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 neo-Kurdish jangle plays on satellite radio. I need to find a red-lit room in “the Green Zone”. The kind of place off-duty soldiers get 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 a very relative term in the Middle East. You can get called a Shermuta to hold a man’s hand on a 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 there 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 because 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, shall I say favorite, 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 the 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 unhappy in Erbil; it is like a gilded bird’s 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 fewer 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 one’s values.
Sebastian Adonaev “one day 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 “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 Yahud, in some ways he is a 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 must 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 a lot 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.
Comrade, Heval Sebastian Adonaev, 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. She’s over the years have gotten more excited about being Shi’a. She didn’t always cover her hair in a chador.
My man Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s “an artist”, “a biz-ness man” 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 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 Haram, something perhaps super inappropriate, well it was mostly missed.
What’s sexting in the Middle East? Well, it’s 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. Even though we are in a land of dust and fire; we are still in the future and “the future is 1000x more futuristic than anyone ever expected”.
A quote from a pamphlet I am reading, from the Party of God and Workers:
“The Enemy” reduces us to slumber, serfdom and indefinite toil. The enemy forces false and arbitrary division upon us, reducing us to a force for labor. They strip us of a life of any meaning, they abrogate our rights. Divided we die in half life. Reactionary thinking is an embrace of hopelessness and brutalist individualism. A life of minimizing harm and maximizing pleasure. Such a life is encouraged by every existing regime.
“A human person is born free and equal, fully conscious and capable of limitless possibility.”
A Cadro is a “conscious person”, of an open mind and collective spirit. A Cadro lives a dedicated life. She or he is not a monk, an extremist or a zealot. She or he is a partisan. A person of good morals and great fight. A person who through knowledge of truth lives by rights, sees value in collective existence. Lives a free life, in liberty and in virtue knowing self and loving others. The dedication of a Cadro is rooted in the tree of life, therefore the deep roots of our collective history, the tallest branches of our collective hope. He or she is dedicated to “the world of the real”, yet persistence and boldness drag us toward a world to come. By rights possessing a basis of just measurement, knowing good from wrong, by virtue of living with integrity.
***
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. Of course there was Russian involvement in the effort; they are loyal allies of us and also, the meddling Syrians. Always just one coup, one plot, one dynasty away from trying to absorb Lebanon. That is the basis of “the axis of resistance”, or at least it was in 2015; Russia supporting Iran and Syria, Syria supporting the Party of God in Lebanon; who in turn was aiding and abetting 16 factions of Palestinians; Hamas and Islamic Jihad; the ones with more rockets and teeth. Somewhere to the Southeast, in Yemen; the nominally Shi’a Houthis aided and abetted by Iran against Saudi Arabia. Tens of thousands there dead from war and famine, no one really talks about it very much.
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, scientifically, enough, a young Tehranian scientist moving to Baghdad, the Wild West! 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. “The men really running the show.”
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 imagined identity. Woman wails, cries, prays, and sometimes does some killing too. In the world of artificial intelligence, in the world of tiny deadly robots, all humans were nemesis, no discrimination as per faction. When these are released, it will kill many of the white Jews, but realistically many of the white Jews are responsible for the Naqba and the fitna today. They are not all guilty, but they are predominantly guilty for the Genocide in Gaza. Although it must also be said that they were warned about October 7th multiple times, by Egyptian intelligence and the Pasdaran. It is said they not only did their State let the attacks happen, but that also then even went as far as moving that little rave from where it had been scheduled to only a few kilometers from the apartheid walls. These experiments were not yet in any state of perfection, but the Zionists are pushing us to the wall in Lebanon and Palestine. They say we are all bent on conspiracy theory in the Middle East; but I will say this, as a scientist, the little robots are quite real. To stop a man’s heart, to induce a stroke, to induce homicidal feelings. They have over two hundred nuclear weapons, we Iranians have close to five. But strange things that happen cannot be left to fog of war and mystical narrative.
When this weapon is perfected, we will be able to stop the white Jews in their tracks. Make them fall into the sand in thousands. When our work is done, we will be able to make all Europeans homosexual with gas. Of course, there was Russian involvement in the effort; they are loyal allies of us and the Syrians. They are not like the evil Americans; they will not falter to defend their allies. America will use the Israelites and use the Kurds, then abandon them all in the end. It is good to have loyal friends. Not friends like the United States of America.
“The Jewish Military Colony is filled with surveillance and informants, every phone is bugged, every email is read. The basis of any uprising must be so low tech that it leaves no fingerprints, a series of whispers, notes on paper, a war of cells.”
There is also a great deal of inevitability all your friends will get rounded up, tortured, and killed. Some will give each other up under torture, betray themselves and the cause.
I went on another scouting trip to Be’er Sheva at the very beginning of August. The young, tough Gavroche went right to work enlisting the local, disaffected youth of the urban Be’er Sheva sprawl. He was not a great thinker. He was a young person of action. What he seemed to like was that there wasn’t too much of a preset plan. He did not have to read anything to join. That was the beauty of it that made so many people just plug in and fight. For years people had said things like this are only in the movies or in Russian literature.
None of that is important anymore though because we are a life support machine, a clandestine movement operating way behind the lines, which according to an unseen G-d, are our ancestorial homeland. You came by. You plugged in or enlisted was a better word because by then we had written our own Kaaba, an internal proficiency and placement exam. You got talked about it because a friend had signed up. You saw a group of kids learning how to take a soldier’s weapon, saw them practicing martial arts in a park, and then one night it hit you. That fucking heroin dealer that used to be in that park was gone. So were the junkies posted up on the playground. You noticed the gang graffiti on the bombed-out buildings had been painted over. Sometimes just grey paint. Sometimes a small mural. Sometimes, an odd black pictograph you have never seen in your life. A food basket ended up in front of your house. Just a little bundle, but if you are hard up enough, any bit helps. It came again a few days later courtesy of Ha Irgun. You picked up someone hitchhiking, and they put you on to our righteous and almost self-obvious revolution. That someone was always the young Zachariah Artstein, making rounds with his old friend Hadas.
Zach got in trouble anytime we went up the hill to Jerusalem.
The Mugavnkiim arrested him and held him 48 hours when he tried crossing from East Jerusalem into Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp. He had lost his passport some time ago and it was lucky they did not hand him over to the American embassy or deport him. On a trip before this one, we got caught up in some Arab quarter unrest and had to hide for a few hours in a metal shuttered market stall with a couple identical twin Palestinian brothers and their father as the Mugavnik storm troopers flooded the market with tear gas and shots rang out all afternoon.
But by the second week of August, we are solid in Tel Aviv. Mostly Black Israelites and European émigrés. The base of the Cabinet and flagship chapter was called the ManassehCommand. Our network was based out of the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft on the edge of town. We had secured a printing facility and were working on secure lines of online communication.
We were also solid in Be’er Sheva led by Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar and a small army of punk rock kids and working-class hooligans. This formation we called the Judah Command. Out in the desert these young fighters were training on M1 rifles and learning Krav Maga. Expansion was being focused on christening cells in Ashdod, Arad and among the Bedouin settlements.
We were solid in Haifa too, a large cluster of Arab Christian youth led by the young preacher Deeb al Hadid and some Ashkenazi artstudents at the university on the top of Mt. Carmel, who were led by a girl named Hadas, some one-time lover of Zach’s from the kibbutz days. The fighters in Galilee called the Asher Command.
There were several three to five person cells recently established in Pardes Hanna among Zach’s Russian immigrant friends. In Akko there were a couple of Arab Israeli girls who owned a tattoo parlor. Afula never seemed that solid. Bet She ‘an consisted of a kibbutz hippy and his boyfriend. There were a couple of paramedics in Rehovot. In Sheroot Lummi and in Netanya, it was more Russian street kid friends of Zach’s.
“In Jerusalem we are entirely without representation.”
There was just one single mission. We would drive the U.S. influence out of Israel, and we would make a stand for a government that upheld human rights. I had spent a good many nights wondering if Zach’s theory of communism would set us free or just get us killed for nothing.
“For many years as a young girl I just hoped I’d go to heaven.” I pictured heaven as this endless beach with tall white castles and all the people I had ever loved were waiting for me to get there, waiting for me to come home. I wondered if God valued the work we were doing even if I was not sure about there being a God. But I could never make myself honestly believe. And now I knew that the only heaven I might ever live to see was the one I was ready to fight for then defend. The heaven we would create right here, right now, our Zion in the wilderness.
This Romanian Jewish girl Noaah was making the rounds to collect donations for our relief baskets. Gavroche’s ladylove Katusha was editing the articles that would go into the first edition of our mini newspaper. The little ones they called Sahar, and ‘Molly the Fairy’ were sweeping up this massive, abandoned building called the Bedouin School House where Zach and Molly lived in a room under the great stairs. She had become his little protégé. She followed him everywhere. The little Russian half pint street urchin had been made homeless because of an insane mother and an abusive father who was a self-professed ‘anarchist.’ She was just 13. Enormous glasses, bright outlandish clothing, little braids died different shades of pink. She adored Zach and believed in the ideas of Ha Irgun completely. Tribe Judah had a wide range of child soldiers, but it was the only command with predominantly Jewish members. Asher was Christian Arabs and Manasseh was mostly foreign expats and Black Israelites.
Three weeks ago, the Bedouin School House was overrun with narcomaniim until Gavroche, Big Guy, Zachariah, and a few others from the Be’er Sheva Unit’s paramilitary arm EGROPH flooded the building with diverted sprinkler lines and then drove them out. The junkies moved into the abandoned military base on the other side of the electric neon Old City. Ha Irgun took over the enormous two-story Ottoman structure, destined for many years to be a science center. The boys padlocked the doors shut, dragged in meeting tables, bricked up some windows, and called it the KDAA, some made-up word surely of Zach’s inspired whims of creation.
You can’t teach what we were preaching because we are making it up as we go along. And there was no one to compete with. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades kept everyone, for lack of a better phrase, “pretty fucking terrorized”. And all the while as both the second Intifada and our revolution unfolded around us so out of control, I never stopped thinking which among us would be the victims of either of these little wars. The Palestinian war ever punctuated with a bullet or a bang. Ours new and in the shadows, but we’d have our bangs and bullets too before long.
On August 9th, Zach and I left Be’er Sheva bound for a third try at organizing the Capital city into a regional command to be dubbed Ephraim. We got there around noon and got lunch at Mike’s Place Jerusalem, a sister joint to the one managed by my close friend, Canadian Dave. We take our time to eat. I think the kid was a little burnt out. He’d been busy and never seemed to like coming to the ‘holiest of holies’. We were both more Tel Aviv kind of people. We made our way down to King George Street, one of the huge thoroughfares. Zach looked in his bag.
“Fuck,” he mutters.
“What is it?”
“I’m all out of art.”
Then three blocks ahead of us we heard a
PEGUAH! And I jump in the air and my bones rattle inside me. We freeze. For a second and then watch the smoke and dust settle. We do nothing helpful. Wait for a secondary explosion. The Palestinians have blown up a pizza place up the street. One of the few that still sells Pepperoni. People are screaming. The place is a hectic mess. Blood, dust, ambulance sirens. Zach slumps into a green bench on the road and takes off his hat, as he sometimes does when he gets impassioned or upset. The cloud of dust and the screams of wounded people does not stop until he flags us a cab and tells the driver to “get us back to Tel Aviv.” There’s smoke, there are the screams of the injured, the incoming sirens. The ambulances show up and second bomber blows up the responding rescue crews. PEGUAH!
The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing took place around 2pm. The blasts kill 15 people, including 7 small children, and wounded around 130. Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad immediately claimed joint responsibility. The only thing he said on the road back to Tel Aviv, with soldiers and emergency medical personnel swarming to seal off the city was:
“I won’t be caught dead in that city again.” But that was just how he talked when he was upset by the intifada and carnage. We obviously would be back when we had set up a cell. That is how organizing works; unreasonable persistence.
Hand to hand, mouth to ear, little speeches, drawings in the sand, whispers about impossible sounding things. She showed me that summer was not just about going underground and becoming invisible to our enemies; she taught me how to breathe underwater and travel across time.
“Let me begin by saying: the Jew of Beirut is kind.”
They said this often, and with a strange insistence, as though kindness itself required defense in this city of layered suspicions. If ever anyone accused him of madness, of petty vice, of wandering too freely among the wrong streets and the wrong people, others would answer quickly, almost nervously: No, not him. You are mistaken.
And yet, even in their defense, there lingered a hesitation. For he had arrived not as a simple man arrives, but as one falls from some uncertain height into the waiting hands of a city already burdened by its own past.
His name was Sebastian Adonaev. Though in Beirut, names did not remain singular for long. He was also Abu Yazan, by inheritance of a story half true and half invented. And elsewhere, in colder lands of conflict, he had been called Kawa Zivistan, the blacksmith of winter. Each name clung to him like a fragment of a life insufficiently lived.
He was, by trade, a paramedic. Which is to say a man trained to intervene in the brief and decisive moments between breath and its absence. Such men develop a peculiar disposition, half healer, half intruder, capable of entering any space without invitation, provided suffering resides there.
This, perhaps, explained his presence.
Beirut did not receive him gently, nor did it reject him outright. Instead, it absorbed him, as it absorbs all things, into its contradictions. He walked its streets with an openness that was either admirable or naive, depending on who observed him. He spoke too much, listened too intensely, and gave of himself in ways that made people uneasy.
“They have no roots,” some said of his people. “They drift.”
But if this was true, then Sebastian drifted with intention. He sought not novelty, but belonging, an endeavor far more dangerous.
It was said he flourished quickly. That he suffered just as quickly. That within forty days he had lived through enough transformations to constitute several lifetimes. Whether this was exaggeration or not hardly mattered. In Beirut, myth attaches itself to the living with alarming speed.
No one knew how many Jews remained in Lebanon. Perhaps a handful. Perhaps fewer. But categories persisted even when their subjects vanished, and so he became, almost immediately, a symbol, claimed by none, suspected by all.
When they finally detained him, it was in Chiyah.
He had wandered there without clear purpose, or perhaps with too many purposes to distinguish among them. The streets were dim, the air heavy with that peculiar quiet that precedes confrontation. A patrol, informal, uncertain in its authority yet confident in its necessity, approached him.
They asked questions. He did not answer well.
There are moments when language fails not because words are absent, but because too many meanings compete for expression. Sebastian stood within such a moment, aware that whatever he said would be insufficient.
“Why are you here?” they asked.
It was, in truth, an unanswerable question.
Inside his mind, voices arranged themselves into a tribunal. One urged restraint, another absurd defiance. A third, quieter voice suggested that perhaps this scene had already occurred elsewhere, in another life, under different names.
He tried to locate himself within reality. Failed.
The slap came not as violence, but as punctuation.
And then, abruptly, motion. Confusion resolving into instinct. He moved, whether in resistance or escape, he could not later say. The street opened before him, narrow and uneven, leading nowhere in particular.
He ran.
Behind him, voices. Within him, more voices still. The city itself seemed to observe without intervening, as though this small drama were merely one thread among countless others woven into its fabric.
As he ran, he experienced a curious sensation, not fear exactly, but a displacement. As if he were crossing, not distance, but layers. Each step carried him further from the world he recognized and deeper into one that operated according to unfamiliar laws.
He wondered, briefly, whether such crossings were reversible.
Elsewhere, along the Corniche, another man arrived.
Yousef Bashir chose his hotel with care. Not for comfort, but for its particular deficiencies, privacy born of neglect, security softened by indifference. The city revealed itself differently from such vantage points, less as a spectacle, more as a mechanism.
Years earlier, their paths had intersected under far calmer circumstances. A shared ride. A conversation that began politely and ended somewhere far more consequential.
They had spoken, then, of history. Of land. Of the peculiar persistence of borders drawn by those no longer present to defend them. Each carried within him a narrative both deeply personal and broadly political. Each recognized, in the other, not agreement, but a kind of symmetry.
What emerged between them was not consensus, but a question.
If division had failed so thoroughly, if it had produced only smaller enclosures of conflict, then what alternative could exist? They entertained, cautiously at first, the notion of expansion rather than fragmentation. Not the erasure of identities, but their uneasy coexistence within a broader structure.
It was, perhaps, an idea suited only to the insulated environment in which it was conceived. Or perhaps it required precisely the chaos into which they had now separately ventured.
Time had not resolved their differences. It had, instead, deepened them.
Yet the question remained.
Beirut, indifferent and attentive all at once, continued its slow, inexorable motion.
And somewhere within it, a man ran through the dark, uncertain whether he was escaping danger, or approaching it.
Every day in New York City, about 5,500 medical 911 calls are made, yet only a small fraction are truly life-threatening. Roughly 30% justify the full response of firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics, while most calls still consume significant resources in a litigation-driven system that often uptriages to avoid risk.
The EMS system itself is fragmented: 70 agencies across four sectors and seven unions; municipal, hospital-based, private, and volunteer; all trying to balance rapid response to critical emergencies while maintaining coverage for thousands of unwarranted daily calls.
Response times reflect the strain. A life-threatening call waits nearly 18 minutes for an ambulance. Firefighter first responders, who cannot transport patients, average over 23 minutes, while structural fires receive units in under 6 minutes. FDNY EMS handles about 65% of 911 volume, hospital-based EMS about 35%, with additional calls outside the system. Ambulance bills are between $500–$1,692 per run; FDNY EMS generated $400 million in FY2025 revenue. None of which returns directly to the department, while hospitals increasingly compete for a larger share of the system. While ambulance providers bill for everything, paying the EMS workers has never been anyone’s priority. None of the agencies can retain staffing. The average time an EMT or Paramedic spends in the field is under 4 years. The average wage of an EMT across all sectors is just $19.00. The FDNY EMS have not had a contract in 3 years.
The solution is multifaceted, but it begins with a Department of EMS. If we cannot fathom an FDNY without its own ambulance service, then we are essentially talking about a city agency to regulate the entire ambulance service.
As was recommended by the Citizen Budget Commission, we must reduce the non-emergency call volume by at least 10%; use EMT/Paramedic combined units; and end routine use of FF CFRs on all but the most serious of calls.
As was recommended by the Gilbey-Mole Proposal: immediate pay/benefit parity must be made between FFs and EMS in the FDNY if they are to continue being an ambulance provider (the subject of a Federal lawsuit); end the “promotional” exam, which causes massive attrition of skilled staff in EMS; educate the public on when/ when not to call 911; establish an independent Department of Emergency Medical Services.
As per the Emergency Medical Services Public Advocacy Council:
Let’s set an industry minimum wage for EMTs at $30. As was just done for security guards and delivery workers. Let’s use combined EMT/Paramedic units like the rest of the country to expand advanced life support care. Let’s levy a state-level microtax on the industry that we know most heavily contributes to the 5.5K daily calls: alcohol. Let’s call a hearing on our broken litigation-proof dispatch system. Let’s divert low-priority 4 to 6 out of the 911 system, but not to low-wage, non-union privates, to a real Community Paramedicine program. Let’s use the Dept of EMS concept to compel uniformity across the 70 agencies providing ambulances. Let’s get FFs taking vitals, even staffing EMT/FF units, and drive real emergency service integration. Let’s pick anything from that bucket, anything, and deliver a common-sense approach to getting an ambulance. That doesn’t have to be incompatible with a progressive approach to how we treat our EMT and Paramedic workforce, which has been abused and neglected for decades. We must continue the funding established in the Crisis to Care Budget Initiative to provide all EMS adequate access to mental health support and referrals to clinical services.
We have to resuscitate our NYC EMS service. 17-minute response times are just as unacceptable as the long term mistratement of EMS workers. For the sake of our City and our EMS workforce, the time to act on this matter is now.
Walter Adler is a 23-years on the job paramedic and President of the Emergency Medical Services Public Advocacy Council (EMSPAC).
The country is physically small, but you can unleash yourself into all kinds of misadventure and ambush upon your senses; like a pin ball machine rigged to God. By bus the entire nation is eight hours tall or two hours wide; the Gaza Strip, sealed behind high walls and mine fields is 5x the size of the Isle of Mann. With under 2 million Palestinians living there it is also the most densely populated place on earth.
I was about ready to take to the roads and to the townships on my mission in the last week of July. 6,000 of our postcard-sized flyers were stacked up in boxes in the back room of The Deep labeled ‘New Years 2012 Party’. Avinadav had a cousin who was now apparently hip to these happenings. I got nods of approval from lots of young Black Israelites I didn’t know. They might not have known the score, but they knew the big man ‘Andrew’ and I were up to something. I was always around the club, but never drinking, never dancing, not really laying down game. I went over plans and notes and made suggestions about operations. The general staff of the little Cabinet soon included his cousin Dizrael ‘Dizzy’ as “Communications Minister”, the Jamaican Claude as “Education Minister” and Svetlana the Russian debutante, ‘can’t stand being from Russia’ as a financier. Svetlana had only been convinced by Maya because she wasn’t very fond of Blacks and looked at me like I was sort of a loud, radical younger sibling. But one night over drinks Maya convinced her to crack the trust fund if she was convinced nothing violent was going on. Svetlana had paid for all the ‘New Years’ flyers.
I was working as a day laborer unloading furniture and textiles from Southeast Asia toiling to raise money for a cell phone, a ‘decent’ hot weather suit and a black-market handgun. I toiled in a warehouse near Hertzolia Petoach. I made some sub-slavish wage to haul and sort tons of cheap imports with a handful of Arab workers. Ditri came along with me. We walked away each day with close to 400 sheks. 100 American for ten hours of work wasn’t so bad. I got a lot of odd slave work out of the Mughrabi Hostel. I’d post up in the lobby around 6 am and guys would come to collect workers for menial one-day labor jobs usually paying about 400 shekels for the day. It was more lucrative than art selling, especially on a weekday. It wasn’t always hauling. Sometimes it was scrubbing stoves or repainting housing projects or odd gardening job. I scrubbed shit and vomit out of the party hall bathrooms after the party went on too long. I was doing thankless horrible work that wouldn’t put money in the bank but could feed me and get me a few nicer things for my time here. I had become a Mexican wetback, but a Pancho Villa kind of fucking Mexican. I had become what I was supposed to be.
I bought a tough black and grey messenger bag for the road, a black leather planner, a white linen suit, and a grey poncho from a Georgian retail store in the Florentine neighborhood.
I was always meeting new people. I needed new ears for yarns and new women for carnal company. I also needed new friends and new brothers and new parents. I adopted older brothers because I don’t have one. Sometimes someone saw something in me they had to save. Like I’ve lost my way and shouldn’t be selling pictures in foreign boulevards. Normally this took the form of either an older woman or a homosexual. The homos invited me for sleepovers, but they liked feeding me too, while giving me advice. Gay Avi wants me to be an event planner and the English girls from Golder’s Green tell me to get married and move to Jerusalem to train as a rabbi. The correlation of the two is beyond me.
I guess Brent Avery wants to save me from the ghetto because he is in Israel converting young boys to Christianity. It was not pervy if it came across like that. Brent was not just saving souls for Evangelical Bible-belters. It was more interesting and subversive than that.
The night I met him I was hooting and hammering, trying to find people to recruit for the Organization. This group of faggy white dudes comes up to me and asks me about a picture with a guy in a beret crucified with a red hammer and sickle tattoo on his bicep. I tell them Jesus was a communist. They were having one of those very Christian conversations with me full of polite contempt and always ready to drop a fucking gospel passage. But I am trained to play that game and the whole thing soon turned into a communist versus Christian debate as a crowd gathered. It was like this was Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner on the Mediterranean.
There were five of them. I know one was named Paul, and one was named Che, who I asked if he was an Argentinean. He didn’t get it. There were two other White boys not really talking and a chaperone. The chaperone was named Brent Avery. He listened more than he talked. I argued with his minions for an hour. I know the gospel well from being locked up in the Family School. But our debate was for the spectators, not each other. At 1 am this client Brent Avery bought me some pizza at Abulafiah and we didn’t talk about religion, but about “what I was doing in Israel?”
“Making people pictures and reckless adventurism as it arises,” I tell him. “With a bit of drinking and a lot of smoking.”
For a preacher he wasn’t all that preachy. He didn’t have that annoying habit of putting each segment of the conversation in the context of his creed’s texts. I think he didn’t even drop the name of the J-man. He asked simple questions attempting to elicit God-only-knows-what. He let me talk a great deal about communism. He had me go into detail about tons of things I hadn’t thought out so well. The phrases didn’t seem to alarm him. I’d say ‘death to bourgeoisie scum and their spies’ and he’d just scratch his beard neither judgmentally nor in any way in agreement. It was like two wild alien creatures asking small questions as if they had never been around each other’s kind before.
To him I was a sort of hardened city-boy radical or just some lost street urchin with a Biblical moniker. He was a shit-kicker preaching gospel talk in the wrong fucking country as far I was concerned. I rambled about class war hoping to jostle him, but the guy just went on asking questions letting me smoke my face off. Over a couple hours at a café, I told him about the Family School, about my lengthy perditions, about exile in London and the struggle unfolding in Tel Aviv. He had this very good sense of punctuation. He knew when he should hold his tongue. He knew I would get up and leave if he started his fucking sentence with, ‘In the second book of Timothy.’
When it was all said and done and my long political diatribe expounded, I didn’t feel like I had said anything at all. He had let me go on all night with this tale of tragic misadventure. As dawn brakes, I felt my confidence begin to run dry. As the mission yarn wore thinner, I saw for the first time the great, great error I had made. He didn’t need to do anything but let me talk to expose myself.
In that moment I had a realization! There had been no reconciliation between my warring parts. I had in no way reconciled whether I could complete this mission without the very intervention of a G-d. I had an even harder time accepting the use of miracles in a class war. I had the hardest time still believing, as it seemed Avinadav did, that I was some mouthpiece for the dreams of epic, divine things to come. The fat man named Brent Avery was remarkably good in his mission because of his commitment to patient tenacity. He, the expert recruiter that he was, was not concerned with the quantity of converts but only with the perfect training of more recruiters. If he saw in me a potential convert, a lost soul, a broken sinner, he did not reveal this. As the sun rose, he said simply: “Your eyes betray you, son. You are not convinced you will win.”
“What then would you have me do? Pray for more answers?”
“It would be in your interest to consult your maker as He will provide the necessary covenant for this battle, your intent on waging. The things you speak of calmly, many men and women have been slaughtered to avoid the coming of. It is time, Zachariah, to find your G-d in the wilderness.”
After breakfast we went to a bookstore. My head is spinning in the way it does when I do not sleep. Before he leaves me to do the things I am now too aware that I must do, he buys me a hardcover book that it was high time I read. There are many books in one divided between two traditions. I purchased another book to take with me to make sure I had the whole wild trilogy, the bloody three book set; at the ever ready.
The Brooklyn labor ghetto at night smells like rum smoked chicken, like muscle cars and also like marijuana and or just a rotting refuse; the aura blown up into the heavens by the heating exhaust steams.
ADONAEV
On my 32nd birthday, everyone assumes I will soon die in the Syrian Civil War. So, my birthday is actually very well attended and unfolds with lots of cocaine, alcohol, and dancing over four venues well into the next day’s dawn. Everyone toasts to everything! Often to me! Often to whatever they warble! I wake up with Martina in Harlem.
It was by far the single largest birthday I have ever had and seems as though I had many friends and allies. But a year later, if I survived the war, none of these people would care or be around when needed. They had lives occupied with varying struggles that left no room for human solidarity. These friends are always there to drink my food and eat my wine, to hear about adventures but not really ever get involved for the most part. Having no real culture of my own, at some point I adopted elements of Trinidadian and Russian cultures, both which place tremendous value and veneration on the birthday ritual. I would even go so far to say that West Indians and Post Soviets treat the birthday as a sort of celebratory holiday, trumped only by weddings, funerals and for Trinidadian Carnivals. I had this feeling on my 33rd birthday, that very few people knew or cared if I was alive inside. Did not know how to react to my intention to head off to Syria. I had the feeling for my family any day in January could do, and that preparing a meal like any other meal, with a cake, was adequate. Now, were I a homeless drug addict, or a person of exceptionally low social and moral character, perhaps I should feel tremendous gratitude that I have a family, that I am being given some food and also a cake. I am a very ungrateful wretched person. However, my birthday is on the 30th not the 23rd, and to me it is offensive and borderline insulting that my family would sort of ambush me with a birthday eight days early largely based on my brother’s flight plans. Because that is exactly what happened, it was a Potemkin birthday for the sake of my brother who I had not seen in 2 years. As for most others, without social media I’m sure few really knew when it was. And so with the world’s smallest violin in my hand I undertook to spend it completely alone, or partially alone since both Alan and Martina had discovered it and in their own ways cultures and obligations understood the importance of a birthday ritual. Without any real plan the guest list ballooned to over fifty people. None of which approved of my upcoming travel plans. Martina was the first person to ever publish my writing, while perhaps a poem or short story or two had appeared in varying poorly circulated underground presses, this was not any more auspicious, but I was certainly more widely read. Martina is a Bulgarian journalist and real estate agent now. I see her once a year. There was nothing going on here except sympathy. Just before I drove back to my Brooklyn safe house at 5 am dawn, I was doing some coke off her inner leg.
Sometimes late at night from a safe house in the borough of Brooklyn Sebastian Adonaev will read from one of his manuscripts and post it to the internet, for whoever might be listening. Really no one was listening, maybe Polina, depending on what time of night. These were futile, desperate calls for attention. For validation. For reaction. Since, in the United States the cause of anti-capitalism was for the most part soundly defeated many decades in the past. The man had some relative sympathy, but not exactly a sympathizer base which he might have cultivated more effectively over the years. Which might have resulted in a short little burst of terrorism, truncated of course by the all-pervasive American security state. What held him back were all the repeated hospitalizations, which came nearly every year. Invalidating his mind and probably also his message. This never seemed to deviate from a meme of communism and human rights, but by the age of 33, he had only a few people willing to listen to even just 1 minute of his message. His few friends left take him in small smei-annual doses.
Sebastian Adonaev reads:
“Sometimes, old friend, I cry from my own weakness.” I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it entrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!
Then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.
I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had no counsel to turn to. But I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too.
“I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well-planned evil!”
And the responsibilities that impressed me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still, we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, organized demonstrations, built unions, and operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by the government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long-term prison and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.
And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.
“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart sends him,” Goldy once declared.
So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Goldy Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.
“I have been imprisoned twenty times.” My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and tortured. The deaths of Mcgaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden, violent, and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good at anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.
“I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others.” Goldy mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I do not have the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills, the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man, and I am seduced sometimes by wanting a good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, “no one asked you to struggle!”!
“Friends, they torture me once a year.” They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away repeatedly. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who knows that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.
“I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I am talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.”
“I’m thankful for the resistance.” I am thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. I am grateful to Commander Saint Reed in Mosul, and Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife; I hope this is the year we go pro. She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found Communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the battered blue uniform I wear now.
I raise glass to the East, for somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, Long live the resistance, God protect the bloodline of the prophets and the Meshiaak84and the Mahdi. God keeps us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and led astray.”
For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers.
A trucker with a heart of gold clings to his worst memories to not fully lose his mind in pity and drink. He is paid to move some cargo from point A to point B, but it is a lonely and meaningless life. As though he is working to pay for moving himself as meaningless cargo.
HEVAL JILO
“Shipping out from Boston any day now,” I tell myself. I tell myself the pain will be over soon. I tell myself I’m just an ordinary New England Joe. You can call me Micky because it’s my born name.
I have a pretty gruff face. A New England working class disposition. I think it made a lot of the younger volunteers think I had some kind of training I didn’t have. Just a little bit of running and my knees would start to hurt. But they all ask me if I was in the military, even though I never ever was. Very few of the YPG volunteers have any useful training, besides from the leftists. They are self-trained to see things, imagine things that are probably not even there.
On my chest I am wearing a picture of my ex-girlfriend, about the size of a baseball card. That’s perfectly normal, right? But more on that later down the line.
I watched it on the news for several years before the cumulative effect took over me. By the time I was being struck by Turkish air force and artillery vollies, running through trenches and tunnels in Afrin Canton, called by the Hevals as Jilo Boston, well I used to drive a UPS truck. That was all the training for this I had. After that I installed solar panels. I had no other serious qualifications that made me ready for the war. Even a bit of light running makes my knees hurt.
Explains Heval Jilo from Boston: “I mean it’s really Mikey Mike or Michael, but they named me Heval Jilo from Boston.”
Now, strangely it seemed that in the Academy Hevals Zinar and Jansher, the two principal instructors and commanders of Western internationalists ended up sending people with no ideology to occupy Raqqa and those they somewhat ideologically trusted to fight in still raging battles near Deir Ez-Zor. But that wasn’t a hard fast rule.
They liked, but didn’t seem to trust me, well any of us. Some of the leftists like Kawa and Shoresh tried to buddy up to Cancer. Some of the military guys like Heval Ciya tried to buddy up to Zinar, but really, they didn’t seem to have favorites. We all looked good on our martyr posters and in death could bring the Kurdish cause to the front pages of our national papers.
I’m cynical about Zinar and Cancer, they were of course there just to figure out how to use us effectively as so-called ‘revolutionary militants.’ Most of the Academy, which lasted about six weeks, was all rhetoric and talk. I might have fired my AK, maybe 15 rounds worth. I held up well I think given my age! I hadn’t intended to join the Y.P.G. in the beginning, I tried to enlist in Sinjar first with the Y.B.S.83, but they had put a freeze on international volunteers for whatever reason. Eventually the P.K.K. smuggled me, a loud British Gypsy and a French aristocrat lawyer from Makumr Camps into Syria.
Around my neck is a picture of my ex-girlfriend. I’m sure it sends a more portrait of my mental health to the few who see it, but I don’t have to explain shit to anyone. I don’t want to say anymore, so I won’t. My name is to be Jilo Boston, or that’s what they plan to call me in Kurdistan. I enlisted via proton mail in a formation called the Y.B.S. and received permission to make the crossing.
I don’t have any formal military experience, though some people ask me about it, say I have that look. I’ve been watching the Islamic State terrorize the world on TV for about three years. After a while, I just came to accept that I would go be a part of it. Contribute in my little way. As several hundred had done before me and probably will do after.
My last job was to install solar panels on rooftops. My previous job before that was as a UPS truck driver. It is obvious I was lonely and felt that doing something heroic, even if I got killed, was tangible and important. I was supposed to fly to Slemani and then get smuggled over to the Shengal. The YBS were at that time fighting in Raqqa city. I had to close out my life part by part. There was no fear in my body, only excitement. No longer would I be an observer. This was going to be the highest stakes thing I ever did; I could only fantasize that someone would tell the woman on my chest I fell fighting heroically.
I can’t say that was all the motivation or even half. I cared of course that she knew about my contributions, should I end up making them. What did I feel like? Like shit. Like I did not have such an interesting or amazing life and that if I did this with honor, died or not I’d have some kind of redemption. What to say more? I do not know if I am not the one drafting this book. I will just say that I want my ex to be proud of me for what I tried to do, even if it was just to get blown up being somewhere I shouldn’t be in the Middle East. In the desperate trenches of Afrin, he would be known by my Kurdish name Jilo Boston. Man, we barely got out alive. I look back at it sometimes and I get this sad empty feeling like all these fucking people gave their lives for absolutely nothing. Because in the end, we did not really defeat I.S.I.S., we didn’t replace Assad, we did not stabilize Iraq or the oil, we did not curb Türkiye, we did not build so-called democracy, and everyone got killed for almost nothing.
They say the first stage of constructing a believable fictitious identity is to focus on one banal old job, knowing its most minute components inside out. Have one sad story, your sort of guarded reason to be and one good reason to not talk a lot. Primarily, do not tell stories about places you have never been to.
At the “House of Yes” pansexual Cabaret on a New Years Eve there is glitter fucking everywhere.
In an underground afterhours party, there is a young Peruvian girl with great big tits and a tramp stamp dancing on my face. Happy new year to me. Or to somebody with a better-looking life. Sure, better than any house of no! We ended up getting a room at the Standard Hotel. I fuck her as hard as I can for as long as I can, for as long as she will let me.
SEBASITAN ADONAEV
“NEWYORKGRAD- the “city that never sleeps”/ the Big Apple. What a city? What makes it such a hot commodity to be here? It can get as flashy, as artsy, as chic, or as truly ghetto, working-poor miserable as you want, or you let it. You can get anything here, they say. It can all be bought, sold, found, or obtained somewhere in all five boroughs of the ity for a price. And you and your sanity is the motherfucking price.
“IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT HERE YOU CAN HOPEFULLY MAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!”
“But nothing is ever real, or real enough for someone allegedly from here. It is a gathering point for people who have abandoned their old people. It’s a petting zoo for an Empire filled with hookers and administered by the cream of the Jews.”
Sebastian Adonaev “the paramedic adventurer,” watches over the Brooklyn Ghetto at night. Smoking a Newport from the rooftop. Recording his angry thoughts in a leather-bound journal. As is typical in my own fashion, I worked on a holiday that to me is a pagan aberration. Clearly, 2017 is not the actual year. Not at all. In the “Russian culture” which I have in some form absorbed into my own amalgamated creed, what you do and who you surround yourself on New Years Eve, is a sample of the year to come. This is like many Russian idioms, up “variable interpretation”. Variance in interpretation. The good old “cultural context.” Especially as Old Russian New Year is probably a couple weeks away, still in the future.
ADONAEV
I am playing a civilian and a transport paramedic in the age of near constant war. A serf, just a working class serf with no proerty, in the latest version of New-New-York-Fucking-City. Or NEWYORKGRAD; depends on if you know about “the occupation” or not. It depends on what papers you subscribe to. It depends on what languages you speak and what reality you sign up for.
My comrade Danny Hertz has a crazy looking hippy beard.
He throws me some nightlife work over the years. He offers me $250 for a 10-hour gig at the “House of Yes,” the artsy hipster performing arts multi-space. So, I take it, just like I did in 2016. The shortlist of the New Years variables. I came off from my real ambulance job. I slept 6 hours and had dinner with my aging parents. I took a cab to the House Of Yes. I made some new single-serving work friends. As usual got on well with security and took care of two intoxicated women, both who invited me into the cab I placed them in. Then a guy went briefly unconscious, I induced vomiting and cleaned him up, leaving him with the doctor’s friends. When the ball finally dropped, my two ambulance partners, Alisha and Jose, wished me well. lia the lawyer invited me for coffee in the New Year. Polina Mazaeva left me a voicemail. No one tried to kiss me. But that was way after midnight. And of course, I had a long conversation about not a lot with a gangster from East New York named Cyrus. I ran into my old volunteer and ffriend Jon Denby, who fought with us in Haiti, and eventually, Danny Hetz came at 9am to relieve me, as the party was to carry on until 6pm.
There is this Peruvian Italian chick who keep buying me drinks and making out with me. With enormous breasts, dancing near me, while I made sure the intoxicated people sleeping were dead. And I felt a kind of savage carnal lust, very different from that which I felt in a while. And I saw her look at me a,nd I knew she’d let me draw her something, but I didn’t do or say shit. And not new years or sleep deprivation or run changes all that. And the bartender offered me a drink, but I don’t let batti-man I don’t know give me drinks, no, it didn’t matter he was gay. I just didn’t really need or want a drink. Smoked some cigarettes, ate a complimentary egg and cheese. Texted Polina happy New Years and took the train home not an Uber. Like a worker. Because fundamentally, I have been a hard worker for a while. And fundamentally, I like trains. But not as much as I like to fuck that Italian with big tits like a savage.
I feel like 2016 was a year of incredible unmitigated defeat, near death and only partial recovery. So that would mean 2017 has the potential to be-anything. Since Russian idioms are about mind games and superstition, not about fate or destiny. But no matter how much I would like to say I’ve developed some real self-interest. It may be a year to stack cash and stabilize what’s left of sympathetic base and fee friends. A part of me wants to blow coke off her tits and ravish her in a way that my girlfriend can’t manage. The reality is that I must maintain my honor and my courage, my course. It is my destiny to be a guerrilla, not a reckless debauch. Not a scoundrel. Not a normal serf. I will use my time this year to be healthy enough to resume the fight, when I am ready to sustain it.
***
A few weeks before Sebastian Adonaev left New York for Cuba, then Russia, then Turkey, then Iraq for Rojava he gave a firebrand speech in front of nearly 40,000 people sometime in early April on Time Square at a large liberal solidarity pageant called “TODAY WE ARE ALL MUSLIMS”. His speech was just a 5-minute radical little foot note in an overall group hug of liberalism. Under five minutes in duration, its message to remember how all immigrants were treated when they arrived here was coupled with an extollation for the resistance to defend Muslim lives in America. This ‘resistance’ that the spoke of us was nebulous here in the U.S.A. Mostly it amounted to loud anti-Trump pageants. Freedom of speech is, almost, still without any limits.
He imagined while speaking that his on again off again, sometimes hot mostly cold muse, a debutante of Midtown, Russian courtesan ex-flame Goldy was watching it from the crowd, but that was improbable that she was. The speech called for the defense of Muslims amid the international genocide being perpetrated against them. It called on immigrants and descendants of immigrants to mount collective defense. My family came to watch, it was the very last thing they were ever proud of. Better to say it so others can do it, it seemed to be the family ethic.
His kid cousin Alexis came to watch him speak. She was into it, but also a bit chicken shit and American mentally at the end of the day. Also, something of a hipster. Not a bad kid, just high levels of probably not gonna make it in New York. But maybe she could still make it somewhere else? Eventually later when the art didn’t pay the bills, she turned to sex work.
After a fancy dinner, which was once a week normal for his upper middle class household, lots of bottles of white wine later; perhaps three, still in the dark blue rebel uniform of a G.C.C. a “staff medical officer”, he headed off to the fancy night club Le Bain on the roof of the Standard Hotel with Benny, his younger brother, Benny’s fiancé Nessa-Vanessa and little hipster cousin Alexis. They all rediscover old friend uncle Vodka, they all get fucking lit. In the glamour and chaos of the night, Sebastian Adonaev is to meet his future lawyer. Buxom and brilliant Ms. Chanie Chanel Rossi. His future lawyer.
Remembers Sebastian,
Out of my left eyes I saw an extremely attractive blonde in big glasses looking elegant and upper class but well intentioned. I saw her surrounded by tall dark and handsome men, wondering if she was an escort. Wondered what she charged. You see I’m not about that life because I can’t afford it sure, but not about that life because it’s so fucking degrading to all the women walking it. The woman who introduced herself as Chanel was happy and pleasant and gave me an email address and number to send her some of my work. My paintings.
It was all very businesslike, like a transaction. But she was filled with good happy energy, and I was about to fly off and possibly die for this cause! If necessary. Not ideally. Ideally, I’d come back and get the girl. Like in an American movie.
Remembers Chanel:
I think he wants to put me on my back for a very long time. I think I would be open-minded to it, except that I do truly love my boyfriend Mr. Charlie. So therefore, it actually barely doesn’t cross my mind. Charlie and I are made for each other, which is why I must be so careful with this older man writing to me. But if his cock was between my legs, even if Charlie finds a single letter; then I get off my master plan, which is Harvard and Law and a perfect husband. Charlie is actually nearly perfect, and we’ve been together seven years.
It’s safe to say I find Sebastian Adonaev more than a little attractive. And that has to do with what he is, a paramedic, and what he says he will do which is much more than regular people. Which is to say volunteer in Syria. Sebastian recounts:
If I told you that I was not hoping to have a lot of sex with this buxom stylish young woman, I would be a great big fucking liar. But it was all highly innocent talk. She admired my work and my lifestyle, and I admired her convictions. Her words you could say had pure and undiminished optimism.
Her body, I could spend days on, in one or many settings. But the opportunity would never present itself. In my culture you can marry women half your age plus seven, but it was not about that. She had a man. That never came to be an option for us as lovers, as she was very devoted to her boyfriend Mr. Charlie, a bit of a possessive psychopath if you ask me. He would later find the innocent letters and flip out. I suppose he was right that I would go to bed with his girlfriend, anyone might, if given the opportunity. As the story goes, he just left her in an airport and turned around.
But they were always off and on for as long as she ever wrote to me about magic and positive energy and hopeful living. He got her pregnant and abandoned her. She had an abortion; he took her back. That was her miserable lot, Charlie. But Sebastian neither passed judgement nor respected things without rings on fingers.
I never got the opportunity because of her morals and of course logistics, I met her about two weeks before deployment. She was up in Harvard, and I was down in Brooklyn. But she made quite an impression, he notes:
Let’s talk about Chanel Chantal Rossi, shall we. She’s a blonde bourgeoisie from the Caribbean Island of St. Martin. I met her only briefly, perhaps under a minute in a fancy supper club in the city. It was just long enough for me to take her information and strike up a correspondence based on her hippy views and happy optimism. I made her a rather beautiful sketch; she mailed me a book called ‘Mindfulness on the Go’ and we wrote to each other periodically throughout the war. Actually, she never got any of my letters until about half a year after I returned because the Special Forces were running a really special pony express from the front to her apartment near Harvard in Boston. By that time her boyfriend Charlie had found the letters and didn’t think very well of them at all. Really in the end Ms. Chanie, without engaging in a single infidelity, unleashed an incredible insecurity and rage. But at that stage, there was only light magic and enchanted optimism. She was delighted with the painting. She mailed him some candles and a small book called Mindfulness on the Go.
To Comrade Sebastian Adonaev,
I apologize for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I was quickly drowned in work once I got back. Your letter touched my soul in so many ways. First, your awareness and choice of words and how you articulate them together, are mesmerizing. You are a truly gifted artist with strong depth.
The journey you are about to embark on is one of great respect and inspiration. I know you will touch many lives, however slight, but most likely grand as you have done so far, and I am sure of that. Without knowing you in a material physical aspect (as in only speaking with you for a brief 30 seconds), you have already impacted my life, which I will never forget.
With that being said, I would love to be your pen pal and hear all about the moments you experience. I have so much respect for you, people like you are those who make a difference in our world for the greater good. Even if it is to put a smile on a stranger’s face.
Send me your address. We will be hand-writing letters to each other very soon.
Yours truly,
Chanel
+++
Dear Ms. Chanie,
Such is the hard work of studying law, and surely it will be daunting, but you will persevere. Your words are quite kind and make me feel quite appreciated. It is a very complex task ahead and it makes me glad you will allow such correspondence. Although after 12 April I will be abroad more a year or more and with often an unreliable postal system, we can alternate pen and email as you see fit, and of the letters you send to the address below can be pony expressed or scanned and sent. Any art I make out there, same route. Cuba and Russia will be short, wonderful extremes before I get into Iraq in late May and soon after North Syria; a place called Rojava.
I make drawings, and paintings, I make long rhyming poems and I’ve written some novels, but I suppose it just makes me incredibly happy to have a chance to put my mind before a stranger and see yours as you reveal it. As said, the idea of you was strange magic, but I long to know the actual you as well and make you the subject of my art. It will also be surely relieving to sometimes hear of Boston, and your woes of scholarship, and your loves and losses and all. I thrive on the attention of strangers and can only be well informed via their impartial critiques. But, as stated, you were fascinating to me.
Best wishes, Happy International Women’s Day! I look forward to our next exchange.
+++
Dearest Sebastian,
Words cannot describe the appreciation I feel. I’ve always felt as if I was maybe underestimated by my looks and at times may be overestimated in this judgmental society we live in. Everything is based on how you look and not what you offer as a human.
Yet,
You made me feel like although that does come into play, you made me feel much more than that with eyes beyond the physicality of objects of this world with your attention to detail. It is not the mere creation of technique, but what it intends to portray with the story it wants to tell.
I am so thankful to the universe for that day, in so many ways, and one being our casual, brief and meaningful kindle.
Funny story; my overprotective brother thought I was giving you my phone number & got a little mad. I explained to him and told him it was okay; he trusts my judgment. And to be honest… it was your old-school way of a notepad and pen that really played well with my instinct. I am an old soul too.
I love candles, how did you know? I cannot wait and look forward to hearing about your future endeavors. You will be receiving something from me by early next week :) Again, Thank you!
“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 buckling, being in the shadow of their dark feelings.
“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 now 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 near constant feminine presence in my life. I take their advice and also their leadership.
Jineology—derived from the Kurdish word “jin” meaning woman, and “logos” meaning science—is a revolutionary concept born from the Kurdish women’s movement and shaped by the imprisoned thinker Abdullah Öcalan. At its core, it holds that the liberation of society is impossible without the liberation of women. In fact, it goes further: it sees the systematic subjugation of women as the first and deepest form of oppression—one that laid the groundwork for class domination, ecological destruction, and authoritarian state power. To confront this foundational injustice, Jineology proposes not only a critique but a new science altogether—one that reclaims knowledge, identity, and power from the ruins of patriarchy. Unlike many Western feminist theories, which Jineology respects but often views as too individualistic or bound to liberalism, this science of women seeks a collective, historical, and grounded approach. It emerges from the lived experiences of Kurdish women resisting war, colonialism, and male domination. It is not an academic discourse but a lived practice. In the villages, in the mountains, in the war zones, women gather to study, reflect, and lead. They do not just read about history—they rewrite it. Jineology teaches that before kings and borders, there were matriarchal societies; before property and state, there was communal life centered around women, the life-givers and caretakers of the earth.
This knowledge, long buried under the weight of conquest and empire, is being unearthed and revived. Jineology looks to the ancient goddesses of Mesopotamia, to Neolithic communities, to myth and oral tradition. It challenges the idea that science must be male, mechanical, and detached. Instead, it offers a science rooted in ethics, ecology, and freedom. A science that sees not control, but relationship. In this view, every system—whether economic, political, or social—must be measured by how it treats women. The revolution begins with the dignity of the grandmother, the autonomy of the daughter, the choices of the mother.
In the liberated zones of Rojava in northeastern Syria, Jineology is more than theory. It is curriculum. Every woman fighter of the YPJ learns it. Every commune discusses it. In the “Mala Jin”—the women’s houses where community disputes are resolved and education is shared—Jineology is the heartbeat of decision-making. It teaches that power is to be shared, not hoarded. That every leadership role must be held by one man and one woman. That self-defense is not only against bullets, but against the domination of mind and spirit. In refugee camps, in front-line towns, in classrooms lit by solar panels and hope, this science becomes not an abstraction, but a way of life.
To those who take up arms or pens in its name, Jineology is both shield and song. It says that women are not just half the sky—they are the foundation beneath it. For internationalist volunteers like Anna Campbell, who left the safety of Britain to fight and die alongside Kurdish women in Afrin, Jineology was not only an idea—it was her compass. It answered the question of what it meant to be free. Not just free from tyranny, but free to reimagine everything: justice, history, love. A revolution led by women, not as tokens, but as origin, principle, and future.
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 is 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 as well as broken.
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 (really Lithuanian) 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 has just 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 the last few times. Those are all more dangerous places than Haiti.”
“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 Goldy, 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 allegedly born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, USSR, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot past crazy. We both love Russian women. 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.
In grim Birmingham, U.K. sometime in late of 2016, two British Hevals meet in a bleak coffee shop with no phones to say hello, goodbye, and hash out some final details for their upcoming deployment into Rojava.
“My government name is not relevant to you, Hevalin, as they say.” Havalin is the plural of Hevals, my man and multiple friends. Says Heval Erdal, a cheeky British Jew of left-wing leanings with many Kurdish friends. He sits with his old friend Ana Montgomery Campbell from Lewes, U.K. who later died a Martyr in the defense of Afrin Canton. The British pipeline begins in Birmingham. Actually, hundreds of ISIS Islamists had been recruited from Birmingham. Literally many hundreds.
“You may call me by my Kurdish guerrilla name, “Heval Erdal”. I’m lanky and have a highly disarming grin, so say the ladies. I’m just having a kid, which is to say a laugh; the ladies don’t say anything like that. I’m British clearly, but also a cheeky part Jew. It’s not a very well thought out part to be honest. Don’t practice any of it. I became active in the Kurdish movement protesting Turkish arms deals and attending cultural events at the centers. My working-class British city had literally hundreds of Jihadists who took off for the Middle East and joined Daesh. Fuck all mate, hundreds! They took wee kids and wives with them. They thought it was the end of times. Well, it had end of times properties, I’ll give it that.” So, I was always a ‘wee activist’ with politics of the progressive kind, but I love them Kurds man! They’re so awesome. Humble, principled mountain people. Leftists. Warriors. Love um! Sometime in August of 2016 I made up my mind to travel to Kurdistan and join up with the People’s Protection Units; the famous and glorious Y.P.G.71.
So, I worked a bit more than usual. I saved up about 2,000 quid and there I had a chance to ask the right questions about who to contact, literally just an email address called YPG REVOLUTION, and I answered a bunch of questions for them. Then I was approved to go. It didn’t take nearly as long as lots of chaps complained. Britain has the second largest contribution of foreign fighters to Y.P.G./Y.P.J. right after Turkish leftists.
But life happens, you have a girlfriend you can’t bring, and you have an apartment you can’t just leave. You also have a bit of fear in you. No one wants to die! Unless you’re one of these Jihadist tossers. You make various excuses. Well not me, I don’t worry about dying. I had a pretty boring apartment. My job was bullocks. We all have bollocksy jobs, so it made it easier to leave mine and go, knowing how much I hated my current situation in what Kurds call Capitalist Modernity. Also, there were brave Hevals who went in earlier, when things were more desperate and asymmetrical.
I had become friendly with Heval Helen Qerechow, whose British name was Ana Campbell via the various protests and Kurdish events. She was far more ideological than I was. She was what we called later a ‘true believer’, a highly committed young revolutionary. Me, I just wanted to kill Daesh, and the Turkish fascists. I wasn’t stupid to the politics mind you, but I was more of the fighterly mind set. I had set myself on a warpath. I grew up working class and I would die working class, and revolution would never come home to the U.K., but if I could contribute well to the Y.P.G. and aid the Kurdish resistance then I would feel like I was a man of my word. All these years yelling about arms deals and Turkish coups all didn’t ever do much, but it was how you made friends with Hevals and aspiring Hevals. Heval in Kurdish means comrade/friend. It’s what movement people call each other affectionately and ideologically.
They had met just one weekend before herself deployment to Syria. I went out with Ana, and we talked a little bit about what we were risking and why we were risking it. She went in to Rojava about five months before me. This was maybe on the eve of.
“I’m all in the game mate, I’m just all about it. As an anarchist and as a human, this is the real deal as I see it,” Ana declared.
“I mean eye to eye my sis, I agree,” I tells her.
“I mean as a woman and as an activist this seems so big, so important, how could we ever just go on and ignore this and act like we have and validity to our own fight?” Ana always talked in big questions, rhetorical like ones for circular thinking.
“I mean are you scared?” she asks me, “I’m not scared at all.”
“No, not scared to die. Maybe scared to be tortured or maimed, but all part of a revolution I guess,” I reply.
“You must be brave. Everyone is watching us. The Kurds and the vultures, you know they want to make up stories about why we went out there, going out there to die in a foreign war, a Kurdish war! It’s our war, it’s the last stand for idealism.”
“It’s pathetic so few leftists are going, have gone,” I say.
“No, it’s up to us to be an example of trustworthy European leftists and what we can contribute. Everything must be about possibility not fear!”
“You’re a shining star,” I tell her.
“Serok Apo72 says that Women’s leadership is what saved the P.K.K. in Qandil and has saved the Rojava revolution.”
“Well surely it has,” I just agree with her now because I’m not ever one to argue with her on either Feminism or what Serok Apo said. She’s very ideological and I am not, so it’s easy to avoid contentious bickering.
“I’m so happy we’re both finally going,” she says.
“Yeah, good times,” I reply.
“We probably won’t see each other that often. The Y.P.J.73 has its own separate structures. How do you feel about that? I think I prefer the old way when we were all together.”
“I think I read they need to be able to tell the conservative Kurdish village fathers their daughters aren’t getting banged out in the P.K.K., and also because Kurdish Women’s Movement wants their own self-governing spaces.”
“Yeah, both. But anyway, we will meet up for tea and have long fireside talks about ideology like you love so much,” she smiles.
So, I was scheduled to begin the Academy in Qerechow74 in August of 2017. I had booked a direct flight to Erbil from Heathrow. Ana was in the class before me for the Y.P.J.; Women’s Protection Units, the co-gendered women’s structure. We had both been arrested several times scuffling with the Turkish security service at this demo or that. Never had any challenging times either of us. Well, why should we have? We were fighting for Kurdish Freedom, for peoples’ freedom; against fascists and Islamic terrorists, the kind that lived in Birmingham and migrated to Syria with their families for the war.
Now my motives were pure, but they were not purely ideological. Apo did not make me do it! I just felt that Daesh was a heinous evil. I felt the Turks to be true aggressors. And I wanted to avenge the fact that so many people from my city had headed over to the enemy. An enemy which throws homos off roof tops. Kidnaps and sex enslave young women. Commits genocide! And until Operation Inherent Resolve75 I.S.I.S. was gradually taking over the entire Middle East into their “Caliphate”.
“So, I packed my bag and joined the international volunteers!” About five months later Anya went down to Rojava to join the Y.P.J. The proud, inglorious 500 or 600 so who ended up with the Y.P.G. and its various affiliated structures. The embarrassingly low turnout compared to the well over 40,000 Jihadists who turned out to join I.S.I.S. is a matter of leftist defeat, human cowardice, ineptitude of Kurdish propaganda, and the psychological barriers of joining a violent shit show that no one is clearly ever going to win. Her last words before she left England were the same last words, she said to me before she was blown apart on the Afrin Front. The phrase has a couple of meanings to the Hevals. “Onwards to invincible victory,” or “Victory is certain ”, or in Kurmanji, “Serkaften!”
To which I replied “Serchevan76.” On the eyes!
Within the next year Heval Errdal’s entire family would be arrested in the United Kingdom and charged with aiding terrorists financially and Anna Campbell would be dead, martyred in a Turkish airstrike.
➢ “Sometimes I think we have to get out of this place!”𝀓
The motherland calls,
And now we’re using a code.
The silence of touch, the science of mode,
The science of making one’s morals align.
With the cold things done-for-dollars, in the absence of ethics,
Or the g-d head the divine𝀓
Oh, the things I might do! Oh, things that you do.
An animal’s logic of rough-handled thrusting,
Subsumes the illogic, or basic desire to woe or to woo.
“If I get on my back for an hour ortwo”,
I see your face.
Security, obscurity, can you lick something magic?
“Man, how many times did you die in disgrace?”
Frail little humans, trying to see a plot through,
black breaded blue black sky where every single star is a blessing,
A promise of pity,
“I didn’t ask what you’ve done lately,
So I probably only muse partly, rip off your dress, and we forget second-guessing.
on the things you still have to do.
a breathtaking ode to the half-naked goddess that’s you.
The thrusting of my logic dare outpace.
In the lack of a life we had picked out in earnest,
Hinting the the hilt of a gentleman’s saber? You hand in my face?
➢ the back-breaking ease of the thing we call labor,
The belt on the neck of the thing we call grace.
Abhorrent! On whose horse did you rode?
Morse code on my back, your fingers play piano.
Let the skill of your ill masquerading, let it lighten the load.
Let the lust that men drown in make it a new home,
Make the world implode. Make a world where it’s up to a partner to lighten a load.
We both have nostalgia for things that ignite,
A lust for a new kind of rule?
A list of words for the way that the body can gyrate,
and mix to a perfect soundtrack of the sage house abide or abode.
“Man, pretty cool.”
and then all things can explode.
Explode into opportune living of life spent in terror,
Life spent lacking free life, like the fairy tale ritual error.
The first time.
It was always still the very best time, the first time,
So close to your body,
A Look in the mirror of the look in your eyes.
In rented safe house attics suited for stealing, the petty theft of posture passion and wiggle thrust rhyme, silhouettes forming fantastic formations of fondle,
Pausing the clock for a sensual mime.
Physically speaking,
It was something divine.
But the next second time,
“We spoke candidly about the feelings on not having feelings, and escapading in Europe, and the subtle sublime,”
What a terrible habit, paying on the record,
Transferring rebels to camps or rubies for illicit moments of the financial district down climb.
Wasting the very last moments,
“Wasting one’s absolute time.”
For in arrest, for is your work working off the world of stress,
A test of the blessed, a test of the rest of the lifestyle, the bondage?
The work of the night and the work of the question, the imagined, the partially guessed. for the guess of an intention to blow or to be or to bless!
To lay even one more hand on your most amble chest.
I close my eyes, and we kiss harder than the press will later confess.
I sought out your confidence, I seek out your most costly attention, I believe you think in Russian, but that’s a soft guess.
I seek out something between total lust and a loyal affection,
I seek out writhing inside you and placing a kiss on every speck of your being,
What and how much am I after?
I don’t ask you to fully undress.
My love is something absurd, the uses of my love are anyone’s guess.
I ask you to weigh.
Do I have the talent and useful out lie of skills to back up all of the ludicrous things I might say?
Will all of the laughter outlay?
All the past hardships and tears?
It doesn’t matter the plot points that set out the setting,
I want to use (and to know) and be used near on next to your body for years!
Not just mere hours, in a state of total erotic orgasmic undress.
Speaking of evil and speaking of stress, please use me for fucking,
Please use me for parts.
Or for evil Jew medical legalish arts.
Floor boards are now creaking,
Shall we try and proceed under such flagrant duress!
Rustling now in the attic,
Erotica is what one is perhaps seeking;
Also, are you waiting? Chandelier spills of
For the end to come,
In a visitation, we commit petty crime.
In downtime,
Surround sound to fondle around time.
in up time, in emotional downtime.
In the placement of dispondant downtime,
You stroke the shaft of midnight off the layers of lime.
You lay me down, my face into a hole like a waterboard, I’m dripping.
You lay me down, your reflection an erotic silhouette of starlight,
Lip service for a hardcore lash or lock of further lipping.
Dasha, can you trust me yet?
Have we made love in other lives?
Dasha, can you ever fully trust me, get you happy, get you fully unhinged in upset?
A tall tale of too much turmoil, a rare form of Amerkanski.
You are well armed with your curvatures, your lips tight.
A lusty lap dance for a lingering servitude,
I’ve been to your safe house in Midtown.
Your goddess naked, curving silhouette is etched in my mind at night,
At first sight.
I want to render you completely naked,
And work very my sex on your very soul, lie where you lie.
A ride or a grip; or die for a try, par to the part of the whole,
with the ink of my pen, or the typing of sonnets that preferably never will get old,
and preferably never quite die.
Make you call out for me,
like I call out for you,
in the bellowing evilish New York dusk twilight.
I want to kiss your lips forever, or just for the rest of right now, can we try,
I have a half of a plan and I will show you how, how the last of us cry,
for as many hours as it is possible to imagine them entertaining me.
I want to roughly take you,
There were sneaking, creaking footsteps toward the rented safehouse,
There were mechanical noises in the dark sky above,
But perhaps in reality, just make noble love.
My hands as they grip your hips,
My tongue, when it lashes out, sips of fortuitous trips down the small of your spine,
And the arch of your back when you moan out for me.
Make you drip, you make me drip, you make me melt, you make me sip,
On the very most waters of want, on the lustiest thirst, on the thrown.
On the edge of reality’s grip.
I can’t do this whole night of class war alone,
I can’t write you too well from an ambulance late at night,
from the glow of making us less smart phones.
I can’t make love when your body is still something to buy or to own.
Are words purely worthless?
Is their weight to a promise. Is there weight to a stone?
Are we still having fun?
I want you to think of me kindly when we are all done.
I want your lips on my lips, I want your hips on my hips, I want my whole flesh inside you, writhing naked right back to where the romance begun.
When the traps are reset, and the web is unspun.
Where do I know your naked body from?
Where do I imagine this whole tryst can go?
Do you think of me ever when my existence is gone?
Take you hard on a floor roughly, or a gentle, long kiss good night in a hotel bed, can you want me like a lover and still profit from a John?
Русский (рифмованный) перевод
«Иногда я думаю: нужно бежать отовсюду!» — Зовёт нас родная земля, Мы пишем шифром, в немом переулке у чуда, Где такт прикосновений заменяет слова.
Наука того, как мораль подчиняют расчёту, Холодным делам “за доллар”, без духа, без Бога в нутре. Что я бы сделал? Что делаешь ты в поворотах? Животная логика тел, уступающая логике тьме.
«Если лягу на час-другой» — вижу снова твой лик. Безопасность, туманность — лижешь магический штрих. «Сколько раз ты погибал позорно, до криков и рвот?» Хрупкие люди ловят сюжет, Чёрный хлеб, чёрный небосвод, Где каждая звезда — благословенье, Обет жалости, «Не спрашивала я, что ты делал вчера — Мне хватает лишь жеста, Рву твоё платье — и нет больше бегства, Есть только тела, и их высота, и последняя нежность».
Полунагую богиню продумывает мой стих, Дыханием споря с твоей красотой. Мы жили бы лучше — но путь был другой, нас увёл… Твой жест — будто эфес от сабли был поднят над мной.
Тяжёлое и лёгкое, то что зовётся “трудом”, Ремень на шее “грации”, Где потеряно всё. На ком твой конь взлетал галопом? Твой Морзе на моей спине — Ты играешь, как рояль в темноте.
Пусть ложь твоих масок хоть как-то снижает саван заботы, Пусть страсть, где мужчины тонут, Станет домом в сердечной пустоте.
Мы оба скучаем по искрам, что жгли до зари, По страсти, что строит законы и миры. По словам, что описывают танец тела, По музыке мудрых стен, что хранят ордена и тайны квартиры.
«Чёрт, круто же было». И всё может взорваться — Взрывом удачи, Жизни, где страх — и любовь, и попытки восстать.
Первый раз — Всегда лучший, Так близко к тебе — словно зеркало глаз. В мансарде секретной, где время крадут, Где позы, касанья — изгибы страстей, Где тени сплетают узор из тел, Где вздох — это музыка, Пауза — сонм нежных ролей.
Второй раз мы говорили честно О том, как не чувствуем чувств, О Европе, её авантюрном искусстве, О тонком, почти бестелесном «вдруг».
О, ужасная привычка платить, Переводить бунтарей и рубины За тайные встречи на дне делового квартала.
Тратили последние вдохи, «Тратили время — финальный товар».
Арест ли спасает? Работа ли держит нас в мире, где боли — товар? Ночные вопросы, оковы, догадки, Где благословляешь удар.
Положить бы ладонь На грудь твою — в пламени странных начал. Я закрываю глаза — и мы целуемся так, Как газеты потом не напишут.
Я искал твою уверенность, Прошу твоего дорогого внимания, Мне кажется — думаешь ты по-русски, Но это лишь нежное предположение.
Мне нужно меж похотью и верностью Узнать твой предел и твоё доверие, Обнять каждую точку тела, Не требуя даже раздеться.
Моя любовь абсурдна, Её смысл — загадка и жест.
Скажи, есть ли талант Удержать все нелепые фразы, что скажу я всерьёз? Перекроет ли смех Все прошлые слёзы и боль? Неважны сюжетные трещины — Я хочу быть с тобой Годы, а не часы, В оргазмическом, бешеном, нежном, Беспамятном наголо-снятом тепле.
Говоря о зле и о стрессе — Пользуйся мной, Пользуйся частями, Пользуйся “еврейской медициной и правом”, На полу скрипят доски — Но мы продолжаем.
В мансарде шуршат тени, Ищут эротики, Ждут конца, Как визита небесной беды.
В паузах — преступленья малы, В минуты простоя — Ласка, В часы разлада — Тоска по ударам судьбы.
Ты кладёшь меня вниз лицом, Как на водную пытку, — Струится пот. Ты кладёшь меня под свет звезды, И губы твои творят Служение боли и ласке сверх меры.
Даша, Ты мне доверяешь? Мы любили друг друга в иных мирах? Даша — Сможешь когда-нибудь верить, Сбывать мои страхи, Безумие вытравлять?
Ты — тень небесной работы, Американский мой миф и бред. И армия линий твоего силуэта В ночи гремит.
Я был в тайном убежище твоём, Где тело твоё — как статуя яркого тлена, Где я хотел снять с тебя всё — И душой, и рукой, И стихом, где ни строчка не стареет, Где слово не умирает порой.
Хочу, чтоб ты стонала так, Как я стону по тебе В злорадно-чудовищный сумрак Нью-Йорка.
Хочу целовать тебя вечно — Или хотя бы до утра. Есть план — и я покажу, Как плакать вдвоём, Как тянуть наслаждение часами, Как разгораться в безумных играх.
Хочу взять тебя грубо, Но в ту ночь Казалось — вокруг механический шорох, И шаги по лестнице, И звёзды гудят. Но на самом деле — Это была любовь.
Мои руки на бёдрах, Мой язык вдоль твоей спины — И мир тает, И таешь ты.
Я не выдержу этот классовый бой в одиночку, Не напишу тебя с “скорой помощи”, Где свет смартфонов гасит нас в ночь. Не могу любить, Когда тело — товар, Когда любовь покупают за наличный вздох.
Есть ли вес у слова? Вес у камня? Всё ли нам в шутку? Я хочу, чтобы ты вспоминала меня Добро — когда всё кончится вдруг.
Хочу твои губы на губах, Твои бёдра на бёдрах, И тело твоё вокруг — Как начало романа.
Когда ловушки сброшены, Когда сети порваны — Откуда мне знакомо твоё нагие формы? Куда ведёт эта связь? Думаешь обо мне, Когда я исчезну?
Взять тебя жёстко на полу Или нежно — Ждать рассвет. Быть любовником Или стать для тебя Очередным, кому платят за след.
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.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 