A small place like this takes on fierce intensity. A pressure cooker of ethnic strife baked in varying religious modes. I have not seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach, and then go back to Mughrabi to sleep. I’d walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled until I got to Mike’s Blues Bar. I’d shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager told me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turned out he and Maya, whom he also called Emma, were old lovers or something for a fleeting time. I really liked the guy. Once he took me to the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours to get the most bang for your exposure. He told me that sniping is like ancient times when you must remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I told him I wanted to be a sniper in the army, and he just figured the army I meant was the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but they only happened two more times.
I co-write a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav an,d they turn it into Hebrew and Arabic. I didn’t trust any of my Russians to look at it and did not know any Arabs to trust either. We set up a timetable for me to set up cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and Jerusalem. I spent about three days in each city recruiting. I was to attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya would set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav would be the money and logistics man.
The Organization, as we soon took to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line went. The initial objective of our group was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded was that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized’ another line from our playbook. The Organization was to serve as a network through which quite different people could unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals were to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel and Palestine.
I was taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I was mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We didn’t say proletariat. We just said we fought for the rights of the working class. I was getting my training on the fly. So were Maya and Avinadav. The Maya revealed no ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She seemed left without needing to declare it. She was Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’d been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she had half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She took the role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urged me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tried to recruit anyone she knew.
Andrew Manasseh Butler, aka “Andrew the Hustler”, whom no one seemed to call Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me one night over dinner that Maya and I could be the activists, but he had ‘keep the focus on the mission.’
Avinadav and I would talk all night. He lived in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azrieli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It was really near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot, so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma called it. There were always people crashing on the couches, on the floors and anywhere they could. There was a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who had been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucked it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. One night he and I picked up these two Ashkenaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed the stand and the four of us walked our asses north to the Sheraton and beyond, only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.
I talked big too, but I prided myself on delivering what I promised with broads and bullets both. This guy was living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declared ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium, was the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looked Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time, there could be between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d gotten exiled from Demona for this or that and were living with Avinadav until something came along, or they got forgiven.
“We are all in ‘back against the sea or a head to the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of Southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?”
“How many of you are there?”
“A couple thousand now. Not one is a citizen here. Ethiopians, they at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We do not even get offered real citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you got some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkenaz, everybody is shut out of something.”
“Just like in the States.”
“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.”
“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.”
“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.”
“Ah. Answers about what?”
“To judge if we can trust you, a near total stranger, with our lives.”
“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?”
“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?”
“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.”
“Which would take a miracle.”
“You’re not saying…”
“Who’s Mike Washington?”
“How did you….?”
“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.”
“It’s not like that.”
“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.”
“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.”
“Gets um all doesn’t he? Shoots straight, never misses, reliable? Brotherly maybe?”
“Something like that.”
“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?”
“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.”
“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.”
“Who? Mike Washington?”
“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘G-d Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being an accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young and so early.”
“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.”
“Be as careful as you want. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.”
“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. I think I’m in love with Maya by the way.”
“With Maya or Emma?”
“Same person.”
“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?”
“Emma told you my real name?”
“Yeah, but I learned it again going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We must ensure everybody is who they say they are. Got me?”
“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.”
“Complicated. Sounds like programming. Being that you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. You are in love with Emma. What is it to you to hold that girl?”
“It is to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise, she would not want me near her.”
“That’s part of it. What else you feel?”
“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.”
“Whatcha gonna do about it?”
“Why so you can tell her?”
“Information only flows one way around here.”
“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.”
“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love, she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. You want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time-honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.”
“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?”
“And stop being promiscuous.”
“You and Emma are gonna do that?”
“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.”
“Why the fuck is that?”
“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message, get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.”
“You keep alluding to me on some God tip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?”
“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.”
“Eleven more years?”
“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends.”
“The world doesn’t ever end.”
“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians, we probably wouldn’t have left the gardens to begin with.”
“Why 2012?”
“It’s the Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.”
“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?”
“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.”
“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.”
“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah; and your soul is eons older than your years of life. Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.”
***
So, we built the thing, cobbled it together based on the various books we’d read and life experiences we’d had. The Organization, whom the Israelis called Ha Irgun, was structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It was the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal was for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proved logistically expedient to our ends. We had all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya was appointed Defense Minister. I was elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that would command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program, under the leadership of the Cabinet. Maya and I authored the first statement that we would print glossy club flyers with a grey fist.
We selected the color grey as our standard because it was no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We called our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It began simply:
“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.”
“Go big or go home.” We argue about the name for a whole night then figured “what’s in a name?” We all had a couple of names, so why not the group? “We were organizing. It was an organization.” The word for that in Hebrew was Ha Irgun, which sounded officious enough to me and had been the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups. So, we ran off stacks of these little grey cards with a black fist and a little call to arms.
Friday arrives and I catch the last bus out of Afula before sundown and head south down the coast. Sundown on Friday is when they shut everything down, everything except parts of Tel Aviv. I need eye candy and attractions. I need to sell some art because I am completely out of cash. It was a two-hour trip to get from Afula to the Boardwalk.That night far out pacing any records set in London. The tiyeled is packed. The strip is lit up brightly. I feel good about getting back to this city. I moved through the crowd impressed with how quickly I’d made my first 200 shekels. This equivalent of nearly $50 is a chump change except on a kibbutz. Tel Aviv is geared to be one of the most expensive cities on earth. Thats from putting the Western incredible and implausible up on beach sand in under 90 years on the shores next to old Port Yafo. It’s also because Israel is a very small place and this is where wealth and decadence are concentrated.
I can smell the perfume of the beautiful painted Russian frehhote. Many of the young Russian men had bleached their hair like Eminem. A salsa band was playing, and an Argentinean Jewish woman was dancing and singing through a Madonna mike surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Everyone was clapping to the beat. A group of Arab Israelis was hawking watches, lighters and bootleg L & M smokes from a foldout table. Some rough-edged Romanian hustlers and their friends were taking money off stupid, shit-brained cocky American Yeshiva boys in games of three-card Monty. On the beach I saw the flash of fire poi whirling in the night. The Opera Towers looked huge. I could see a security guard patting down Yemenite Jews because they look Arab while he let the paler Ashkenazim in without any trouble at all.
Canadian Dave who is the bartender over at Mike’s Blues Bar gives me a bunch of flyers to hand out. They take up half the space in my bag. He gives me fifty sheks and a hamburger with French fries to hand them all out. I got this gig through a girl I drew on the tiyeled a week ago.There are several big parties tonight. I offload flyers to anyone who will take them at drop spots along the way to the Dolphinarium. The Dolphinarium beach-bar-restaurant complex, which houses a mega club called Pacha. Builtnear the Dan Hotel where the boardwalk hits the Turkish Fort at Yafo, Jaffa, the old Arab port that was here before the Zionists did all this building. No one I give flyers to will go to Mike’s because it’s an Americanized tourist jump-off right next to the American embassy.
It’s 10:40 pm. I make my way to Abulafia for a couple of mini pizzas. Abulafia is a 24-hour bakery that sells mini pizzas and pita soaked in olive oil with zaatar, a green fragrant spice that tastes like Palestinian oregano. The place has non-stop business especially around sunrise when it gets swarmed with club goers on the way home. That is when the fights break out between the Russians and Arabs or the Russians and the Ethiopians. It’s always the Russians and someone else. The owners of Abulafia seem to have a lot of sons and nephews named Muhammad. They do good business. One of them tells me they live in Yafo, the Old City, the Arab Quarter. It was the Arab port of long, long ago. The Yafo-Tel Aviv border is near the Dolphinarium and near a huge Ottoman prison that now apparently houses a sex club called the Dungeon.
***
A man disguised as Orthodox Jew in a cab is approaching the Dolphinarium. He is wearing a club suit and carrying a guitar case that covers a payload of ball bearings and nails. He thinks nervously,
‘It is too heavy. They will notice me as soon as I step out of the cab. This vest and jacket are making me sweat.’
He looks out the window. The driver seems nervous. The man doesn’t say much. This is not a situation for small talk. He looks at his watch. It’s 22:53. He observes people strolling on the tiyeled as the cab speeds by.The cab passes the Sheraton Hotel. The man wonders if one day all this will be returned to his people. He wonders when these Jews will be driven back to Hell. It’s 22:57. He takes a deep breath and tries to come to terms with the fact that he will be dead within this hour.
***
Roman is standing outside the Pasha Club in the parking lot talking to his friends. He thinks, ‘Fuck this place. Fuck this place big time.’
Roman is of regular build and is wearing a tight black T-shirt and FOXX jeans. His shoes are polished. There is gel in his hair. He speaks in thickly accented Hebrew. He mixes in Russian words. When he gets angry, he stops speaking Hebrew altogether. He never goes anywhere without his cell phone, which seems to never stop ringing. All his friends are from the Ukraine. They are racially Slavic and technically Jewish, which is to say that they have a Jewish grandparent. This doesn’t change the fact that they go to the Orthodox Church.
This is his third time at the Pasha Club. He wouldn’t normally go to this venue, but the girl his friend has fucking dragged them along. Her friends are Russian origin, and they act like whores when they drink like most Russian girls he knows. One of them is Georgian. Her family is using Israel as a halfway point between the former Soviet Union and the US. Like most of the olim Hadashim from that part of the world, they have no intention of staying here too long. Roman hopes his family get their U.S. visas soon because the Arabs are going crazy and he’s about to get drafted into the IDF.
The line is always too long. The Dan Hotel is across the street. Its plaza is large and white. He’s never stayed there, but he imagines it’s rather decent. When he gets to America, he’ll stay in a hotel like that. Or maybe even own one if he works hard.
***
I remember the basic joy of walking in the damp sand by the water with no shoes. Zachariah and Sebastian equate this with happy childhood memories so it’s pleasing to see the body they now share.
I finally break free from the crowd as I get to the end of Jerusalem Beach. I deliberately walk on the sand even if it means no people take flyers. I can see Yaffo in the distance. Compared to Tel Aviv it is ominous and lower key. I’m wearing my khaki pants with the tan button-down work shirt that says Mike on the left breast and has a Drop Kick Murphy patch sewn on the right. I pass out most of the flyers for Mike’s Blues Bar to groups of arsim and frehhote. They ask me questions in Hebrew or Russian, but I hardly speak either language well enough to know what they are asking me. I reach into my pocket and pull out a crumpled pack of Noblisse cigarettes. There are only three left.
***
The waves are crashing against the seawall levy. The rocks extend out into the water, and you can walk along them toward the end, which is as good a place as any to smoke hash. The levy is on the seaside of the Dolphinarium. This section of the Beach is called Tiki Beach. During the day people play Congo drums, and an outdoor café serves overpriced beverages with a scenic view. There is a private club next to the Pasha and a barbed wire fence prevents people from climbing from the levy into its outdoor section. House music is blaring from Pasha.
Slightly removed from the chaos, Ze’ev and his friends smoke a joint of tobacco mixed with hash. Ze’ev knows he’s a scumbag. The girl he and his friends had been gang-raping in his car had been left slumped against the rocks down by the water. They had pissed all over her before they left her. They’d slipped her a ‘knock out’ in the last club.
***
The man in the lethal club suit is approaching Target B in the cab. He had three targets to pick from. He had rejected the other two as unsuitable. He thinks, ‘I have never been to this part of the city before.’ He removes his wristwatch and places it into an envelope in the front seat. The envelope already contained his wedding ring, his wallet, and other petty personal effects. The only thing that remains is a small snapshot of his son and roughly 2 pounds of military grade plastic explosives. He begins a silent prayer, ‘My G-d is merciful, and all good things come of it. I will be your sword, my people’s sword against the Zionist dogs who killed my son and stole my land. Amen.’
***
I finally arrived at the Dolphinarium with no flyers to hinder my game and my two-step. Long lines had formed to get into the club. Its clientele are mostly underage Russian immigrants. Dave doesn’t need or want this demographic at his bar but fuck Dave. What’s twelve dollars and a beer. Absolutely nothing. I should just dump the damn flyers in a trashcan and rattle off some tourist spots I magically hit up. There are arsim everywhere. The word is sort of like the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd of Israel. A little meaner actually.They are dressed pretty much the same. Tight t-shirts, jeans, hair gel. They all reflect the same mannerisms and mentality. They always give me shit everywhere I go in the country while I’m selling art. My style is way too different for them. When they want me to draw something, it’s always crude and they never pay. They might sit and watch me draw and then wander off like crack heads with ADD. They are the club guys of the Middle East, the socio-economic equivalent to a mix of Jersey Guidos and ghetto Blacks coming to Manhattan clubs with a hard-on and a roofy. They love the ultra-violence. Most of them aren’t from Tel Aviv. They just come here for the clubs and the tiyeled. Packs of them will follow groups of girls around propositioning them until a rejection or a hook up or rape. They take Ecstasy. They are offensive to everyone. They frequent bad clubs and get into fights. Not unlike the Jersey Guidos, they thrill me. Racially they tend to be non-Ashkenazi, Romanians, Russians, and the Yemenites who live in Israel’s smaller, rougher cities like Bat Yam, Rehovot, Peta Tikvah, and Pardes Hana. I watch young, stupid people try to get laid after they wait on a long line for a high-priced bottle of poison. The Russian immigrant girls look blazing.They are really loving this whole free market thing and are waiting eagerly to get visas for the US or Canada. In the meantime, they’re made up as hell even when they are only going to the store for laundry detergent.
I see my friend of three weeks, Roman, talking to former Soviet girls. The Israelis are curvier and less made-up. I walk over to give him a pound and he introduces me to several of the girls whose names all end in ‘a.’ They, of course, don’t speak any English. They are maybe Russian but could be from Kazakhstan because they look a little Asian. I have no idea what they are trying to say to me. Roman’s English isn’t too hot either. We mostly communicate through gestures and the occasional sentence or two in Hebrew. He is excited to have ‘an American friend.’ Like most of the Russians I’ve met, I have only the most basic knowledge of who Roman is as a person. I’ve known him for less than three weeks. He was the first person I met in Israel and when I’m in Tel Aviv he always quickly visits to get his lady friends to buy sketches off me. Then we party in broken Hebanglish.
***
Ze’ev wonders what that American asshole is doing here. He remembered how the guy looked at the girl he was with last week when he met them for the first time at his stupid hobo art stand. Ze’ev thinks he dresses like a hobo. I should tell my friend not to let that American hobo into the club. Nobody looked at his girls like that. Ze’ev wasn’t some little punk lookout anymore. He was moving pills and would soon get a piece of Jerusalem beach to milk or bleed. Ze’ev knows everyone worthwhile in the Tel Aviv club scene. It’s all he’s been doing for the past four years. He gets comped at most of the low-end joints and a few of the mid-end. He’s still too young for the real hot spots. He does not like the niggers so most of the hip-hop venues are out. All the bouncers know he deals and that he’s affiliated so he gets in quick if the spot is Russian. He wonders why those girls are flirting with the hobo. It’s because he’s American and they want to get to America by using him. It’s the only explanation. His pictures are stupid and communist.
***
The human time bomb steps out of a black cab. As he surveys the scene, he thinks, ‘I’m so close I can smell them. These Israeli girls smell like whores. It’s the scent of my enemy. They all look so young. I don’t see any soldiers. My lieutenant gave me orders, ‘Take from them their young as they do to us.’ In a few years they’ll all be in the army killing my people anyway. One of those girls is giving me a funny look. They know I’m an Arab and I’m wearing a suit that’s too bulky.’
Quick thoughts race through his head. He thinks about his son. He thought about his people. He thought about the land that they stole from his people. Someone points at him as he edges near the line. He tugs the ripcord at his sleeve. “Salwa, I rejoin you,” he whispers to his long dead wife, “Palestine will be redeemed!”
***
I’m chatting up one of the Russian girls when I realized I was out of cigarettes. I told the girl to hold on for a second. I asked Roman if he had one. He told me that he did not. Everyone smokes, but I really want a Noblisse. They all have L&Ms or worse. I didn’t want to stop talking to the Kazak girl, so I asked Roman if I could toss him some loot to buy me a pack. He didn’t pick up the phrase ‘toss him some loot.’ He looked at me like I was crazy. I look at my watch. 11:31pm. I hopped the barrier and was about to cross into the parking lot. I don’t even know if the kiosk is open across the street. I look back to see if the girl is still. . . PEGUA!
***
Ze’ev is telling his friend about ‘some chick that gave him head on the beach.’ That chick is a 16-year-old that he and three friends raped. She is lying unconscious face down in the sand by the water. He tells them he came all over her PEGUA!
What the fuck was that he wonders. It came from the street by the club entrance. Of course, he knows what it is. This is Israel after all.
***
Roman is on his cell phone when he dies. It’s hot as hell here, even in the night. He looks up and sees a quick bright flash before he blows apart.
PEGUA!
***
I’m on my knees half deaf. I hear a terrible ringing in my head, but I can’t hear anything else. There are tiny droplets of blood all over me, but I don’t think any of its mine. Dozens of people are screaming, slouched on the ground. Some of them don’t look like much more than bloody bundles of tattered flesh. There’s blood on the ground and there’s blood in my hair. I don’t really know what to do. I am slumped down facing what was once the outside of a popular nightclub. I reach into my pocket to pull out a smoke and I realize it is the fucking cigarettes that just saved my life. My first suicide bombing. Saved by a fucking pack of cigarettes. There are a lot of dead bodies less than twenty feet away from me. I see the lights of the paramedic trucks and hear the sirens through the cluttered tunnel of my inner ear. I see people trying to pick themselves up and help the wounded. I’ve never seen so much real blood. Not in real life anyway. Everything I thought I knew about anything was ripped to shreds in a fiery burst of nails, ball bearings, and sharp things flying. Violence looks so cool until you meet him in person. Then he just looks like the Angel of Death.
I try to stand up. I can’t. I am a coward in the face of it all. A part of me is thinking: So that is what a suicide bombing looks like. And another part of me realizes: Holy fuck! I just got all blown up. And another part of me, the part that has my undivided attention, is asking where the fuck our god was tonight!? Twenty-one victims are dead. Most of the dead were teenage girls from the former Soviet Union.
My father is a Lebanese politician. From what I gather, we are Shi’a, and the Shi’a are the good guys, but we, as in our faction of the good guys, want a more secular Lebanon not what the Party of God wants; another brand of an Islamic State; something like Iran, or just like it. But, in Lebanon, you’re dealing with Phoenicians, not Arabs, so we have the mentality of trade, the mentality of sensualism; we are not dogmatic. The civil war, it happened by accident, but we all blame the Palestinians and the Israelis.
“THE OLDEST SONG EVER SUNG EVER WAS A LOVE SONG” a Kurdish jangle plays on satellite radio. I need to find a red-light room in the Green Zone. The kind of place off duty soldiers gets lap dances, drop dollars, and “get their dicks wet.” They say it’s “the world’s oldest profession”, but in fact the oldest profession is farming. I think Shermuta (a whore) is very relative term in the Middle East. You can get called a Shermuta for holding a man’s hand on park bench. You can get called a shermuta for selling your body to a man for their money. You can also get kidnapped, or raped, and/or killed over feelings. In Iran and in the Isis controlled zones, as well as in Afghanistan is the Ministry for promotion of virtue and prevention of vice.
I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad, and I tell you it’s much harder to get out of here than I ever thought. I have a credit card and freedom of movement for the most part, but I have family honor to uphold too. I have jet black hair and a baby face. Shabab15like it. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel that pretty. I feel mostly empty, living in a repressive culture with repressive heat and violence. I feel wilted. I feel confined. I rarely go anywhere without four armed men with beards. Sebastian tells me I am “powerful”, but I do not feel very powerful lately. Although they say I have tits for days. My name is Nadia. Some friends call me; Nadia Night, i.e. Nadia Layla cause I stay out all night partying. Or at least back in Beirut I did. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction called AMAL. I think he was doing something indirectly for Hezbollah16 in Lebanon, I do not have a profoundly serious opinion about this faction or that faction, and I’m just 19!
My latest boyfriend is a Kurd. And I am Arab, so that must be kept at least somewhat quiet. Mostly because I am high class, and he is working class. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. We have a chandelier or two and some very fancy carpets, which is a real thing. There is always meat in the supper and fruit in the filled up fridge. We have at least five south Asian servants, serfs, either one. I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Erbil where I met my first love who is Kurdish. I had lovers all over Erbil, but now just this one guy. His name is Alacan al-Biban, he’s so, so cool. He’s a Kirkuki. I am not so libertine Beiruti in Bagdad. What a repressive slum. Too easy to get kidnapped. I have crazy person dreams. I have bold visions too! I am, however, deeply-deeply unhappy in Erbil, it is like a guiled bird cage. When my mother moved us all to Baghdad it became much worse. Baghdad is of course a much larger, much more sectarian city. You can get your ass kidnapped. There are less eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis.So, when I became a young woman, I lost track of my happiness and my sleep. I am of course a “liberated woman” and “artistic” as well. Or just a little libertarian shermuta, depends on ones values.
Sebastian Adonaev “the Jew of Beirut” gave me an art lesson, but I didn’t take that many notes. I just liked watching him “do his thing”. Except. when he finally made it to Syria and doing that part of his thing is a little scary. But prophetically I knew he would probably survive the civil war.
Sebastian told me that the dreams I had are “old school prophecies”. That was nice of him to say, because my expansive white therapist says I’m “bipolar” and bored in a “guilded cage of Middle Eastern hyper-privileges”. He’s quite nice, for a Jew, in some ways he is real Middle Eastern man. In other ways, a colonial debaucher. He is a good mix of a gentleman and a tumultuous revolutionary too. I have never actually never had a Jewish friend before. Or let a Jew touch my breasts. We were never ever serious lovers, but he spoke sometimes about “running away with me, after the war, back to Beirut” and I agreed it was “a real hard possible”. It was a romantic idea, and I planned to go home to Beirut anyway, because Baghdad is “extra”. But the war will never-ever-ever-end so it’s a very silly notion, this running away staff. He says that in the old country you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we have to wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 33 toward dying. It’s not fully such a big deal. I am very-very beyond bored in the Green Zone. Alot of check points and alot of showing my papers. A lot of bored Shebab, on some factions payroll with machine guns. Alacan al-Biban wants to fly me back to Erbil, but ever since the veritable hordes of Shi’a Militia men called the Popular Mobilization Forces17 began surrounding Kirkuk, Alacan al-Biban has been stressed and distracted. Asa fixer being stressed and distracted is basically his job.
Sebastian, he is probably getting involved over his head and language skills in the PKK. The Workers Party activities that Alacan introduced him to, but to me he hardly admits such things to me or over social media. Later, I had a cafe talk date with my friend Mina Abdul Rahim. Shes over the years have gotten more excited about being Shi’a. She didn’t always cover her hair in a chador.
Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s “an artist” and “a free radical” and I like him a lot. Sebastian and Alacan al-Biban are strangely very close friends I have realized after the fact, and not just “friends of the Abdullah Ocalan type”. They have what Westerners call a “bromance”. Alacan is doing a lot of free fixing and I believe Sebastian may have helped write his college thesis. Something about a “Confederation for all the Middle East.” As my fling and flirtations in Erbil with this slightly older male Jew Kafr18friend developed into mostly sleeping with his Kurdish friend Alacan, Sebastian writes me every other day from Syria, respectfully. He’s my ”sweet infidel“ always being optimistic to me on the WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again when he went to Rojava and I went to Baghdad. But we WhatsApp it up. He is a writer, so he writes a lot. Our brief window to do something super inappropriate, well it was mostly missed.
What’s sexting in the Middle East; well its just like sexting in Europe or America. Telling people you want to fuck them by text. Sometimes I sext with Alacan, sometimes with Sebastian.
I let him sext me from the front and don’t tell Alacan al-Biban of course. I don’t sext back eagerly, I just don’t stop them. Its hot, we all could die in the war, everyone wants to talk about my tits. But I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. These flashes of Ali and such. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. I might just be triggered into revelation amid this shit show of war. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire. Or thrown off the roof. Or get stoned to death, or get their hands cut off.
You see, on one side of the Middle East is art, math, reason, love, vision, and high points of science and philosophy. On the other, unseen hateful dark old gods and howling hordes of death, with black banners, or red, white and blue ones. Telling everyone to wear more layers in this bull shit heat. Making up hypocritical rules about shit no one heard Muhammed say to anyone. On one side is hope, constructive collaboration, toleration, pride in diversity, and honor. On the other bullets whizzing, bombs dropping; bodies piling up. Massacres here, genocide there. One person sees Djinn, another G-d, and yet another knows it’s just fucking nanobots. That even though we are in a land of dust and fire; we are still in the future and future is 1000x more futuristic than anyone ever expected.
***
Everyone is familiar with the Iranian Israeli shadow war over Iranian nuclear acquisition. Less publicized is the Iranian Israeli shadow war over nano-bot technology. The itty-bitty war inside. The technology to control a person remotely. The technology to kill with a stroke like event or make someone see “visions” then blow themselves up in a truck bomb. Notice how any enemy of the Russian state dies and you will see traces.
It is infact very hot, and people here in fact hold very zealous beliefs. By the Israelis and Iranians incubated all kinds of ways to murder each other shot of a nuclear bomb. Although Israel has 250 Nuclear missiles and Iran has 50, no matter what the other side claims, bluffs, declares; no one wants a nuclear war of any size.
It started innocently enough, a young Tehranian scientist moving to Baghdad. With Mina Adul Rahim experimenting in her lab, fine-tuning the algorithms that governed the behavior of her nanobots. She marveled at their ability to navigate intricate mazes, dismantle complex structures, and even repair damaged tissues within living organisms. But as her mastery over the technology grew, so too did her ambition. With a few lines of code, Mina found herself able to exert control over swarms of nanobots, directing their movements with precision. She could command them to assemble into intricate patterns, mimic the behavior of biological organisms, or disperse like a cloud of dust. It was a heady sensation, knowing that she held such power in the palm of her hand. Really the hand of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran, the guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
But power, as Mina soon discovered, was a double-edged sword. As she pushed the boundaries of what her nanobots could do, she began to fully realize the potential dangers they posed. The nano-bots refused to be sectarian. In their most advanced coding and strain, they viewed all humans as a threat. In the wrong hands, perhaps their own self-awareness, which had perhaps already developed, could be used to wreak havoc on a global scale—unleashing plagues, destabilizing economies, or even manipulating minds. Haunted by the ethical implications of her work, Mina wrestled with her conscience and her obligations. Should she continue down this path, fully knowing the potential consequences? Not robot vs. Zionist, but little deadly robots against all humans. Or should she destroy all her research, before it falls into the wrong hands? Such as the hyper-warlike, white settler colonialist demonic, racist Zionistical Israelites. In the end, Mina made a choice that would shape the course of history. She resolved to use her knowledge for the greater good, to ensure that her nanobots would be a force for healing rather than harm. But even as she vowed to control her creations, she knew that the true challenge lay in controlling herself. For in the world of nanotechnology, the line between creator and creation was a perilously thin one, and only time would tell where it would lead.
In the proxy wars and cold wars, and hot wars man kills man over identity. In the world of artificial intelligence, in the world of tiny deadly robots: all humans were the nemesis, no discrimination as per faction.
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer wrote to me. Michael Kreminzer had done more to train me as a paramedic than anyone else. A horrible feeling, feeling someone strong buckle, being in the shadow of their feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And now you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
She was one of the very few that had ever read deeply into any of my books. Kreminizer was one of the men who trained me as a Paramedic. Now his woman was dead from a cancer.
I was in Al-Brooklyn, U.A.S. The heart of a party and the very soul of New-York-Grad; “the big apple”. The “city that never sleeps” or slept and sleeps no more. In a clear and well-furnished safe house abutting the J-M-Z line. I never want to go above $800.00 for a room at a safe house. Okay, I’ll rephrase that. $800.00 is the cap my budget can allow such a room. I always pay cash; I never sign anything. I always put down one month in advance. The people I must live with are all just as shady as I am.
In terms of a safe house, what you’re basically trying to establish is secrecy and staging. You can’t have anyone in the security apparatus know where it is of course, you need it to be hiding in plain sight.
“Don’t bring your lovers to the safe house. Bring them to a fucking hotel,” is what Brit the German lesbian comrade always tells me.
There are a ton of women in my life, but they all do different very things, chemically electrically speaking. Without them, I would perhaps not have as much supporting strength to carry my beleaguered little projects out into the world in the face of great risk, there would also not be as much love or hope in me. Or as Kurds like to say, “Motivation.”
Broadly, I could say there are women I fuck and who I don’t fuck, love and who I don’t feel that much at all, but there is a lot more to it than that distinction. Friends with benefits competing with lovers who are impossible to win, buttressed by ex-girlfriends who still want to help the cause. I learned about Jinology in Kurdistan, but I’m not sure if it all stuck.
The “Science of Women” (Jinology) cannot be taught in two days and much of what it has to say is just a radical take on feminism. For instance, that for every position of power should be co-chairs; a male and a female running the show together. Women are not special, or complicated. In many ways they are just the same as men. I like listening to them more though, I appreciate the feminine presence.
They all want something different though, but the same. And it’s all built on the foundation of friendship, like any healthy relationship. The way they pity me is different. Very few admire me, well they do but the pity instinct is a greater driver of their behavior. Or the way my work inspires them.
Goldy Andreavna was no longer answering my calls or returning my letters. She had had enough. It sure is cold. And the worst parts of me just want to die. Life is thankless, and I am aware that it is also very cruel to most of my human people. That all makes me want to fight, but I’m sure I’ll just make myself into a new statistic. The train rattles by on the above ground track next to the room I’m renting. It doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. It sounds like living in poverty next to plenty. I worked 80 hours this week. I still can’t manage to sleep.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.” I would have them put that Mighty Mighty Bosstones lyric on my tombstone if I believed they would ever find my body or figure out how to make me die. I lean towards Hooligan in depicting myself, “lower your flighty expectations”. I will not live up to your expectations for me and my agency, me and my powers. I am an easily broken man running from capitalist modernity into dreams, poems and the world beyond American reach.
It was the icy cold night of Purim in the Hebrew year 5777. Super fucking Futuristic. The full moon was huge, and it was brick as shit, it was Friday, everyone was drunk. But that had nothing to do with their silly drunk festival called Purim. The coldness goes right through his sheets, through his comforter, the space heater doesn’t start up right away. It’s a fire trap in here with all the subdivided dry walls. But it’s brick, as the brothers say, no matter how many layers I put over him. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. He knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade tonight, but I was conserving my finances. Hoarding up my comfortable sleeps on his big Queen-sized mattress made in Brooklyn that he’d lashed now three times to the roof of my civic and trafficked about the borough. Moving rooms in safe houses. Working everyday towards my next operation. Nothing is given to you in the movement. You have to earn or take initiative. That can appear attractive to women, sometimes, for a bit. But he’s basically broke.
The safe house isn’t so bad. It has high ceilings. The train is obnoxious, and the neighborhood used to be a war zone. It’s still dirty. There are still robberies every day. But the rent was a square $800, which was reasonable. Things were gentrifying here in the Bed Stuy-Bushwhack area. Still looked and felt like the ghetto Adonaev worked the 37 Bravo unit in. It still looked like the dark place Rahula died in.
That was our first “American Martyr”, shot himself twice in the head. But now there were white hipsters and cafes. It was a cute place except for a couple little things. Like the no drinking rule which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer slash painter greatly.
Her name was Brit Tully, and we did time together in the camps a few years back. She never admitted to being such, but this is what my associate Alan Medved told Adon, and he knew about such things. Brit was a metal worker, glass worker and an introvert. Her square job was retail in a fancy SoHo denim outlet. We co-habited the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house. It was Brit Tully in the small middle room, with my room to the right and Handler Hicks to the left. A fucking nut. We had all these hippy rules none of us followed and we both kind of hated him, he was a shifty fuck.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small-time publisher and writer Handler Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed.
And somewhat muscular and vigorous looking from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good!” He is a total nut who fixates on 9/11 conspiracy theories and has all the tendencies of being a junky off junk. His little boy, when custody allowed as always there every other weekend, looked feeble. Looking malnourished and unhappy to be there, yet chipper. Handler is an endless passive aggressive pain in the ass, but Brit and Sebastian Adonaev need a house for a cash and paper trail, and you get what you pay for in this city.
The handler took me in when the safe house just before it got too hot. Right before I skipped town to Baltimore to get my assignment from the local committee. A safe house falls apart for two main reasons; too much traffic or drama among spies. This place Brooklyn is infested these days with whores, with criminal scum, with sedition and with spies. It’s a good staging area for working in the city with no papers.
Natasha Salzano, which was just her passport name was a cold cunt. Natalia Chicherova, which was her name in Russia, had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused student Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arrears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night.
A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a good fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house, whoever is on the lease is the boss.
Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a master’s in international communications, but who knew.
She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the landlord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it, and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came really, nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything’s gonna be fine!”
I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill me over $735, well, that’s life. I’d kill someone over no less than 5,000 and depend on what they’d done to deserve it.
Comrade roommate-sublessor Handler Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figurehead of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews. I guess he didn’t get the memo that the best way to be hated in America by everyone was to keep talking about 911 conspiracy theories. I know for sure I read that memo in 2001. Moving on, it got so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two-year winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. I had invested in a long heavy Soviet grey coat, and layers of thermal underwear as well as an Ushanka. The big furry hat everyone knows and loves. Fucking around with the contents of my desk I find some letters from Adelina Blazenaya, a lover long gone. She called me some time a year ago on the road to Washington D.C.
And really, I never heard from her again. Like someone with a better, more giving dick inside her or maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with ever me. I have three love letters she wrote me and I carry them around in the black leather party envelope I was issued in Haiti. I try quite hard to break that silence of hers. To get friendship or something more or less than that. No dice ever. Legally speaking, I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment.
I’m rambling about nothing useful. My existential first world concerns my laptop; I’m comparing gear I need to procure. Bags, boots, and devices. I’ll expropriate them with a fabricated credit card. About 2,000 worth of kit. Maybe I’ll even get a new laptop. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Havana to Qamishli, well it would be a damn good haul.
Comrade Handler is out first every night. He sometimes reads in the living room; we wait it out in our rooms. Brit and I are almost pure night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago, I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock. I’d been waking up at 445 am all summer and fall to drive to the ambulance base in the Rockaways. Now I’d wake up at 1 to 2pm and go to bed at 5am to 6am. I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big, long wooden table Handler built. It’s shoddy work like the bunk beds he builds. He’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. But he’s chicken shit. This safe house is ok. Even if we can’t drink here. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great though. Never emotional and always objective, she’s going back to Berlin soon, her casework never comes up and isn’t polite conversation.
We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013. Now the year is 2016. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, something about nothing. Well anyway many years later like six months ago I found it and when Handler subdivided the loft into three rooms I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with my friend Erin Moore who is dark humored and funny and can cook her ass off. But frankly Handler sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such a steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.
I plan to drug Handlers and burn him still alive in his home the night after I leave the states. That’s not because he gets under my skin. It’s because he is working for the Iranians and that’s what Brit and I were paid to do. Burn him alive.
Weird fantasies of murder still pop in and out of my head from time to time, but I’m a medical man in the emergency Pre-hospital health field.
The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is a superhero in their own mind. And you don’t pick up a blonde bimbo hipster in a bar and bring her back there to savagely fuck her in every hole in her body with a belt around her neck. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are shady fucking gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me, have something to perhaps hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a few factors.
Brit is supposedly “German intelligence”. Handler is a well-known brilliant crack pot being paid by the Iranians to enlarge the American propaganda base of Press TV. Also, the undisputed leader of a 16-year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth. Most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is a famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W. Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Handler, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, or pretending to be reading behind the chirpy banter was a killer. An Iranian propaganda asset. And I was going to dope him up with benzo sedatives and literally cook him alive.
I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a total tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, the fucker was so precocious. I don’t mean to talk so much shit; I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
I am not a great person all of the time. I fucked that little hipster like a Ukrainian by the hour. Her face to the wooden floor and my cock up her ass. For something a lot like rape, she took it seven or eight times before I murdered Handlers and jumped country after Passover. Though those acts were perhaps not connected at all, in my mind they sort of connected to my own depravity.
Comrade Handler Hicks is a left-wing zealot; I respect him only for that. Shows some morale compass anyway. And about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a lesser hero of this story I’m about to tell. But I will admit that I didn’t mind the idea of killing him. He was annoying and also human trash. Because the truth is Iran doesn’t have any shortage of agents in this city, and his theories on 9/11 aren’t that well received anywhere. And he’s big faggot dork; so why did a two-person hit team get sent to eventually cook him?
“Well, that’s because loose lips sink ships and traitors get put in the ground.”
I am one to think every other high-powered person living in the darkness is mental, a whore, a killer or a spy. It’s mostly true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy. But I am a paramedic, and it took me a while to reconcile that; helping and saving sometimes, murdering and torturing other times. But a man’s got-to-do what a man’s got to do.
So, this small plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens Border and it’s gonna fly me low down the coast to Cuba. And pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate with rum and pussy after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.
Then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropole to meet my “new attaché” and confidant Ms. Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with for about six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. Thanks to the internet. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhny Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really needs, and we’re gonna be working on a few things. Getting some paperwork and concepts in order before I fly to Erbil, Iraq then infiltrate Syria to reach the Rojava Revolution sometime in the fall. But before I leave my city for a while, perhaps forever. Handler Hicks will die! If not by my hand, then his own. He’s a black hole or vile negative sucking energy.
Polina is a cozy, coy little red head doll. Died of course. She’s overly attentive to my interests and reads my work which is flattering since, honestly most Russian women take all my money and suck on my dick, try to rearrange my wardrobe and ride me for housing and good meals. That’s cheap, but no off. Polina is looking at editing my shortest book, which means she’s manipulating me for someone. She has a little kid, she lives in the fifth biggest Russian city Nizhny Novgorod, looks provincial and bleak. I’ve never been to the Russian Federation. It will not be hostile; well, it might be a little. It’s better when I don’t talk because vaguely, I look like them. That is what people say.
A translation of a book about Haiti into Russian, a collaboration called ‘Endless Walk’ which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven-year-old son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love. Or I’ll use her, and she’ll use me, and when it stops working, we can part as nothing.
But mostly my heart is cold, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is a talented singer, a painter and really too much of an artist for Russia’s third to fifth biggest city. She should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She makes her pittances as a graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is my gibberish for fucking less than nothing. She lives with her kid, her brother and her parents in what looks worse than an American housing project.
I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhny, which according to my research survived the Mongol horde invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.
Then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhny, fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Demhat al-Jabari, my colleague and fellow card-carrying D/U associate, to arrive a week later so we get to Sulaymaniyah, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava Federation. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time; I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance. $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two-year little exile in Boston.
“I’ve been to Russia in a past life or been Russian in a past life either one”, which I hope to see again in my present and future. I spend most of my time in the Russian quarter on the Brooklyn coast. I like everything about them. I can go deep or very, very shallow on it. I have read several dozen pieces of Russian literature and deeply admire the effort of the Soviet Union. I was blowing the coke off a Bulgarian lady friend’s tit the morning after my 33rd birthday. I liked it a lot, but it felt also disgusting and cheap, and I couldn’t bring myself to fuck her, so I paid and left. I guess Comrade Malcolm Veshanti, one of our comrades who stayed up all night with us, I can’t confirm but I think she passed out there at the Harlem brothel, woke up and fucked her.
So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my keyboard, and, Handler was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little notebook to Adelina, send them to her, no response. Svetlana, her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Adelina was there with her watching me type.
Sveta says she had a man now and was surely happy. I hope she’s happy and motherfucker isn’t twice her age. It might seem like I have all these lovers laying around, or like I’m a cold confused whore mongering whatever I am; but no. That’s not true. Generally, I have a free life partner, she bares me and the movement for a year or two, and she tries to save or fix or improve me; get me out of the movement and into medical school; then ultimately breaks it off when I do some time. I’ve spent 2 ½ years of my life inside camps cells and involuntary detention.
I’m not a cheat; I don’t beat women up except when they like that in bed. Which seems like a lot, leading me to question my own sweetness. I paid for everything. I dress well, I’m smart and an artist. I’m a decorated hero paramedic. I’ve written 8 books. I’m just a little bit crazy. And I’m a communist. And I do think those things are fine in Russian Federation, no cause for alarm like here. I did bring not one but two pairs of handcuffs to put Polina in, which is kinky but also tasteless and savage.
Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messages me. His wife, maybe just his longtime girlfriend, has just died, will be cremated in the morning. That’s the way poor people do it. Burying people isn’t cost effective. It can cost over forty grand.
You must understand this man is a tank. A big Russian Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, Palestinians specifically. May or may not be a Mason, definitely some kind of strange Q-ANON enthusiast. has killed men with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan. Trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in? Not for money. No one gets saved on ambulances. It’s all a profiteering machine of mythology and greed.
After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Polina Mazaeva and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer had written to me. A horrible feeling, feeling someone who is very strong buckle, being in the shadow of their horrible feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“Ain Davar.”
“No, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael. I know how much you loved her.”
“Yup. I just came from New Jersey. She will get cremated tomorrow.”
“I remember it was two summers ago. Yulia and I were on the phone, and I was so manic, and we were talking about her illustrating my book.”
“Well. That won’t happen.”
“Not in this life, no.”
“Agree.”
“In the world to come maybe she will be willing. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to get some rest. Good night, buddy.”
I hate it when he calls me “buddy”, but his main chick is dead.
“Good night.”
“I’m leaving the States on April 12th for Adelina’s birthday. I’m sure you prefer to suffer in silence, but if you want to hang out. I’ll drive out your way. She loved you so much.”
“We will see how I feel in the morning. Where are you going this time?” he asks me.
“Cuba. Then Russia. Iraq and then Syria. I’ll leave the night after Passover.”
“Be careful. You were just lucky last time.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got more men and training now. A good team. A real fine outfit.”
“Only reason you’re still alive.”
“I’ll try and get to see you more than the one-year usual. I do not only feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own mask of a face.”
He doesn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precept-ed and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Daria, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the blacklist I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again.
I feel this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly has nothing to live for and does not fear g-d or devils; his self-destruction is frankly inevitable.
You must always be ready for suicide watch dealing with our kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos, whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen. Michael is a hard man. And he killed so many people he had to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I got into. He called me Chechen once, because he could read into me and see many of my past lives.
I felt so sad, like I had not been sad in so long and I thought about Adelina. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?
Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot crazy. We both love Russian women. And he’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.
“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s an endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” the dancehall song says.
Late at night, I join Comrade Brit on the roof for a smoke.
We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was. Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. It was really nice out for mid-March; it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.
“They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.
She was so dark, introverted, and cynical, as well as a lesbian. We only went out together a handful of times, but we smoked on the roof together a lot and both hated the passive aggressive Handler. Brit would always say she’d leave for a lover in German, soon, I always said I’d leave for revolution in Syria, any day now. We were both suffering in the Brooklyn ghetto, in the loft of Handler Hicks the conspiracy theorist and Iranian puppet man. Who we had just been paid to rub out of circulation. But you can’t just kill a man and get away with it in the United States. You must be realistic about that. We weren’t really gonna light him on fire, nobody really paid us to kill him and neither of us were really intelligence agents. We were all just living in relative poverty of conscience and slight material poverty deep in the Brooklyn labor ghetto, where you lived paycheck to paycheck. Where your collar is blue shade.
“It was all just a transit point to death or possible greatness. But a pointless death is more likely to come first and make the second proposition meaningless. What use is greatness when you cannot see the results of it?”
“You sure make a lot of dumb American movie like inner monologues when you smoke,” says Brit the German spy.
Dedicated and shared exclusively to Ms. Komrade Elena Anatolievna Komarova
Written by: Walter Sebastian Adler
Every time we kiss it takes me out of this place!
And there will be more time for kisses!
Hold me fast and take my tongue from me as well as all my new found essence.
Absorb for me and let me then carry you further than ever before.
When man is submerged in the flood water of his longing,
When the rapids break the legs below him,
Voluptuous folds of over powered temptations yielding bed sheet utterances, belonging.
The desire to muster his best qualities,
His full works brought to bear for that singular woman thrust before him.
As my rough parts are made a puppy faced rabbit!
And my soul into a naked exposure,
Your hands, hips lips a flush of all endless ways to bring the winter to better closure.
And then tight ripped verse.
To chainsaw the rough cut marble of composition, to bash apart the inadequacy of poor form which might hint that all done for you was not unique.
Depart.
Komarade Komarova! You sometimes amaze me how much.
Such, I shall tell you what rights mean to me, dare we be glutted, yet so cold in Babylon make plain your wishes, I will get us free!
I see you not judging, or hiding well judgments!
From my past escapades or the demons in me!
Not judging we, I am beyond aleaved that we is now two and has been cleaved down from three.
Yet, wet lips still spout insurrection.
They bite the tongue, I bite my tongue in only one language. And lips which once from words but strike keys into bloody history, misconception.
See the melee!
See the thrill of “to us impending victory”
She asks:
“How many of your poems sound close to same? The want of affection of a daughter from Russia, the toll of such women, the toll of your struggle, the playing too hard of no rules at the game!”
She says:
“Take a short blade and cut the warble off the words, trim the American vernacular down to half the size.
Surmise, drop vanity, your chornay like use of countless profanity. Make again proud form, verse you rehearse until ere ready to perform.”
“Make language a beautiful thing!”
No instrument to bludgeon about thy demons an enemy’s down with the Winter and up with future, the coming of Spring!”
“And who,” she asks “art thou biggest enemy? Thyself-Thyself Comrade, squandering don’t you dare, stare, look in the mirror see the source of past troubles, he’s laughing at you or crying at you! Comrade take care.”
“Thyself if so untrue is pleasing to no one, not one single no one, not even the darkness in you,” she declare.
I respond; “Kamrade Komarova, my sweet Elena I will moan every moment touching you and beside you render myself a smiling man with a past of no great countenance, you’re not like other woman we can’t be labeled by our continents!”
“Our consonants!”
“Most wanton. Touching you or looking through!”
“I long every day for your touch!”
She sometimes amazed me how much!
Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.
Scheming into dreaming, another bridge called Karlov!? I love to dream beside you, separated by nothing but desire, but happy always for the dreaming we do.
The duct tape that when I lived impoverished I used to patch my dressing shoe.
Take that blade that you were offered,
Cast that thing aside!
Seize control that vessel, bleed it red or bleed it blue.
What mean that Haitian flag to you?
“Talk of love or talk of sin or talk of rights;
You are too happy now to die before winter has finished setting in.”
I want nothing more or train robs, nothing more of winless fights.
“I want us to dream of ways to win!”
It’s all or nothing motherfucker! She imitates; “For a Baha’I Russian Haitian fighting Irish you sure still like to make your dradel spin.
“What’s now not haunting you ought make your words more beautiful,” she says, “No more Victor Gin.”
“And are not small beautiful moments, dreams and things, smells and tastes and landscapes also dangerous to make tunes and tomes too?” she asks.
“Are not sad barricade ballets just belligerencies to thine enemy self?”
“Do not invite fire into your home, the Victory Gin is for self-murdering men, who don’t know how to begin the sniff of a win. Onto the shelf.”
“Your guns and your bullets your lies and worthless desires of dueling with devils!
“DREAM CORRRECT! You command my respect, your humor in nightly visitations to Burma to Paris to Trinidad; you call that all love, your love is forever suspect!”
When I see the smile of Komrade Komarova, I know her as a plural woman.
I profess her my longing and I take her commands.
A woman who like I is disconnected from aspects of realty so she might better love the place where she lands.
A pause again, cheers to now and cheers to never again; might never loving trysts rip out hearts asunder, might never ideals take needless lives, cost rivers red of blood, denying life all grace or wonder.
I cheers to total truthfulness, a pause’ I’LL SEE YOU; WHEN?
Again and Again and Again.
I speak freely before you, I dare.
Until fireworks over Bagan’s skies are but a symphony of promises kept to me and you, and Blood red balloons of the Banshee insurrection not a spark compare.
She asks:
“What for then comrade! When you kiss my lips and write your poems on the softness of my stare; what is you’ve set yourself to do?”
“If you promise we, or the entire Breuklyn Soviet our liberation true then mark my words your words will return to stab a blade in you, and dash yourself and burn apart for the emptiness of the promises you sew.”
My hand overtakes her finger, her hand on the clutch.
She sometimes amazed me how much!
Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.
How much she knew my heart and yearned to know the plots of my soul. And perhaps I could amaze her too, not with all the adventures to come or the tall orders of deeds I had promised her and the world I could do,
I say.
“Just remain by my side and all of the happy you put on to me, I’ll reflect it actions right back on to you.”
“THE OLDEST SONG EVER SUNG EVER WAS A LOVE SONG” plays on the satellite radio. I need to find the red-light room in the Green Zone. The place off duty soldiers gets lap dances, drop dollars and get their dicks wet.
I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad, and I tell you it’s much harder to get out of here than I ever thought. I have jet black hair and a baby face. Shabab15like it. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel that pretty. I feel mostly empty, living in a repressive culture with repressive heat and violence. I feel wilted. I feel confined. I rarely go anywhere without four armed men with beards. Sebastian the Jew tells me I am “powerful”, but I do not feel very powerful lately. Although they say I have tits for days. My name is Nadia Shubar Noori. Some friends, all me Nadia Night, i.e. Nadia Layla. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction called AMAL. I think he was doing something for Hezbollah16 in Lebanon, I do not have a profoundly serious opinion about this faction or that faction, and I’m just 19! My boyfriend is a Kurd. And I am Arab, so that has to be kept quiet. Mostly because I am high class, and he is working class. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. We have a chandelier and some fancy carpets. There is always meat in the supper and fruit in the fridge. I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Erbil where I met my first love who is Kurdish. I had lovers all over Erbil, but now just this one guy. His name is Alacan al-Biban, he’s so, so cool. He’s a Kirkuki. I am not so libertine in Bagdad. I have crazy person dreams. I have bold visions! I am, however, deeply unhappy in Erbil, it is like a guiled bird cage. When my mother moved us to Baghdad it became much worse. Baghdad is of course a much larger, much more sectarian city. You can get your ass kidnapped. There are less eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis. So, when I became a young woman, I lost track of my happiness and my sleep. I am of course a liberated woman and artistic as well.
Sebastian Adonaev tried to give me an art lesson, but I didn’t take that many notes. I just liked watching him do his thing. Except when he finally made it to Syria and doing that part of his thing is scary. But prophetically I knew he would probably survive the civil war.
Sebastian told me that the dreams I had are “prophecies”. He’s quite nice. He is a good mix of a gentleman and a tumultuous revolutionary. We were never ever lovers, but he spoke sometimes about running away with me after the war to Beirut and I agreed it was “a possible”. But the war will never ever end so it’s a very silly notion. He says that in the old country you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we have to wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 34. It’s not such a big deal. I am very bored in the Green Zone. Alacan al-Biban wants to fly me back to Erbil, but ever since the hordes of Shi’a Militia men called the Popular Mobilization Forces17 began surrounding Kirkuk, Alacan al-Biban has been stressed and distracted.
Probably getting involved in Workers Party activities, but to me he hardly admits such things to me or over social media. Later, I had a cafe talk date with my friend Mina Abdul Rahim.
Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s an artist and a radical and I like him a lot. Sebastian and Alacan al-Biban are close friends I realized after the fact. As my flirtatious older male Kafr18friend, Sebastian writes me every other day from Syria. He’s my sweet infidel always being optimistic to me on the WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again. But, he is a writer, so he writes a lot. Our brief window to do something inappropriate, well it was missed. I let him sext me from the front and don’t tell Alacan al-Biban of course. I don’t sext back, I just don’t stop him. But I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. These flashes of Ali and such. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. I might just be triggered into revelation amid this shit show of war. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire. Or thrown off a roof. Or get stoned to death, or get their hands cut off.
You see, on side of the Middle east is art, math, reason, love and science. On the other, unseen hateful gods and howling hordes of death, with black banners, or red, white and blue ones. On one side is hope, constructive collaboration, pride, and honor. On the other bullets whizzing, bombs dropping; bodies piling up. One person sees Djinn, another G-d, and yet another knows its nanobots.
***
Everyone is familiar with the Iranian Israeli shadow war over Iranian nuclear acquisition. Less publicized is the Iranian Israeli shadow war over nano-bot technology. The itty-bitty war inside.
It started innocently enough, with Mina Adul Rahim experimenting in her lab, fine-tuning the algorithms that governed the behavior of her nanobots. She marveled at their ability to navigate intricate mazes, dismantle complex structures, and even repair damaged tissues within living organisms. But as her mastery over the technology grew, so too did her ambition.
With a few lines of code, Mina found herself able to exert control over swarms of nanobots, directing their movements with precision. She could command them to assemble into intricate patterns, mimic the behavior of biological organisms, or disperse like a cloud of dust. It was a heady sensation, knowing that she held such power in the palm of her hand.
But power, as Mina soon discovered, was a double-edged sword. As she pushed the boundaries of what her nanobots could do, she began to realize the potential dangers they posed. In the wrong hands, they could be used to wreak havoc on a global scale—unleashing plagues, destabilizing economies, or even manipulating minds.
Haunted by the ethical implications of her work, Mina wrestled with her conscience. Should she continue down this path, knowing the potential consequences? Or should she destroy her research, before it falls into the wrong hands? Such as the warlike Israelites.
In the end, Mina made a choice that would shape the course of history. She resolved to use her knowledge for the greater good, to ensure that her nanobots would be a force for healing rather than harm. But even as she vowed to control her creations, she knew that the true challenge lay in controlling herself. For in the world of nanotechnology, the line between creator and creation was a perilously thin one, and only time would tell where it would lead.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 