves you, other than the demons whispering inside you to pick up arms and kill without compunction for cause.”

The thin boy smiles with a shit eating, devilish grin.

“At least I can believe in my hate. But if faith is what governs us–you in your God, and me in the coming revolution–what makes you think we should see eye to eye on anything? You play the preacher pray boy and I’ll play the rebel with righteous cause.”

“You should confide in me because we all have nightmares about the things we can’t control. Your demons have taken their toll, Sebastian Adon. An ocean, a new name and some ten thousand miles later ain’t improved your sleep, boy. Is that truth?”

The coffee shop has all but emptied out, still the boy doesn’t answer. The Arab Christian is keeping it open for the sole prospect of what these Americans might buy. He will stay open all night as long as they keep drinking and eating things. The Carmel is sometimes slow on a Tuesday night. Especially since the uprising began.

“You want to hear a yarn?” the boy asks.

“I want to hear a true story.”

“There’s no such thing as a true, Brent. There’s only the mostly true, the heartfelt and remembered past. It’s a long story. It goes well with vodka and cigarettes.”

“We’ve got all night, but you’ll have to settle for coffee. I’m not much of a drinking man. I’ve come a very long way to get you home and I don’t have anywhere else I’d rather be.”

“Well, let us all hope this Arab can tolerate the sound of English and take mental notes. It begins with the tale of a rude boy on the last days of summer. It ends with a hooker beaten half to death on a lonely desert high way. A black man hanging from a tree and an early deportation. And we know exactly who brought the towers down, and more importantly why.”

Tough talk from a seventeen year old.

But the boy is still just a walking corpse with a demon inside him and the if the lord works in mysterious ways maybe Avery can him back to Babylon before someone, something or even himself will cut the story short, or worse change the underlying narrative. Take a boy meets girl, meets some Negro revolutionaries and twist it until you don’t even care who lives and who dies.

PART ONE:
Concrete Jungle

1

My oh my.

Tickle me Tamerlane. I wish I were part of a religion important enough to have my God housed in that thing, thinks the pilgrim as he looks up at the sprawling temple complex on the mount in this little desert town.

This is the Pale City in the badlands.

The streets are dark. An eerie twilight dances upon the cobblestones and the happy laugh of children is missing. The pilgrim senses that this place is just no good. There is no moon and someone has turned off the stars. He has been here many times before. He has wandered these cobblestone streets lost while searching, drinking deeply from the puddles of his own soul. Time has no meaning here. There are only the ghosts and the growing darkness surrounded by an endless desert of the mind. Each time he returns to bow down and to venture towards the light glimmering in the darkness. He is no longer sure this light even exists. Behind every locked door is some route to the horror freak-show of his subconscious, some lurking subterranean display of rape or torture. The place is good at making a religion out of violence.

The pilgrim passes by a towering Ferris wheel at the town wall; a Bregna barrier, an apartheid separation wall made of pyramid bricks and barbwire. The wheel sits in a thorn garden. Its operator is a hideous harlequin whose face is painted white, red, and black and who laughs like a mad man carries himself like a pederast.

There is no way out.
Every night the pilgrim returns to this personal hell, this Pale City in the desert, this home of perpetual blackness. His pilgrimage begins anytime he goes to sleep causing him to return to pay homage over and over again, to bear witness to hell as he understands it.

Tonight there is a great commotion coupled with alarm. The town’s transient population waits on the central square called umslagplatz. Their faces are twisted in grimaces too close to death to be truly alive. Everything appears grainy, toned in black, white and gray scale unless it needs to bleed. Then it is the color of bright red arterial blood, like a 1970’s B movie grindhouse.
The temple looks like a cross between the Hagia Sophia and the Luna Park housing projects, or maybe the Alhambra mixed with Astroland in its heyday. Robed clerics on the balconies of the temple drone out prayers from behind their grey hooded robes. One can never see their faces, accuse them of their crimes. The holy men are never from the pilgrim’s tribe.

A tall and twisted tree stands in the center of the square, bulus and ghatly. It looks like the last standing cherry tree in the parking lot at Chernobyl. It has flowers, but not the kind you would give a loved one. The pilgrim knows what is to come for he has read about it in a banned book called the New Testament. You can’t get a good translation of it within ten thousand miles of Brooklyn.
But most versions agree on one detail at least. When the messiah came back, well the forces of evil got him, got him good.

An illiterate and rowdy mob has assembled around the main square. A large garrison of foreign troops forms ranks and bars all the entrances and exits. A big black man crowned in barbed wire, already beaten nearly to death, is being dragged through the streets as the people pelt him with rocks and garbage screaming for his blood. The crowd exists as a single entity, a twisted sweating creature of manipulated rage. The black man carries a long wooden board over his muscular African shoulders. Grisly avulsions run down his back. His blood and sweat only lubricates the mob’s resolve to hurt him further. It emboldens them. Many would have begged for mercy or made an indignant show of fortitude toward their captors but this man simply marches along with a sad look in his grey eyes. His humility makes them hate him even more.

The pilgrim is watching the spectacle from his hiding place in a bombed out café at the edge of the square. He is too scared to get much closer. Finally, the man is lifted by the mob onto the tree. The beam is fastened. They begin nailing his hands to the ends of the board. Then they nail his feet with one great big rail spike right into the tree. Two more pitiful figures, some alleged criminal that the pilgrim didn’t know and some revolutionist are fastened next to this dying rebel. Their bodies form a triangle above the base of this crucifixion tree. The mob is cheering with an orgiastic glee, dancing about the tree. Soon they begin fucking each other right there on the square.

The pilgrim shudders. He is only thirteen and can’t speak the language much less really protect himself from that mob. He uses a pair of binoculars to look up from behind the counter of the derelict cafe into the eyes of the man. There is no fear or agony on the man’s face, simply the grim realization that he has failed in his mission. The black rebel spasms and coughs up blood as life drains out of him.
A soldier stabs him with a bayonet to seal the deed.

A young girl in a dirty white dress is hiding in the bombed out café also. She is only sixteen or seventeen and pregnant. She could be Arab or Puerto Rican but passes for blan. She has red hair like Jessica Rabbit, bright died red hair. She is sobbing quietly. Her hair is tied in the light grey wrap that pilgrim women wear.

She whispers accusingly, “Collaborator.”

The alarm rings. It’s an air raid siren blaring the pilgrim out of slumber.

I wake up quickly in a pool of sweat. I nearly fall out of the bed that is a raised bunk bed with my desk underneath. It has been another in a string of nightmares. They all started sometime in 1997. I never remember most of the details, only the horror.

It is 6:15 am on a Monday morning of a new school year. I live at Waterside Plaza on the island fortress of Manhattan. My school is an hour north by subway in what some call the Boogie down, but what I call the fucking Bronx.

It is time to go to school.

My name is Sebastian Adon. Believe as much or as little as you hear about me. That goes for the things I tell you about myself as well.

The mind works in cycles and patterns, innate behavioral conditioning brought about through external governing factors that mold response and reaction. How strong or beautiful a person appears is genetic, but that the mind is a clean slate, a great evolving tapestry, a mostly unused muscle. With discipline, this muscle can be harnessed to radically affect a person’s surroundings, sense of time and ultimately, the character of an individual’s life. The mind is a beautiful piece of organic clockwork that we are largely unable to understand, regulate or control.

I’m sure that I’m not using more than 8% of my brain, but like all things that will change.

I get up quickly and shower. I jerk off in the shower thinking about my dick with two chicks–one Black-Irish, one Asian. I towel off. I dress in whatever is lying about. Some days I undress again when the socially conscious part of my brain realizes my threads look ridiculous. I run back to the bathroom. I throw Queen Helene, that thick mix of hardening green goop, into my hair, slick it back, spike it and sculpt the devil horns that swoop and curl. I use Scope instead of brushing my teeth because it is quicker. If I’m late the teacher will make me sit in the corner.

I run down the stairs and drop by the steel shutter coffee stand to wait in line for my morning fix of that nasty, bitter stimulant that will keep me awake long enough to do last night’s homework on the train.

It is “essential” that this work be completed, because it is essential that one finishes high school. That’s the place you memorize facts you do not need to know in pursuit of a so-called “body of knowledge” necessary to be considered a civilized member of Western society. This is nation-biased bullshit that paints our consumer-frenzied culture as truth and light to the brown barbarians. But learn it you shall, for college is only four years away. There you will be further tuned and refined into a cog, screw or girder in mainstream society. Eventually you will choose a career you hate, making enough money to one day join that promised upper middle class bracket of the American socio-economic stratosphere. You will marry, have 2.3 kids and move to the dream home in the suburbs. You will go on vacations to places with beaches or European cities you can’t quite pronounce and hopefully sip fancy drinks. Your children will grow up to be accountants, doctors and lawyers if you’re a Jew or athletes, musicians, or entrepreneurs if you’re black.
But the main goal is to get rich. This is the American Dream.

I board the uptown #6 train on 34th Street and transfer at 42nd to the #4 Bronx-bound uptown express. The train is packed like a fetid Polish cattle car, a sea of inter-tangled flesh, crammed into a metal can and shipped to its respective destination. People push and shove, fighting over every inch of cubic space. The heat is unbearable. The stale air is cross-pollinated with the odors of aftershave, raw armpits and cheap cologne.

Right now all I am thinking about is the history homework I didn’t do, the sleep I didn’t get and the utter monotony of the life I am currently leading. The roar of the train car through the underground tunnels is deafening. People peer through the glass divider giving me annoyed looks as I finish off my cigarette. I once read a story about a boy who was thrown to his death from the train while riding between cars as the train made a sharp turn. I am sure these rumors are propagated by the old to make the young less daring. Wouldn’t want to be fucking statistic!

I arrive at the Bedford Boulevard station at 8:30 am. It’s the second to the last northbound stop on the #4 train. I’m fifteen minutes late. It will take another five to ten minutes to cross Bedford Park Boulevard and Harris Field and smoke another stoag.

My school is the Bronx High School of Science. I have been going here for two weeks. I spent the nine years of elementary and middle school at the private United Nation’s International School. But it was pure luck that I tested into this school a month before UNIS suspended, then expelled me.

Bronx Science is a magnet school. The school draws its roughly 2,400 students from throughout New York City. Like many other New York City Public magnet schools, the classes are over-packed and the kids are largely middle class. Unlike almost all other New York City public schools, Bronx Science will, in theory, get you into a good college. I took the admissions test back in 8th grade. I got in by a single point.

I am walking through Harris Field, the dilapidated expanse of gnarled-down lawn that is a massive sports field where teenagers smoke pot. This morning students are clustered across the field indulging in the morning reefer madness amid patches of dying grass. There’s no cover, just gonna-see-the-law-coming-from-a mile-away cover. A part of me notices that it isn’t even 9, so what is there to celebrate? Maybe they have first period off because they commute from Staten Island, but they’re probably cutting. Maybe they just like the green.

The school is a T-shaped, red brick building that is three stories high. The object is not to learn, but to absorb it sometimes seems.

There are exceptions. My first period teacher, the one who is about to put me in the corner, is rather on point. His name is Dr. Maskin. He wears real tight pants and has crazy person eyes. I keep falling asleep in his class, even if it ain’t so boring.

I run up the down staircase as I rush toward Dr. Maskin’s first period global history class. I dash past a group of Asian schoolgirls sitting in the corridor talking. They are legion at this school. My homework is only half-finished. I will most definitely be placed in the corner. My only hope is that he will have checked the work already. There’s a slim chance. I have another worry as well. I push open the door.

“Good of you to join us, Mr. Adon,” he says sharply. “Your presence and your homework were greatly missed.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Quite alright, Mr. Adon. Your homework please.”

Dog ate it, I think to say but mostly give him a stupid look like it was news to me we had any. It was me or the dog.

The class is staring at me. I look for the sympathetic eyes of Case Yadger, another sometimes denizen of the corner. I see him smirking in the back of the classroom, his blue baseball cap pulled tightly over his brow. Also smirking is Tamar Dreyfus; the Greek-Jew girlfriend of my latest friend Donny Gold.

“Sit in the corner. You’re late and unprepared.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stop calling me sir.”

“Yes, Dr. Maskin.”

The theme of today’s class has something to do with cavemen and fences. My eyes feel heavy. Sleep begins creeping into my mind. The room periodically blinks out of existence. The class drones on. Reality melts away. I slump over at my desk. The room fades to gray. I fight it but just can’t win.
All I see is the great desert expanse and the Pale City, dimly lit in the never-ending twilight of my mind. I’m on the tree. My hands are nailed to the branches. I look to my side at the Black man nailed next to me. He eyes pop open and his head swings in my direction. Although his mouth never opens I can hear his thoughts in my head.
“Collaborator, do you see it?” he questions me in rasps.

I awake with a sudden start. I have fallen asleep at the wheel once again, with too many witnesses.

“Mr. Adon, perhaps you could give us some insight into this subject,” says Dr. Maskin smugly. I have been caught sleeping in class yet again.

“I can tell that you are particularly enthralled by the discussion and won’t hesitate to add some of your own vast wisdom to our dialogue.”

The class bursts out in faggot chuckles.

“Well, I suppose I could repeat the question for you, Mr. Adon. I know a mind like yours requires periods of, thoughtful hibernation.”

“Yes sir, it certainly does,” I respond to the amusement of my peers.

“We were discussing early human socio-economic development, Mr. Adon. As you know from last night’s reading, which I am sure you read in depth, hunter-gatherer societies evolved into the classic city-states of antiquity. We are now debating how.”

“Well, um. I suppose when the rich folks started building fences around their homes and telling all the little brown people what to do, tricking um like to relinquish control over property that nobody really owned.”

Dr. Maskin looks vaguely intrigued.

“So, like, society evolved from a concept of ownership and property, a mass theft really. Hunter-gatherers did not understand the concept of property. But it was this concept that created the early foundations of the city-state. The moment the biggest, toughest caveman built a fence and declared that the land inside was his, modern society was born.”

“Once again, ladies and gentlemen, the young philosopher king redeems himself. He may pass this class, yet. You may return to half salute slumber, Mr. Adon.

I lean back in the chair with a smug grin.
Only seven more periods to go.
I hate school. If there weren’t girls here I wouldn’t probably even show up.

 

#108 Workers Life

Raise that black chai high!

Serchevan! Nine hours of fire later and for now the tea is now gone.

A flat land of wheat and Masood is where I start.

I can read the human heart, I can take over crowds with no mike. Kurdish, Assyrian, Arab alike.

I was trained to fire from a dirt bike. At close range into enemy face not vest,

You cannot run from an airstrike. We’re doing our best.

The terror, the horror is rife,

And you know I’m all about that struggle person life.

And you know I’m living wrong.

I save lives sometimes, but sometimes we take them with an AK or the edge of a knife.

I need a Dragonov wife.

I gave her something to believe, and then death flowed freely.

Laela Naesh (live your life), believe me ill need you to see me. Indomitably!

Go in, crowd control it, and survive if you can to sort the plot points out,

Was your vision clear, motivation high, did you walk away understanding what this revolt was all about?

Live your life!

It’s not more important! A smile and a blush formed over the thrill of a save or a kill.

I have to hold you tight, into the life of night, show you the strength of my resilience, my sheer Kurdish will.

Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.

Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.

And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,

Push came shove,

And then she was dead.

When the great revolt is over I’ll take ya,

To far away Haiti and also to Jamaica.

To wine ya, to shake ya.

Trinidad is the place I’m secretly from. Wickedest wine and brownest rum. Take away all my suffering pain,

Return me soon to the city of Port of Spain.

Perwerde,

 

You cannot run from an airstrike.

But you can kill a man with gun play from a dirt bike.

These are dangerous front lines where freedom will die or prevail in bullets hail,

I’m a medium dangerous man so I’ll take you there in the event of a hike, a hike toward some violent truth, things the future will need not the present will like.

We’ve been fighting so long it breaks my resolve, I many times bleed, I have no longer some sense of those things that I loved, I wanted for happy or id likely even need.

I’m not highly seduced by TV or the material creed. I have a militant mind set developed to fight, ethically sound and morally right, based on what loved comrades suffered not things we read.

Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.

Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.

And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,

Push came shove,

And then she was dead.

 

It’s harder now to breathe,

It’s a struggle sometimes, just to remember to believe.

Now im treading water for the loose ends. Capitalist modernity has the manacles for loyalists, serfs as well as the play pretends.

I remember breaking pita bread with hand grenades traded, I remember the names of my latest dead friends read on the TV, signal style far faded. And we all try to see,

What they took from Syria and your people wasn’t exactly what was taken from me.

Of course the jihadists also attacked my city, never again, that’s what patriots still say. Never forget 911, means never pity or play.

And it’s wonderful, to get to see your bright eyes. It’s wonderful to not be judged for the monster or the radical some would make me out to be. They say I believe too much Middle Eastern logic, thinking too democratic confederally.

Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand and those about to fall.

Shahid namaray, were dancing for the living and the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and motivations in your head.

I was just trying to live life free. I was trying to get my blade marks into the tree of history, maybe. I was trying to give my big apple comrades something to believe, but there was nothing up my sleeve.

No reinforcements to release us, quite a lot of cadro talk is still land of make deceive.

What’s an AK to an airstrike? What’s a dvotchka with a dotchka to a modern tank? Before we treaded in the ghettos and mountain bunkers, then we soared and then Afrin sank.

Now watch me run the crowd control, on these trains airplanes and human tapestry of crowds. I do it confident and loud, they trained the craziest for the best, and those of us who would survive the war were no faster than the rest.

The changes we made with Kalashnikovs was not what this revolution needed most or particularly Best.

 

Thunder, lightning now many of our hevals are one by one dead. Martyrs never die. I

In Rojava, you point to your poster, they nod and say what a truly dangerous gal or ideological guy.

But we keep the red, green yellow flying high.

And you can bury yourself when the right moment comes, but they still know how to kill us from the sky.

 

Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.

Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.

And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,

Push came shove,

And then she was dead.

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 3

Warehouse 32a, 2079ce

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, for sport. Sometimes for profit, but often for sport. Like the time I bet the Koch brothers whether the Tutsi’s could beat the Hutus in a machete war. 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 2

Safe house on 16 Kings, 2077ce

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, for two years it was mostly like that.

Chapter 1

Safe House on 38 Prospect, 2077ce

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.

 

This went on throughout the first year of my internment in Camp Waltham.

Prelude

 

 

Camp Shrakasa Waltham

 

 

 

The year is now in the distant unknown future. A grim winter is upon us all. The setting, a grim gulag hidden from normal sight on 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 meters in front of you. They 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. She finds and collects a type of man, a mystique would be the polite way to call them. Men with some abilities that are useful to the generals and the oligarchs. The very way she looks at you, lingers long after she is gone. It’s not seductive, it is a type of white magic. They say, she caused the comet shower in Chelyabinsk, but really that is only a speculation.

  There is a vast spiritual war going on for the hearts and minds of toiling serfs, but the greater wars are still fought with guns and bullets. The world is far past the brink of irreversible tragedy. Invisible and visible warfare is to be carried out now against ordinary people and she has great soul, and is after a very particular soldier in this storm.

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 act.

 

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. It’s also a place where dead men call aggregate, which is to say no one really governs these camps. You surround them and sometimes the authorities drop bombs on them but the camps are for all the people cleared out of the cities pacifying the insurgency going on still.

 

Waiting for her is another 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. Sebastian gets a lot of work done, no one can dispute that, but his ease to fall for women is amateur at best.

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

A bloody three day standoff which precipitated the functional end of a past 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 something of his passion.

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 lovely 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.

 

#1: The Great Revolt

 

 

 

Dastardly were the deeds of our fathers!

So arcane and so lacking of moral substance

They contrived, economically survived on the brutality of which our brothers were not deprived.

 

Tell me now, I vow, I wonder how despite the previous misconceptions,

And good intentions

Attempted abortion, yet were still conceived.

For this we are not reprieved…

A society basing itself on its own notoriety,

A society proclaiming material utopia,

Yet in all essence lacking the cornucopia on which the masses stay fed.

(Still) they might end up dead,

Instead…I analyze the growing profits, which line the rich man’s pockets,

And the bunker busting rockets,

Make us popular indeed.

In what holy book was that decreed?

No more dialectic…human nature equals greed?

 

I am climbing higher, but can’t seem to escape the fire,

As the pillars made of ethics start to fall,

If I give an inch or start to flinch and MAN will take it all.

 

For the MAN’s quite good at taking,

He’s been doing it for years,

 

And now he’s gaining power, by playing off your fears.

They know what playbacks scare you so they play in constant loop,

And reporters flock like vultures, just to try and get the scoop.

Everything, a false conception,

As they improvise a great deception,

Be wary of a man who asks for war…

And all these troops departing,

Any day now we’ll be starting,

Battle ships with cannons line the shore.

 

But what of urban ghettos, the prisons, and their lies

The rich are getting richer as the poor meet their demise.

I’d propose a revolution, but we’re a lacking a solution,

And Communism failed us in the past…

While the Anarchists scream mutual aid,

I’m sure we’ll end up starving oh too fast.

 

Sing one song. Into the night. 

We’re plotting revolution, my revolver shines in candlelight

And the clock upon the wall, means nothing at all,

We’re waiting for moment when we make the system fall.

 

AND in the back of the coffee shop,

Where the honky babble junky spreads his word.

His hair slicked back, hair brown not black, to all those that haven’t heard.

And next to him sits his partner, a man believed to be a clone,

His eyes glazed over, listens carefully, but he doesn’t drink alone.

 

They’ve been up for nearly 60 hours.

Fueled on Adderall and booze.

The tide is turning quickly. Quickly, quickly read the news.

 

On the radio, the broadcast lingers,

The fat man in the corner licks his fingers,

And the wax drips from the candles pausing time.

The streets outside a concrete jungle, and the flames of battle flicker

BURNING THROUGH the ash of urban grime.

 

While the leaders conversed

In the language of tactical insurrection,

The coffee shop offered slight protection,

Gunfire could be heard just right outside.

And with the buildings burning,

The rebels were quickly learning,

That all too many of their brothers that day died.

They recalled the night prior,

Before the city caught on fire,

Students dreaming of a brighter day.

Clad in grey uniform around a table, talking ‘bout the future, come what may.

The lieutenants began reporting, on the status of fight.

One might, despite all previous contraindications,

And resistance depictions, knew a losing battle at first sight.

 

We’re in need of ammunition, but not in a position

Treason is quite serious indeed.

And the RAT-TAT-TAT of rifles,

Echo in the night,

As we watch our wounded comrades slowly bleed.

The barricades it seems are holding,

The uprising is unfolding,

Dead and dying littered in the street.

And don’t be too surprised,

The Revolution’s televised,

‘Cause CNN wants you glued right to your seat.

 

Sing one song. Into the night. 

We’re plotting revolution, my revolver shines in candlelight

And the clock upon the wall, means nothing at all,

We’re waiting for moment when we make the system fall.