The streets of Beirut throb with life as the sun sinks into the Mediterranean, casting the city in bruised shades of gold and rust. The air is thick with the scent of roasted meat, cardamom coffee, sweat, exhaust, and the faint sting of tear gas that never seems to leave the city entirely. Vendors shout above the ceaseless din of traffic, cars blaring horns like beasts competing for territory. Somewhere a muezzin’s call echoes, almost drowned by the wail of sirens far off. Beneath this living chaos, in the belly of the city, another kind of chaos is being written.
In a windowless room reeking of smoke and damp concrete, they gather. Men with hard faces and dead eyes, their features obscured by shadow and grime. Among them sits Kaveh Atatable Ashuri, the architect of nightmares, a man whispered about in markets and barracks, the kind of name spoken only when certain no informant is listening. His voice cuts through the haze, low and deliberate, each syllable weighted like a bullet: “We need something big. Something that will bleed fear into their veins. Something that makes the fat cats choke on their own silk ties.” His eyes gleam with fanatic calculation. “We will take the marrow out of their bones.”
For hours they argue, voices clashing like knives in the dark. Options rise and fall, names of potential targets whispered and dismissed. Finally the plan hardens: Banque du Liban et D’Outre Mer—BLOM Bank—the fortified jewel of Beirut’s financial elite. Its reputation is myth, its security described in the same reverence as fortresses. To strike it is not simply robbery. It is sacrilege, war declared on the city’s gilded arteries. Kaveh smiles faintly when the decision is made. “We will make them watch their walls burn,” he says, and no one doubts he means it.
Dawn bleeds into the city on the chosen day, but by afternoon Beirut feels wrong. An electricity crackles in the air. In Mar Elias camp, whispers crawl through the alleys: something is about to happen. By evening, the storm arrives. Gunfire erupts in the heart of Ras Beirut, splitting the noise of the city like lightning splitting a tree. Masked figures pour into BLOM Bank’s marble entrance. They move with the clinical precision of soldiers, but their violence is savage. Guards fall before they can even raise weapons, throats opened with knives, skulls cracked by rifle butts. The robbers’ boots trample across sacred lobbies of finance, glass shattering, marble streaked red.
Inside the vault corridors, silence reigns only for a moment before steel doors scream under shaped charges. Smoke, fire, alarms howling like banshees—yet the men move in rhythm, cutting through locks, dragging sacks of currency into waiting duffels. Piles of lira, mountains of paper that once symbolized wealth but now barely equate to dust. A hundred million notes that might buy a family dinner, or might not even cover bread tomorrow. Still, the symbolism matters. The vault is raped, and the city bleeds.
Outside, the streets convulse with panic. Sirens converge. The robbers burst from the bank like specters, masks reflecting gunfire, their weapons barking indiscriminate death. Bullets stitch the air, shattering storefronts, chewing flesh. Bystanders scatter, trampled beneath stampeding feet, screams colliding with the metallic staccato of automatic fire. Police cars skid to a halt, sirens wailing, officers leaning from windows only to be cut down in sprays of red mist. Beirut becomes a killing ground, traffic frozen, engines burning, glass raining down like holy ash.
The robbers leap into their getaway vehicles, tires shrieking as the chase ignites. Engines roar through clogged streets, bullets chasing them like hounds. They weave with animal instinct, ramming aside cars, clipping buses, sending metal shrieking against concrete. The police follow, relentless, their guns blazing from windows, sirens a constant scream. Every intersection becomes a kill zone. A taxi is ripped open by crossfire, passengers spilling onto the street, bleeding and howling. A child screams for her mother while cars burn behind her. Beirut becomes a theatre of the damned.
Kaveh drives with one hand steady on the wheel, the other gripping a pistol he fires casually out the window at anything in pursuit. The man laughs, a hollow sound that chills even his comrades. “They cannot cage us,” he snarls, his teeth bared, eyes wide. The others are silent, faces pale beneath their masks. They have crossed the threshold, and there is no return.
They break from the main road, plunging into the cramped labyrinth of Mar Elias camp. The alleys devour them, walls pressing close, the city replaced by a hive of cracked concrete, hanging wires, and desperate eyes peering from darkened doorways. Here the state’s grip falters. Here, history’s refugees scavenge survival. But the camp is no sanctuary for outsiders.
Gunfire erupts from balconies. Youths, half-grown boys with old Kalashnikovs, rake the convoy. Bullets spark against walls, tear through tires. Residents—furious at the chaos invading their fragile world—hurl stones, Molotovs, even boiling water from rooftops. The robbers fire back, mowing down anyone who dares raise a hand. Women fall in the alleys, men clutch bleeding stomachs, children scream. Smoke coils above the camp like a funeral shroud.
But the robbers push through, savage, desperate. Their bags of cash leak notes into the mud, green and red bills trampled beneath fleeing feet. Word spreads at the speed of breath: money has come, money fallen from heaven into the camp. Men and women surge into the streets, clawing at the scattered notes, fighting one another with teeth and nails. Hope, hunger, greed—all combust in an instant.
Through this human tide, the robbers claw forward. They follow Kaveh into a final narrow artery, an alley that twists like the throat of a dying beast. Behind them, police vehicles crash into the camp’s periphery, soldiers pouring in, rifles raised, vengeance in their eyes. Ahead, the alley opens onto the city beyond, the light of freedom like the last candle in a collapsing room.
Engines roar. Tires spit mud and blood. They surge toward escape. Behind them, Beirut howls—a wounded city, a city watching its own entrails spill into the gutter. The robbers burst free of the camp, their bodies slick with sweat and powder, their eyes hollowed by the violence they have unleashed.
They have escaped—for now. But the hunt has only begun. Beirut will not forgive. The city will choke them in its labyrinths or swallow them in its endless wars. They vanish into the night, leaving behind money soaked in blood, a camp torn open by greed, and a city reminded that fear is the only true currency.
We enter the mosque compound at twilight, though twilight itself seemed reluctant to fall. The call to prayer still echoed faintly from the minaret, a broken ghost-sound caught between heaven and stone, though its muezzin had long since fled or fallen—whether butchered or swallowed in the tide of war, none of us knew. Dust hung heavy in the air, congealing with the sharp tang of gun oil smeared across my hands and the dried blood caked beneath my fingernails. We moved with the YPG unit like shadows masquerading as men, our boots whispering across sacred carpets long since ripped open and blackened by fire. The mosque had been a sanctuary once; now it was a slaughterhouse with gilded walls.
They were waiting—Daesh, black-clad, statuesque, crouched like carrion birds behind shattered columns and prayer-stools. Their rifles rested on Qur’ans, defilement turned into ritual, eyes void of mercy, void of thought, filled only with the endless hunger for death. The first shot did not thunder; it whispered. Then the chamber of the mosque exploded in carnage. Muzzle flashes stuttered like lightning storms against the calligraphy-laced walls, sacred verses flickering with each round, the names of God trembling as our blasphemies carved themselves into stone. I returned fire without feeling, a machine in flesh, squeezing the trigger again and again until the rifle jammed, heat and smoke choking my lungs. I collapsed behind a marble pulpit as though it were the ribs of some ancient saint, hoping the stone would hold while lead sang against it.
Beside me, Heval Kamal was struck. The bullet punched through him with the elegance of inevitability, a red flower unfurling across his chest. His lips parted, a scream forming but drowned in blood, his lungs drowning him quicker than the enemy could. He fell without grace, spasming, his eyes begging for air, for rescue, for God. I did not mourn. There is no space for grief in the iron rhythm of battle. My hands tore his rifle from his still-warm grip before his last twitch had passed. Forgive me, brother, I thought, though I spoke nothing. Your bullets are more useful than your prayers.
The dome above us wailed with fire. Smoke poured through holes carved by rockets, shafts of dying orange light filtering in like the fingers of a cruel deity. I saw one of them—young, beardless, his face twisted between terror and rage. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen. For a heartbeat we locked eyes, and I saw a cousin, a neighbor, a boy who might have played football in some forgotten street. Then I shot him twice in the chest, precise, quick, watching him fold against the mihrab as if surrendering into a lover’s arms. His blood smeared the sacred niche where thousands had once knelt. I felt nothing. Or perhaps I had felt everything so many times that my soul had calcified. Somewhere back in Raqqa, or maybe in some trench months before, time had stopped mattering. The clock rusts inside your chest when every day is measured in bodies.
When the shooting ended, silence staggered back into the mosque. It came limping, dragging behind it the stink of powder and iron and meat. We walked among corpses like pilgrims at a grotesque hajj, our rifles drooping with exhaustion, our boots splashing in what once passed for men. I pressed my palm against the bullet-pocked wall, fingers tracing Arabic calligraphy shredded by shrapnel, and whispered an apology to no one in particular. To Allah. To the dead. To myself. To whatever remained listening in this void where even God had turned His face. The only faith left in that ruin was the brotherhood of ash-coated, bone-weary men too stubborn—or too damned—to die.
Every time we crawled out of a firefight in Rojava with our skins intact, a price was exacted all the same. The internationals especially carried it raw in their eyes. They had just killed someone, maybe for the first time. Or had watched a man they’d eaten bread with choke on his last breath. Or maybe their bullets had torn through someone who wasn’t strictly a combatant at all, just a body caught in the blind frenzy of battle. Some had been awake too many nights in a row, fueled by cigarettes, adrenaline, and the conviction that tomorrow might not exist. After their first blood baptism, they drifted for days in a fugue, phantoms wandering the outpost. Some said nothing, as though words were another luxury they couldn’t afford. Others muttered nonsense, speaking in half-dreams, voices cracking like children’s.
“He’s lost the plot,” Heval Erdal, a British comrade, used to mutter, shaking his head at those glassy-eyed stares. He’d laugh when he said it, but the laugh always caught in his throat. The plot was easy to lose out there.
Years later, after the fires of Rojava burned down to embers, those who had survived staggered into other wars. Statistically, one in ten internationals died on that soil, their bodies buried in Kurdish earth far from the countries that had birthed them. Four of ten died later, either by their own hands—noosed, overdosed, revolvers pressed to temples in kitchens at dawn—or vaporized under Russian rockets in Ukraine. They migrated from one doomed battlefield to another like moths drunk on the flame, unable to live in peace, unable to stop killing, unable to stop dying. The war never left them. It only traded flags.
The first time you come here, as a Jew, a lifetime of anticipation, religious zeal, and propaganda make it like a pilgrimage. And you only go on the two-week tour; the wall, the handsome and pretty soldiers, the Tel Aviv vibe, the camels, the shouks, the black tea, the Dead Sea and Masada. But the second time, the cracks began to show up. You either decide, “Tikkun Olam”, we can fix any cracks, or you place the State of Israel on a little shelf, like a photo, and you root for it, or you have long boring circular conversations about the Palestinians. But in the State, itself, which necessitates the ghettoization and systematic oppression of Palestinians; the uncomfortable reality that is literally behind window or over a wall; in the occupation there are not just cracks in moral narrative; there is bleeding and there is dying. There is the full denial of rights and freedom for one people, for another to lay claim to the land.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
I am told it is very green up north in the shade of Mt. Tabor. I am told it’s important to learn Hebrew. The language of the colony, I mean, “our historic homeland”. I take a bus from the Techanama Gazit Central Bus Station to a town called Afula, which is as mediocre as it is relatively isolated. As it is also close to everything. The whole country takes eight hours to drive north to south. The kibbutz itself is still a good half an hour further north, so I stick my thumb in the air for several hours before a Bedouin trucker drops me at the gates of Kibbutz Ein Dor.
My one-night standing had turned into a good long week of partying. With less than $200 of my money left, I decided to quit my evil ways and learn to speak the language of the world’s oldest tribe while doing a bit of the old ‘agrarian collective labor’.
Kibbutz Ein Dor was established at its present location facing Mount Tabor in the eastern section of the Lower Galilee in May 1948. Its members came from groups of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair from Israel, Hungary, and the United States. Later groups from Chile and Uruguay and much smaller groups and individuals from over 30 different countries joined them. Today the kibbutz boasts about 430 members and candidates for membership, and a permanent population of close to 800 when children, parents of members, and Hebrew Ulpan students are considered. The kibbutz’s economy is built almost entirely upon its cable factory, Teldor, which manufactures telecommunication and electronic cables. The kibbutz still cultivates a wide range of field crops, has a dairy farm, and raises chickens. That’s almost verbatim off the kibbutz Web site.
Ein Dor is situated where the Chesulloth Basin meets the eastern section of the Lower Galilee and the JezreelValley. There was a new electric entrance gate that was surrounded by a security fence made of barbed wire as old as the country itself. A guard was posted at the entrance. The young man had dark hair and a black uniform and was sitting with his feet up at the post with an Uzi submachine in his lap looking bored and disinterested. The guard was no older than seventeen. All of the buildings are white stucco with a solid earthy appearance and red corrugated tin roofs. Massive olive trees and other shrubbery made the kibbutz exude abundance. Compared with the dry and dusty hills and the two small Arab villages with their scrawny sheep that flanked it, the kibbutz felt like a fortress of bounty. Flowers had been planted everywhere, and the grounds were immaculate. Green grass covered the lawns of all the kibbutz buildings. As I walked up the main street to the central building, I saw what looked like a huge auditorium that served as the central dining hall. A sign told me as much in Hebrew and English, but not in Arabic.
The Russians Roman and Anya his homegirl had told me that the real Israelis hate the weak, naïve American tourists. That I come from New York means a lot less here. A lot of fat, rich, lazy American Jews live in that city.
“Above your head there flashes a great big dollar sign,” the Russian girl Anya I made fuck within Tel Aviv had said to me adding, “Your nice words will not so much to protect you here from us!” Was she Slavic joking I’d get kidnapped, or that everyone would want to fuck me, I wasn’t fully sure. In fact, she was also alluding as I’d discover that Israel is a place where all the Jews, or the majority, are poor. Sometimes Israelis call Israelis sabras after the cactus-like, thorny fruit with the sweet center when opened as if deep down these Israelites were warm and respectful to outsiders. That’s very wishful thinking, which doesn’t last long past the two-week tour.
“I’m looking for a woman named Bruria who is the volunteer coordinator of the kibbutz.”
Bruria’s closet-like office was in a small shed attached to the main Volunteer Office building. I can’t help but thinking she looks like a man in a dress. Her English isn’t very good, and I am informed that it will cost me a thousand, two hundred shekels and fifty agorot to enroll in the ulpan program. Everything they say about the poor, impoverished kibbutzniks must be truism because they want my agorot; the bullshit Jewish penny. Nobody chases those down the street. I feign agreement fully wondering where I am going to come up with that kind of money considering my net worth financially is perhaps no more than $180 at this time. She takes every penny and tells me I can pay the rest down the line. It’s hard times in the lower hills of Galilee. I now don’t have a shekel to my name.
The kibbutz does not make a great first impression. Built something like a cross between Jurassic Park and the Soviet Union, the adults seem embittered and cagey as Bruria brings me around. The facilities are pleasant until we arrive in the area where the volunteers live. Stucco and pebble faced buildings give way to trailer bungalows near a sign that reads ‘welcome to our ghetto.’ There are close to twenty white bungalow buildings on a steeply inclined hill that are each only one story tall. Each bungalow has a porch with some irregular lawn chairs and assorted stools. Each house has four volunteers in two sets of living quarters. There are two outdoor showers per building, which four volunteers share. These dwellings overlook a series of olive fields and in the distance, you can see the small Arab village of Deburiya. The Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer echoes across the valley five times a day she warns me.
“It may sound like a scary cry of war, but it is how they pray. They are the good Arabs, long time our neighbors. We control now their water which makes them better neighbors.”
Bruria unlocks my apartment and tells me to leave my stuff. I have just one large black rucksack. The room she calls ‘living quarters’ is a one-room affair with two dormitory steel cots and two adjacent closets. My roommate is rather neat. His t-shirts are all folded, his stuff tucked inside the large closet. There are no posters on the walls or art, just a small wooden table with an alarm clock that has a picture of Israeli girl in black and white with X O X O scribbled on it and a big red lipstick kiss. Guess that’s what he’s doing here. It’s all very laconic, that is to say the bare minimum of what one needs. But after squatting for three months in a dirty hovel in London this is all a marked improvement. Bruria tells me my roommate’s name is Danny and that he is from Los Angles
Classes are in session. The classroom building is on top of the hill. It is built in the same white stucco style with a red shingled roof. Bruria interrupts the class and announces that I ‘will be the new student.’ There are about twenty other people in the class. All of them are easily twice my age by the look of it. I had been under the impression that there would be people my age forgetting that this was a program for new immigrants, not seventeen-year-old radicals in some fucked up self-imposed exile. Everybody smiles and then gets back to work.
Later that day I am introduced to the ghetto’s ‘North American Social Club.’ It is on the porch of a bungalow at the top of the ghetto on the hill. It has a third fridge on the porch. There is a Russian quarter, an Argentinean quarter with a Columbian among them here to garden not to learn, and the American section. The Russians only speak Russian; the Latin Americans don’t speak Russian or English well. And go figure, we don’t speak anything at all besides English including the Chilean girl and Canadian guy in my new ‘club.’ Everyone is learning Hebrew, but vodka is the lingua franca by the looks of it.
My roommate introduces himself as Daniel Asher Callahan who is questionably Jewish. He is tall and lanky, has dark hair with freckles and knows how to freestyle rap. The Canadian John Yuma, whom everybody calls Johnny Bravo, is all things loud, drunk, and misogynistic. Also, questionably Jewish. Like Paul Bunyan and Izzy Vitz, he tells tall tales. According to his own booze-soaked account, he was formerly a freelance soldier, this gun for hire in the French Foreign Legion for eight years. He boasts combat on nearly every continent ‘with the browns or yellows’ and is visibly a degenerate drunk. Bobby Brown is the third American in the social club. He’s part bookworm and part smartass jock. He has glasses and flashcards. He goes for jogs to Duriyah. He’s liberal but still doesn’t trust Arabs. Both Danny and Yuma are not yet sure it was worth their coming here. The more they drank, the less they liked the Holy Land air and long summer months with no rain. Bobby Brown was a good little Zionist through and through. “What kind of fucking Jewish name is Robert Brown?” Yuma yells!
It’s my first day at the Kibbutz and they’ve extended me a full membership. Club activities generally involve pounding back Gold Star or Maccabi beers, the national swag of Israel, and puffing carton upon carton of Noblisse from the commissary. It is as if they pay us weekly for booze and smoke. That’s all our little company store stipend gets us in the end. Yuma spotted me the beers.
“You’re new so you get the shitty chair ‘til you steal yourself a better one,” Danny says to me.
“Steal anything that’s not tied down,” he says is the way of things.
Bobby becomes more social the more he drinks. John Yuma seems to get louder and more unhinged. Kind of hard to imagine any of them as being Jewish.
School and work alternate every day except Saturday. Depending on your assignment you work about eight hours a day with a two-hour lunch. Most volunteers are in the mess hall cooking, food prepping and doing dishes for nearly 800 three times a day, although I’m told many families eat at home. Other options include Yards, which means constantly weeding and laying sprinkler line or Gardens, which helps to maintain the flowers and trees on the grounds. The ambitious and trusted either milk cows or work for TELDOR the chief kibbutz product, which is telecommunications wiring. Everyone tells me that I have to decide by tomorrow to work in the mess hall for obvious reasons like stealing food and air-conditioning, but I need to be outside using my hands.
We are all sitting on the porch of the North American Social Club drinking Gold Star beers that Yuma bought in Afula except for Bobby Brown who is immersed in the course work.
“So where are you going to slave,” asks John Yuma.
“I was thinking about Yards and Gardens.”
“That’s a lot of digging. You got to dig mini trenches for the sprinkler lines, which keep the place so green. You should get to work to keep your soft hands not dirty. And fill our fridge,” Yuma says.
“You see, a kibbutz is about doing as little work as possible and getting drunk as often as you can. And givin’ it to every new girl that arrives.”
“I only say it ‘cause you’re scrawny. Teldor and field work is man’s work,” says Yuma.
“Where do all the curvy kibbutz girls work?
“They don’t. Most of them are really underage. Like getting locked up underage. Pickings are very slim these days. There’s a fine Brazilian girl named Carla but she he has a kibbutznik boyfriend. She works in Yards and Gardens if you’re looking for good eye candy. Girl is stacked and curvy,” says Bobby looking up from his book.
“I’m always looking for eye candy. I’m a horny seventeen-year-old.”
Just down the hill at the bungalow below ours some Russians in our Ulpan Program start yelling at us from their window and waving with their arms for us to come down.
“What do they want?” I ask.
“They want us to get really trashed on vodka,” says Bobby Brown.
“Come on,” says John, “It’s a kibbutz highlight that never gets old.”
It was one we would have over and over again. Bobby and Danny sat it out. I had no idea why because I figured it was just for a shot. The Russians apparently really, really liked sharing their liquid oblivion.
There were four Russians in the small room. All four of them were in their early thirties. Three were Slavs and the other one was a dark Georgian. They offered their names, but I only caught one distinctively, Alexi, who was the youngest. The Georgian had a crucifix around his neck, which he never took off. None of them spoke English and I wasn’t able to catch any of the names of the other three. The vodka was very cheap and highly flammable, one of them demonstrated by igniting a wall briefly. We slammed two shots in the first minute or two. Then we chased each shot with water. I was laid out by the time I reached eight. It burned my throat and made my head spin. I fell off the cot as I yelled profanity in drunken glee. Alexi showed us a picture of his sister or girlfriend. Who cared or knew. Yuma told him ‘I’d fucked her in the ass.’ They all started cheering and patting me on the back. And then a blackout, and a blur of sweat and yelling and more shots.
The last thing I remember hearing was Yuma with his arm around a Russian yelling, “WE’RE GONNA FUCK YOUR MOTHERS IN THE ASS!” They had no idea what he was saying so that just cheered and we all did another shot. I had to be practically carried back to my room by John and Danny sometime after midnight. I stink of booze for a whle week. The Russians see to that.
***
I settle on “Yards and Gardens” detail managed by a triumvirate two Latin laborers and the Kibbutz Yards and Garden foreman Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones was half English/half Irish. He’d come here in the sixties, a little leftist and a little reckless. He had gotten an Israelite pregnant and never left. He’d acquired kibbutz membership, married the girl and had three kids. He was a good guy with numerous yarns, which all seemed to amount to a warning about getting out before I got one of their girls pregnant. The girls were all 12, I told him. He told me he was talking about the country not the kibbutz. The other two weren’t Jewish either. Adonai Gonzalez was Colombian and strapping. He’d been here a couple years. Said prospects were better here than in his own ‘piece of shit’ country. And there was the hot Brazilian, a tall, gorgeous brunette, the hot sweaty eye candy Yuma had mentioned.
Our work was largely the maintenance of the sprinkler system. Without it the hills would not be so green. The Israelis utilized a drip irrigation system. The pioneers in less than a hundred years had reclaimed swathes of swamp, desert and rock, but milk and honey hardly came. The kibbutznik dream of agrarian socialism was over. They had outlived their colonial purpose.
But if there was some endless war going on, I hadn’t seen any of it yet. Not in Tel Aviv or Galilee anyway. I dug up sprinkler lines shirtless, never seeming to burn in the nonstop sun. I was getting a little less scrawny with the three meals a day. The kibbutz was always the same work, the same food and the same people every single day. I’d get shit hammered drunk with the Russians and the North American Social Club. I’d sit bored in the classroom pretending to learn Hebrew. I wondered sometimes if I was in too deep. I wondered if Zionism was really the end of the ideological road for me. It was too easy. I wondered when the hammer would fall, or the real test would come. I was living in a war zone wholly sheltered from the war. I wondered when I’d meet a Palestinian again.
I wonder if little Kareem from the Wadi would light himself up in a bus that I was on or perhaps he had already. The kibbutz was a vacuum. Each weekend came and I hitchhiked down to Tel Aviv. To see Israel. To get fucked and hammered and blown by everything except Palestinians. My dreams were a dull silence. Mike Washington was truly dead it seemed. I had learned to sleep like normal people do, in quiet but without peace.
Every so often some kibbutznik would tell me to put a shirt on lest I burn up, but I never seemed to. My blood wasn’t wholly infused with the European. Just my skin. My great, great grandmother’s rape had not been complete, as I didn’t burn. So, I ate cucumber, onion, and tomato salads, tried to pick up Hebrew and fought the good fight to keep the yards and gardens green.
After work I’d sit on the porch with Danny and Johnny Yuma smoking cigarette after cigarette and downing frosty cold liter bottles of Coca Cola. We’d look out over the village of Deburiya and listen to their call to prayer go off around sundown. The ghostly Adhan echoed throughout the valley. We could sit in our walled little compound sipping Coke and getting hammered on cheap beer. We could pretend the Intifada was taking place in the cities and would not reach us. But like the village of Deburiya, we could cut off their water and lock them off their lands but ignoring them is impossible. “There are serious contradictions that Alleyah will raise,” Danny explains, “it’s not a very large country and there is nowhere for anyone to go. We have already pushed millions of them out of the country. We cannot ignore the Intifada; it is not going to stop.”“Fuck these stupid sand niggers” says Yuma.
“It’s not always cold in Russia,” explains Polina Mazaeva, a Russian Chuvasan39 sympathizer and mother of a seven old named Yazan. Yazan was born to a Syrian Druze father who is not with them anymore. It is complicated, yet not that complicated in every society.
POLINA IVANOVA MAZAEVA
“Men abandoning women with their child is a very old story actually in all cultures.”
A pause. “But to be honest he did not actually abandon us, comrades, we just left the Middle East behind and returned to where I am more comfortable, where I believe a better life is to be had.”
“It’s just that we have had to exhibit a certain moralistic coldness.” A certainly ethical chill? This was the experience of growing up in the ruins of the Soviet Union. But we are not without beliefs. We are not without our sympathies. You just must be careful how you talk about them. Things need to be rational; they need to be sentimental but only if sentimentality is kept in letters or behind closed doors. In short, in the Russian Federation you must think about what you write and what you say.
Outside Moscow and St. Pete’s life is often lived quite poorly. Nationalism is still at an all-time high. It was very very bad in the 90’s and order, and some dignity, has been restored. When many have an internal critique about our leaders, or the price of buses, perhaps most best to keep it to yourself. Or the treatment of homosexuals or Chechens, perhaps we keep it out of our heads. Because the United Russia Party has made many advances to restore us to national dignity. Curbed the oligarchy to some degree and reigned in the free for all gangster-ism of the 1990’s. The infrastructure of the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, outside the downtown area remains largely as it was in the late 1950’s. Optimistically better than what Stalin provided, but still brutalist, soul sucking Soviet crumble. But everywhere theatre and music are affordable, also schools and hospitals. Certainly, the upcoming bus boycott will test the limits of ‘free speech’. There is admittedly not much free speech. There are piles of dirty snow all around the fourth largest city in the Federation. The very tall statue of Lenin still stands near the Hotel Marins Park. He’s still the default father of the nation. Why not? Only the ultra-wealthy have any admiration for the Czars, except for of course Peter the Great who stands tall over Moscow. We have a lot of cool history and we should be proud as a nation where we came from.”
Russia is a multiethnic, mostly single party oligarchic federation of some 158 nationalities, immediately east four hours from Moscow is the Chuvash Republic. The semi-central Asian Chuvash people are vaguely European and vaguely Asian; almost all are orthodox Christian and have never in remembered Russian history run afoul of the central authority. Never got ourselves butchered or deported enmasse to Siberia. No, no, the Chuvash play well with others. The Chuvashan capital is Cheboksary on the Volga, but many can be found in Nizhny Novgorod, “the Russian Detroit”, once a closed and secret city called Gorky. Who is Polina Mazaeva? A coy Russian Agit-prop? No, no, she actually has fallen in love with this tragic radical, Sebastian Adon. Fallen in love by letters actually. And they are preparing to meet, but have composed several Russian American, or Americano Soviet love songs and scribbles.
Why and when Sebastian and Polina began to write to each other is of no great mystery, both were in pure existential crisis. Whatever else they may do for a living, they are both writers and artists too in temperament. They wrote often and eloquently in the year leading up to his “deployment in Kurdistan Syria and Iraq”. These letters and poems all sounded similar, but not the same to previous love affairs during the Cold War, but they reinforced each other’s motivation.
“This is not a ballad for two people who move on!” But fundamentally the reality of their underlying narrative was that one-day Sebastian, who had more agency via his U.S. passport would fly to her and give her a new life. A more tragic but realistic understanding of the correspondence was that before he was going to do the hard part; give her and her son a new life; he would go to Syria, where obviously he could die. She mentioned the contradiction seldomly. Their worst fights were Polina’s frequent accusations of Sebastian’s habitual womanizing. Which was real, but not as magnified as she made it out to be. He was not sleeping with every single woman friend he appeared in a Facebook photo with. But he had lovers she did not see. He assumed she did too, but she did not. She loved the idea of him but never expected him to ask for some mega long distance monogamous relationship. It was strange. But she had a son and little Yazan kept her more faithful. Sebastian in the meantime took under half a dozen women to bed, the idea of Polina was sentimental to him, but also not exactly real. Periodically she would flip out over a woman he appeared with on social media. But it would fade. Several times he threatened to cancel the Russian leg of the trip, but he did not want to. Russia was something he needed to see before he died. He probably will die out there like the 600,000 plus others who had perished in the war so far. Maybe in an airstrike, maybe ingloriously from some stray mine. ISIS has allegedly booby trapped every room of every house of every village, town and city they have occupied. Anyway, a lot of people were dying ingloriously in the former State called Syria, Russia most important ally in the Middle East.
The correspondence was real. They uniquely relied on each other to float. The underlying assumption that their struggle was real, that Sebastian would die on some barricade rather than raise a family and that Yazan had frozen her life into place. Sebastian had clearly acquired “revolutionary delusions of grandeur” and was now “enslaved to his own expectations of possible heroism”. Polina had fallen hard for her baby’s father and been rejected by his Druze family and a life in Dubai she an her son Yazan eventually abandoned. The Russian state and her parents shouldered some of the costs of raising a seven-year-old, but her life was a dull repetition and a soft cage.
Yes, the struggle is quite real! Sebastian had averted ongoing suicidal ideations several times through her soft tone and patient words. Polina had taken on new online classes and high expectations of what was possible. While the flirtation with self-harm was mitigated by the responsibility of motherhood, she had dark times. They needed each other after a point. They waited happily for the next response which honestly flowed all day every day since he was an ambulance man, and she was very per diem self-employed with information technology type assignments in graphic design. They wrote and wrote and wrote. Sometimes poems, songs or sketches. Sometimes he would tell her how hard he planned to fuck her, or she would write out something that seemed hard enough to be a rape scene. They both were getting what they needed out of it. A friend in the dark. Two friends in long distance post-Soviet love. Two dreamers who live in utter and total nightmares. It gave them something to believe in.
Polina Ivanova Mazaeva throws back her crimson dyed hair and makes a pouty Chuvashan face for a selfie. I love only three men! I love my son the most, he is the future. He is happy and free and built from diverse parts. Yazan is his name, and he is seven years old. Like any mother I have to love my son very first, even before myself! I am sometimes a dramatic and hysterical person, but this is who I am. Also, a jealous wife.
“My mother is of unknown ethnicity, unknown as her mother was adopted as an orphan during the Great Patriotic War against Germany. In appearance she is convincingly Slavic. Her father is a happy smiling Chuvash40.”
I love second, my forbidden, partially forgotten Syrian Druze ex-husband, Damien. He is in Dubai now, we tried hard to make this work, but he is Druze, and I am Chuvasan, and never the two can be together. We tried. But it was too complicated. I love him still, I fantasize about him returning for me and carrying me off to the high-tech parts of the Middle East, but he is gone. Only the face of my son reminds me a little of him. They make fun of him in school and call him Arab, but this is not Arab. He is Chuvash, and Druze. Holy, actually, a reincarnated Druze inside him will speak in parables sometimes.
“My third love, and final for now is Mr. Comrade Sebastian Adonaev. An American. A New York revolutionary, a medical worker on ambulances and a very gifted artist. Perhaps better understood an upper middle-class malcontent. Aspiring revolutionary? I hope he will not die in Syria, but statistically, it is quite probable. He has my heart in some strange way. Only with his spirited words.”
Sebastian makes a lot of written reports, partly because he’s a writer and partly because his team is spread widely over four countries. He writes me love letters and also forwards technical reports. They are highly boring but cast some insight into his Middle Eastern movements and affairs. I am not really invested in his brigade of foreign fighters bound for Syria, of course, but I admire them all for their relative bravery. Rather, it would be better if he just stayed in Russia with me when he arrives, which will apparently be on May Day 2017.
Sebastian writes to Polina Mazaeva frequently, as though the spirit of the 18th century could still be alive within the tools and technology of Century 22:
Dear Pauline,
There are eight people in or supporting the growing expeditionary party into Rojava. Some are working on the field ground and some from the safety of the U.S.A. Demhat al-Jabari, a Kurdish patriot I met in university, is negotiating with me in Kurdistan. He will likely go to Rojava but return for school in the fall. Shoresh is an actual anarchist, he doesn’t really have a role as much as he showed up to fight in the Y.P.G. and perhaps do some gardening. The constant gardener doesn’t care about any bigger picture or whether Rojava will rise or fall, he will come for six months and depart. He has a wife and young baby, so it’s better, I guess. Alacan al-Biban Rasool is a Kurdish fixer boss. He’s a local to Erbil. He does Fixing, without ever taking money. Yelizaveta Kotlyarova is a Russian doctor, just a podiatrist, and Dr. Jordan Wagner is an ER doctor, and they will do medical control from the stateside. Pete Saint Reed is a marine leading a little medical detachment inside Mosul. Justine Grace Schwab is working with Alacan al-Biban, also with Pete, and maybe could be our 8th; but she is savvy and magic and cunning but doesn’t play on a team well.
Our overall contribution to the humanitarian side of the war in the end was under forty women and men deployed in Iraq under the auspices of Pete Reed’s N.G.O. Global Response Management, and mere four volunteers from abroad, a gardener and I named Spike going up in the mountains, and over the river and into the Y.P.G. A Peruvian nurse named Francisco who worked briefly with Pete in the battle of Hawija, and a Kurdish American negotiator named Demhat al-Jabari. So Pete Saint Reed was a better commander and focused wholly on the work in Iraq.
“There are a lot of complications,” he claimed. One may have been the lack of a reliable hotel bar in Rojava. My unit of four, really three in the end was all we could manage to get over there and into Syria. Several dropped out, unexpectedly? Not expediently expected. The American activist drama queen, “VIP leftist” Cecily Macmillan. A medical assistant in training named Joshua Hunter and a Ukrainian EMT named Philip. Syria is not actually an easy place to sell volunteerism in America.
Few of these volunteers in the end proved dependable, but who could really blame them in the face of the Syrian Civil War bloodbath. Only the Kurds Alacan al-Biban and Roj did any leg work, out of patriotism. Oh yes, Spike did his seven months but certainly none of that was dedicated to the medical mission. He deployed to shoot at the enemies of the revolution.
Really Pete Reed’s success, if you can deem it any success what he accomplished, in Iraq was about managing to access the W.H.O. money. His military veteran can do bravery and being embedded with the Iraqi Special Operations Forces helped a lot. The potential disaster of our Syria mission had most to do with the near total inability to reinforce or evacuate our team once inside Syria, being therefore wholly dependent on the whims of the YPG. Which again, stands for People’s Protection Units, the P.K.K. mostly Kurdish militia fighting ISIS as the primary Coalition-led proxy. Who allegedly and have a deep “martyr culture” and a sort of contempt for Western medical workers.
Sebastian’s reports, like his mind, dig deep then ramble out into incomplete destinations. Actually almost no one reads them besides Demhat, Alacan al-Biban and Polina; sometimes Mr. David Smith, or anonymous forces based in Arlington. Regarding Polina and Sebastian;
“We are both writers and both artists, she took only a slight interest in my Middle Eastern Affairs.” So, Sebastian thought, but that was not true she followed Russia in Syria closely. The Russian media anyway called it “World War Three”. Polina authored many email letters and some he printed out and carried with him in a leather binder. Sebastian carries her letters about to reinforce in himself courage when the weather is too hot, which it always is, and death is inevitably getting too near, which it sometimes does. Such was one;
My Dear Comrade Sebastian,
Privet!
Maybe because many of all in my life you don’t know. You are important to me, that’s why I am winding all, afraid to lose you. I don’t want to be selfish; it just happens. And I really didn’t want any relationship before I knew you better, because I needed to take a break after the last relationship and do something with my psyche and my life.
Why do I claim any love for you? When you wrote to me in October, I just couldn’t understand why you sent me such long letters. Especially because most of them were difficult for me to read. I just wanted to be polite and answer when I could. But then I saw that you feel bad, very bad. And I have a rule – if I have failed so far in my plans, I need to support those who don’t see for themselves how much they can do. You can do all you wish. You can gather people and organize them for common activities. For a good deal. You are a wonderful person. You supported me later. And I began to be inspired by you. I learned how you feel, how you sympathize with other people, what your heart is. You have a beautiful smile and so much fire. Simply, we are all people, and we all have weaknesses that we have to contend with. And you too, and me.
Now you inspire me more and more, and I like your ideas, because I begin to understand them (it was difficult before because of the language barrier), and of course this feeling – I hate it, but I miss you constantly and I would not want to share you with anyone. I’m unstable for the last three years, there were so many reasons, that’s why I did not want to get attached to anyone – it would create problems for everyone.
But you’re great, just know this. I love your strange smile. Your cunning brown eyes. Even when they are tired after a hard day. I love your voice, and I love your face. I love your body (so far imagined in the pictures), I love your thoughts and that thing which guides you, the reasons why you are and what you do. You are a very kind person, so you have suffered a lot. And you are wonderful, in any case, even when your strength is running out. I just love you because you exist. I would follow you everywhere and support you in any crazy thing, and I would share with you my most beautiful night dreams. And if you were nearby, I couldn’t let you leave a bed, I would give you all of me. Simply, you are very important and forgive me, if somewhere my old complexes I project on you. I’m not perfect at this. Sorry. It happens in only one timeline, then leaves. Wait a little, please, you’ll see a lot of good from me. And I hope you feel a little better today or soon. If you need to speak about any of your problems, I am always here.
Your comrade & your future lover,
Polina Ivanova Mazaeva
P.S.
“Do not have boring affairs with other lesser women or get yourself killed in that forever war. There are many people besides me who care about you!”
My father is a Lebanese politician. From what I gather, we are Shi’a, and the Shi’a are the good guys, but we, as in our faction of the good guys, want a more secular Lebanon not what the Party of God wants; another brand of an Islamic State; something like Iran, or just like it. But, in Lebanon, you’re dealing with Phoenicians, not Arabs, so we have the mentality of trade, the mentality of sensualism; we are not dogmatic. The civil war, it happened by accident, but we all blame the Palestinians and the Israelis.
“THE OLDEST SONG EVER SUNG EVER WAS A LOVE SONG” a Kurdish jangle plays on satellite radio. I need to find a red-light room in the Green Zone. The kind of place off duty soldiers gets lap dances, drop dollars, and “get their dicks wet.” They say it’s “the world’s oldest profession”, but in fact the oldest profession is farming. I think Shermuta (a whore) is very relative term in the Middle East. You can get called a Shermuta for holding a man’s hand on park bench. You can get called a shermuta for selling your body to a man for their money. You can also get kidnapped, or raped, and/or killed over feelings. In Iran and in the Isis controlled zones, as well as in Afghanistan is the Ministry for promotion of virtue and prevention of vice.
I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad, and I tell you it’s much harder to get out of here than I ever thought. I have a credit card and freedom of movement for the most part, but I have family honor to uphold too. I have jet black hair and a baby face. Shabab15like it. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel that pretty. I feel mostly empty, living in a repressive culture with repressive heat and violence. I feel wilted. I feel confined. I rarely go anywhere without four armed men with beards. Sebastian tells me I am “powerful”, but I do not feel very powerful lately. Although they say I have tits for days. My name is Nadia. Some friends call me; Nadia Night, i.e. Nadia Layla cause I stay out all night partying. Or at least back in Beirut I did. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction called AMAL. I think he was doing something indirectly for Hezbollah16 in Lebanon, I do not have a profoundly serious opinion about this faction or that faction, and I’m just 19!
My latest boyfriend is a Kurd. And I am Arab, so that must be kept at least somewhat quiet. Mostly because I am high class, and he is working class. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. We have a chandelier or two and some very fancy carpets, which is a real thing. There is always meat in the supper and fruit in the filled up fridge. We have at least five south Asian servants, serfs, either one. I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Erbil where I met my first love who is Kurdish. I had lovers all over Erbil, but now just this one guy. His name is Alacan al-Biban, he’s so, so cool. He’s a Kirkuki. I am not so libertine Beiruti in Bagdad. What a repressive slum. Too easy to get kidnapped. I have crazy person dreams. I have bold visions too! I am, however, deeply-deeply unhappy in Erbil, it is like a guiled bird cage. When my mother moved us all to Baghdad it became much worse. Baghdad is of course a much larger, much more sectarian city. You can get your ass kidnapped. There are less eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis.So, when I became a young woman, I lost track of my happiness and my sleep. I am of course a “liberated woman” and “artistic” as well. Or just a little libertarian shermuta, depends on ones values.
Sebastian Adonaev “the Jew of Beirut” gave me an art lesson, but I didn’t take that many notes. I just liked watching him “do his thing”. Except. when he finally made it to Syria and doing that part of his thing is a little scary. But prophetically I knew he would probably survive the civil war.
Sebastian told me that the dreams I had are “old school prophecies”. That was nice of him to say, because my expansive white therapist says I’m “bipolar” and bored in a “guilded cage of Middle Eastern hyper-privileges”. He’s quite nice, for a Jew, in some ways he is real Middle Eastern man. In other ways, a colonial debaucher. He is a good mix of a gentleman and a tumultuous revolutionary too. I have never actually never had a Jewish friend before. Or let a Jew touch my breasts. We were never ever serious lovers, but he spoke sometimes about “running away with me, after the war, back to Beirut” and I agreed it was “a real hard possible”. It was a romantic idea, and I planned to go home to Beirut anyway, because Baghdad is “extra”. But the war will never-ever-ever-end so it’s a very silly notion, this running away staff. He says that in the old country you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we have to wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 33 toward dying. It’s not fully such a big deal. I am very-very beyond bored in the Green Zone. Alot of check points and alot of showing my papers. A lot of bored Shebab, on some factions payroll with machine guns. Alacan al-Biban wants to fly me back to Erbil, but ever since the veritable hordes of Shi’a Militia men called the Popular Mobilization Forces17 began surrounding Kirkuk, Alacan al-Biban has been stressed and distracted. Asa fixer being stressed and distracted is basically his job.
Sebastian, he is probably getting involved over his head and language skills in the PKK. The Workers Party activities that Alacan introduced him to, but to me he hardly admits such things to me or over social media. Later, I had a cafe talk date with my friend Mina Abdul Rahim. Shes over the years have gotten more excited about being Shi’a. She didn’t always cover her hair in a chador.
Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s “an artist” and “a free radical” and I like him a lot. Sebastian and Alacan al-Biban are strangely very close friends I have realized after the fact, and not just “friends of the Abdullah Ocalan type”. They have what Westerners call a “bromance”. Alacan is doing a lot of free fixing and I believe Sebastian may have helped write his college thesis. Something about a “Confederation for all the Middle East.” As my fling and flirtations in Erbil with this slightly older male Jew Kafr18friend developed into mostly sleeping with his Kurdish friend Alacan, Sebastian writes me every other day from Syria, respectfully. He’s my ”sweet infidel“ always being optimistic to me on the WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again when he went to Rojava and I went to Baghdad. But we WhatsApp it up. He is a writer, so he writes a lot. Our brief window to do something super inappropriate, well it was mostly missed.
What’s sexting in the Middle East; well its just like sexting in Europe or America. Telling people you want to fuck them by text. Sometimes I sext with Alacan, sometimes with Sebastian.
I let him sext me from the front and don’t tell Alacan al-Biban of course. I don’t sext back eagerly, I just don’t stop them. Its hot, we all could die in the war, everyone wants to talk about my tits. But I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. These flashes of Ali and such. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. I might just be triggered into revelation amid this shit show of war. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire. Or thrown off the roof. Or get stoned to death, or get their hands cut off.
You see, on one side of the Middle East is art, math, reason, love, vision, and high points of science and philosophy. On the other, unseen hateful dark old gods and howling hordes of death, with black banners, or red, white and blue ones. Telling everyone to wear more layers in this bull shit heat. Making up hypocritical rules about shit no one heard Muhammed say to anyone. On one side is hope, constructive collaboration, toleration, pride in diversity, and honor. On the other bullets whizzing, bombs dropping; bodies piling up. Massacres here, genocide there. One person sees Djinn, another G-d, and yet another knows it’s just fucking nanobots. That even though we are in a land of dust and fire; we are still in the future and future is 1000x more futuristic than anyone ever expected.
***
Everyone is familiar with the Iranian Israeli shadow war over Iranian nuclear acquisition. Less publicized is the Iranian Israeli shadow war over nano-bot technology. The itty-bitty war inside. The technology to control a person remotely. The technology to kill with a stroke like event or make someone see “visions” then blow themselves up in a truck bomb. Notice how any enemy of the Russian state dies and you will see traces.
It is infact very hot, and people here in fact hold very zealous beliefs. By the Israelis and Iranians incubated all kinds of ways to murder each other shot of a nuclear bomb. Although Israel has 250 Nuclear missiles and Iran has 50, no matter what the other side claims, bluffs, declares; no one wants a nuclear war of any size.
It started innocently enough, a young Tehranian scientist moving to Baghdad. With Mina Adul Rahim experimenting in her lab, fine-tuning the algorithms that governed the behavior of her nanobots. She marveled at their ability to navigate intricate mazes, dismantle complex structures, and even repair damaged tissues within living organisms. But as her mastery over the technology grew, so too did her ambition. With a few lines of code, Mina found herself able to exert control over swarms of nanobots, directing their movements with precision. She could command them to assemble into intricate patterns, mimic the behavior of biological organisms, or disperse like a cloud of dust. It was a heady sensation, knowing that she held such power in the palm of her hand. Really the hand of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran, the guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
But power, as Mina soon discovered, was a double-edged sword. As she pushed the boundaries of what her nanobots could do, she began to fully realize the potential dangers they posed. The nano-bots refused to be sectarian. In their most advanced coding and strain, they viewed all humans as a threat. In the wrong hands, perhaps their own self-awareness, which had perhaps already developed, could be used to wreak havoc on a global scale—unleashing plagues, destabilizing economies, or even manipulating minds. Haunted by the ethical implications of her work, Mina wrestled with her conscience and her obligations. Should she continue down this path, fully knowing the potential consequences? Not robot vs. Zionist, but little deadly robots against all humans. Or should she destroy all her research, before it falls into the wrong hands? Such as the hyper-warlike, white settler colonialist demonic, racist Zionistical Israelites. In the end, Mina made a choice that would shape the course of history. She resolved to use her knowledge for the greater good, to ensure that her nanobots would be a force for healing rather than harm. But even as she vowed to control her creations, she knew that the true challenge lay in controlling herself. For in the world of nanotechnology, the line between creator and creation was a perilously thin one, and only time would tell where it would lead.
In the proxy wars and cold wars, and hot wars man kills man over identity. In the world of artificial intelligence, in the world of tiny deadly robots: all humans were the nemesis, no discrimination as per faction.
Sebastian Adonaev enters the Tavern. A place of refuge! The double doors swing shut and seal him inside. The place is entirely deserted. Music plays lightly. He is a fugitive and a soldier returning from a forgotten foreign war. He is losing his mind. A busty Slavic shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks.
They meet in the eyes. He is “a completely used up Israelite gun man”. Brown hair and Chechen eyes.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
“During our border reentry run from Rojava back into Suly, most of our column was blown apart in repeated missile strikes. We hid in a dugout bunker for two days. I was covered in piss, shit, blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. Heval Jansher, my mentor and immediate commander, I think he died in a drone strike. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman. But all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death from me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever and get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria alive!”
I spent the evening of my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah. Yet not one thing in it was made clean. Or for bathing. “Suly”, or also called “Slemani,” is the more libertine of the Kurdish cities in liberated Northwestern Iraq. A liberated, but unrecognized country politically divided by two city states.
The Chinese sex worker bore witness to a madness that would soon follow. My colleague balls deep in something carnal his way come. I just kept washing myself vigorously. The filth I felt of cowardice. The shame of retreat. She put her hands on me for only a moment, and I shuddered. Pushed her away. I then fell on my knees, and I cried. I picked myself up, and the Armenian volunteer paid our bill. We had a beer in the adjacent bar. Right before midnight we took a cab back to the safehouse. They went through our bags to make sure nothing would flag us at an airport. Some party men put us in a van with tinted windows then we were hustled through security. My magic carpet landed in Baghdad. Then a 24-hour layover in Cairo. Almost fell out of the sky over the Atlantic several times. Then with no questions asked I was in JFK.
Now! I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But! War and ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious ‘show time.’ By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind is not where I had thought I had left it, and neither are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It is March or it’s April. I have just done an eighty-day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two-day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow Street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern right before nightfall. I don’t know what the hospitals did to me. I just want to kill myself, or at the very least get myself killed.
I showed up at the Tavern early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor my friend and associate, the Gangster Medved. On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call in a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote to me every day during the war. I am just too late. I think I am being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I do not have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow-follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with before they pick me up again. Well anyway, there is only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern.Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me. Not Medved, he is buying me a drink. Out in the wide open. Like he does not give a fuck!
In walks a newly hired shot girl Maria Silverstova. A chesty young thing. She says she is “from Moscow” but is from the glorious nation of Bulgaria.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
Zdrastvistia8.
MARIA SILVERSTOVA
Why hello to you my very strange one! My wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say Privet to me, my old new friend. For I do know you are naked.
SILVERSTOVA
I had met Ms. Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I first met her again on international working women’s day.
She gave me a decent price. There are 88.95 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots cost 280. Her body is far more. Her mind is not for sale.
SILVERSTOVA
I tell people “I’m from Moscow,” though of course I am not.
My waist is tight, and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cocktail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am an exceptionally good listener.
Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.
ADONAEV
I am looking for Oleg Medved.
SILVERSTOVA
And Medved, your friend the bear, he looks for you, droogy.
Sasho said, “try and make him happy.”
Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on-scene kind of way, they encourage him. Giving him refuge.
Adonaev does not remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sorted out some work and some papers for him.
He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a mad man.
He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And was asked to exit, relinquishing his tavern card last Saturday.
I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as a shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.
ADONAEV
Maria, Tovarish Maria, how does life go at night?
SILVERSTOVA
I’m alive. It’s a start from which all options can follow. Would you like a drink?
ADONAEV
Not on your pale ruble.
SILVERSTOVA
There are other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit. Tell me about the Syrian Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
ADONAEV
Far more good was done than any real evil. By my Otriad anyway. I am sure the others killed more Jihadists, and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. In which one did their little part. But really, few of my single serving friends have survived the war. The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Türkiye rolls in to squash the entire revolution.
SILVERSTOVA
What Otriad did you serve in? I am a little familiar with the actors.
ADONAEV
I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.
SILVERSTOVA
Ye-Peh-Gay? Or WHY-PEE-GEE?
ADONAEV
The Kurdish Militia received American support to defeat the Islamic State.
SILVERSTOVA
Freedom fighting and or raw U.S. Imperialism, both? Same, same; not different?
ADONAEV
We were defending the only alleged Democracy in the Middle East, besides the alleged democracy in Israel. Türkiye was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking Idlib in the West, the Hashid Shaabi Popular Mobilization forces from the East, and ISIS from the south.
You take guns from whoever offers them in that kind of situation, nu.
SILVERSTOVA
So, on the Russian speaking news tonight. Türkiye has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is completely overrun and Manbij is next, and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against whoever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned it.
ADONAEV
I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking, and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Goldy and I will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
I need help from you or Medved. A different kind of bullet.
SILVERSTOVA
Prosto! You just need a new whore! Excuse me, I mean muse. Someone pays to love you even better than before. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots to remember. Not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we even French kissed. It all just made me pity you.
You’re basically not a man to me or your Goldy. You have no car, no respectable job, no property, and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. She and others like us must think about papers.
ADONAEV
Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.
Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting democracy, and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than a criminal!
SILVERSTOVA
Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the beginning of the narrative and explain to me your motivation!
Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life versus a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.
ADONAEV
Tovarish Maria,I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in green dollars.
SILVERSTOVA
“Your money Tovarish,” they say is no good here. You cannot pay for a bullet or a dance. You cannot pay in Rubles, Dollars, or the now faceless Dinars9.
You can buy time with or without sympathy.
ADONAEV
Sympathy with the resistance?
SILVERSTOVA
Sympathy with the American Mayakovski, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?
ADONAEV
You do in fact know what!
SILVERSTOVA
You know I don’t partake in the Lapland for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod and a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight. That is 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand. I do not think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.
ADONAEV
I do not have 100 Rubles to my name.
SILVERSTOVA
Then you get what you pay for! Which are nothingly nothings.
ADONAEV
What is my story worth?
SILVERSTOVA
It is worth less than a lap dance. More than a Dabka.
ADONAEV
I need her, you know.
SILVERSTOVA
Oh, that we all know that sad story. “It doesn’t take a weather man or woman to know which way the winds blow.”
Old American saying?
ADONAEV
I don’t follow your allegory.
SILVERSTOVA
Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your whole mask falls off!”
ADONAEV
That one I understood, almost perfectly.
SILVERSTOVA
As if I was making reports in Russian, or even Turkish.
“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self-deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and Iraq, Türkiye, and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brainwashing. He is to be watched if necessary: eliminated.”
Well, I guess you did not die in the war.
ADONAEV
Well, I guess I did not die in the war.
There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and useless. All my best efforts were forgotten and amounted to less than one nothing.
SILVERSTOVA
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat10… Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon-to-be-dead Kurdish friends. Confirm a little seditious rumor I heard?
ADONAEV
A rumor?
SILVERSTOVA
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blyat..now I heard a rumor. It’s a, how do you say, doozy, of a rumor.
ADONAEV
Go on.
SILVERSTOVA
I heard that the same people that did 9.11 created the Islamic State from scratch.
Enter the Gangster Medved, Sebastian and Medved bearhug embrace.
ALAN OLEG MEDVED
Loose hips sink ships! Say no more serious things to this chesty one, my one old friend! Maria, call up some of your friends! This man needs a serious distraction.
But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in, hopes to fully convolute the narrative. Blur apart the story of war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sexcapades, pornographic poems, and some borrowed prophecy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air!
SILVERSTOVA
A simple patriotic task.
MEDVED
One night at the tavern, about one week after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. Shortly after our reunion, he was taken.
Shall I call them “American secret police?”
His voyage, quest, which began in Cuba, then to Russia, then Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, and then finally Syria, then out via Baghdad and Cairo. The detention lasted 80 days. All were behind him for now. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan. In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Ms. Daria.
ADONAEV
What news do you have about Daria?
MEDVED
Listen, man, not again. She has all cleaned up. Singing and dancing at the Millenium Theatre.
She has a lovely place in Midtown. A fully kept woman now.
ADONAEV
She wrote to me…
MEDVED
…every single day of the war?
ADONAEV
Da11.
MEDVED
They have AI apps that can do that now. Robots can also write to you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them or sponsor their citizenship.
ADONAEV
She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can be figured out. For nine months she urged me to stay alive and come home. I need to find her.
MEDVED
You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you are in.
Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made-up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American lovesickness?
The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway, man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards, and keeping her papers in order.
ADONAEV
Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Robert Bruce?
MEDVED
What does it matter? Other people’s property now. Other people’s problems.
ADONAEV
I need to see her tonight!
MEDVED
Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.
ADONAEV
Well, I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possibly, possible.
MEDVED
Leave her alone. If you know what is good for her. Also, for yourself.
ADONAEV
I need to do this. She wrote to me every day during the war.
MEDVED
Nope. You do not have to do anything, blyat! In a month, or less, you will have another woman. In the meantime, is your fucking Daria even talking to you?
ADONAEV
No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple of weeks ago.
MEDVED
Prosto, that is it. You two were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way. But really, that Suka is a curse.
ADONAEV
She is only with whoever she is with for some spending money and a green card.
MEDVED
And you want a paperwork marriage and a world of work? You are not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right path, again. Go slap yourself in the bathroom. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride. You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars, hard maybe.
You cannot afford a woman like Daria Andreavna. I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things. You are not a man of stability and security. You are a man of adventures too enamored with the “good of the people.”
ADONAEV
Not yet.
MEDVED
Not yet. What do you plan to do when this is all over?
The last phrase I hear was selected for me: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.”
I am on my knees not far from the mouth of the well. The scorched earth of a once lush oasis, the WADI FARIN, is a battle torn hell awash with pock marks from artillery, countless arrows protruding from the ground, and, of course, drenched in oil. Mike Washington lays next to me breathing, face down in a puddle of his own blood.
The army of the demon clown does not draw much closer. The face of the clown still flickers on a several mile high screen. The horsemen have black bags on their faces or what looks like masks of flesh with nothing underneath but TV static flickering from their eyes, souls long departed. They stand at attention moving not even a dull twitch.
In this silence I watch Mike bleed to death. The arterial red pool collects underneath him soaking through his duct taped grey bandages. The pistol hidden in his gut must have caused him incredible agony. He bellowed in pain when I dragged him out of our foxhole.
The horsemen stand over us less than fifty meters away. Their legions surround us and the well in a great enveloping circle of thousands of zeppelins and assorted craft. The deliberate lax and lazy apprehension is perhaps just a part of its game.
We are in a dead place. Only one day from the end of a four-year journey, we are beaten. Like in a good Western or tale of knights, they had the girl, and we were surrounded. No reinforcements were coming. I remember something Mike once told me about the early days of his rebel career, when he received his first paramilitary training in a cave complex deep in the hills of Judea. A reincarnated soul possessed with the ghost of the Chinese general of Sun Tzu was instructing the fighters of Bar Giora in the ancient arts of spear craft and asymmetrical war.
The oracle had enchanted a young boy whose blood made him able to receive the spirits of the dead. The oracle put Sun Tzu within the boy and the boy honed the irregular Hebrew forces of several thousand untrained farmers into the guerrilla army Simon Bar Giora used to smash Roman legions. Michael had served throughout the three Hebrew Revolts following the death of the man Jesus Christ.
He told me he was only 17 when the war against Rome began. The death of the man Yeshau Ben Yoseph was taken by many to be the sign of the end. The man Jesus Christ, born Yeshua Ben Yoseph became a symbol to many throughout the Roman Empire that the iron heel of Caesar could be cast off. The Province of Judea in 60 AD was the first to try. Michael served as an officer until the very end, through 57 years of grisly desert war. In the third round of Hebrew-Roman fighting an entire legion, the XXII Deiotariana, was completely wiped out. The Second Temple of Jerusalem was razed and every last Hebrew man, woman and child were deported as slaves into exile.
“The ghost of the Chinese general told us ‘Death to traitors and spies.’ The first we slew were those in our midst who were pawns of Rome. The tavern owners, our corrupted class of priests, our foremen and merchants doing business with the empire, the harem proprietors, the spies and turncoats. The ghost of Sun Tzu taught us that many of our people never thought for themselves, had forgotten their people to fill their bellies and pockets and were more our enemies than even the hated Roman occupiers. He called them the living dead, soulless animals that consume but are no longer human. He taught us to cut off the heads of these zombies, to wash the streets with their blood. He taught us these zombies were the enemy within, that which consumes its own kind.”
Mike continues with his story:
“I was there surrounded at the fortress of Masada in the first revolt, one of seven to survive the ordeal. They cut off our water, then forced our own people to build the ramp up the mountain. We slew those zombies by the thousands. When we ran out of arrows we threw rocks upon them,” he told me.
“The thing about zombies, or even these horsemen without their own heads, they take their orders not from a god but just one man. Kill a million horsemen they just keep charging. Killing a zombie just removes an immediate threat to your survival. But if you ever get to fire at a Caesar, you’ll only get one shot. But if you hit Caesar, hit him right between the eyes and you’ll bring an empire to its knees. Few men think for themselves. They mostly just follow some tyrant.”
As I sat there on the ground, on my knees watching my companion die, I remembered these words. The old, fat clown was Caesar. To him all human suffering was a joke we brought upon ourselves. A grinding of gears and spiraling of machinery from the grandest zeppelin above let me know the clown was coming. A great catwalk of warped metal and tubing was twisting down at me like snakes, descending to the dune directly in front of me out of these Babylonian atrocities. The screeching of the metal ramp did more damage than the air raid sirens above us. The ramp hit the oil-soaked sand with a mighty thud. I still couldn’t see it. The ramp towered into the bowels of a great blimp above us. It seemed as if the other craft had begun extending docking mechanisms intertwining them all into a great aerial city. They intended to dock with Zion, to put out the many, many lights and send something foul and wicked to my world.
Mike was dying. He squirmed on his side bleeding heavily from his gut. He spasms in pain but does not cry out.
As the dark thing approaches a quiet feel of creeping death take hold. Slowly and deliberately, it moved down towards us. It had gotten fat feeding on pain. It held a gold chain in its hand with a green tube attached to something behind it we could not see. It wore a regal white gown, a crown of thorns and white golf shirt. Its red face was circle with a leering smile painted in red. Its eyes were blackened orbs. Its massive spider limbs crept out down the plank. Its body pulsated under the gown rising and falling like a serpent. As it got closer the dark horsemen all fell upon one knee.
‘You’ll only get one shot,” Mike had said to me.
I knew that as soon as it got within firing distance. As it swooned over us to mock us, maybe shit on our head or piss on our wounds, I’d tear the golden pistol from my companion’s dying chest and shoot Caesar between the eyes. The rest of the things would crumble. The horsemen would fall one by one like dominoes. The zeppelins would fall and be rendered apart like the mother fucking Hindenburg.
In theory. But the best-laid plans and theories of angelic gunslingers and mentally ill young men . . . you know how the saying goes. Mike coughs more blood out on the sand when he sees it. A yank of the chain and she steps out in front of him. She is dressed in white, a burka nikab and a miniskirt, a miniburka. Her slender fleshy legs are exposed and nothing else. You could bend over to fuck her in the ass without ever seeing her face. I see her green eyes. She’s wearing makeup under the veil. The shirt is high like a burlesque show whore. The gold chain is around her neck. The green tube descends into her swollen pregnant belly. My nemesis is as cunning as we.
Mike’s sockets show no anguish, but his face is clenched in fury. But he’s too far gone to have to make the decision I’m about to. I see the redheaded girl tremble, a nervous flinch. She traveled with us too long to not suspect that we have some plan. ‘Knock around rebels for god’ like us cannot be brought to heel. But what makes her shudder is the look upon our faces seeing her like that, seeing her tied to him and knowing we can’t do a damn thing. The best laid plans. The tube goes out the clown’s beating exposed black heart winding down into her belly through a port and likely into the child.
When the creature addresses us it sounds like nails dragged across a chalkboard. It speaks in images.
As it speaks I see buildings burning shortly in the City of Many Many lights. I see blood in the streets. I see its towers falling in flames.
“KIL,,L me wil’ yo,,,,,,,,,,,,u? You could try.”
Its voice makes me cry blood. Mike has no more eyes with which to cry.
“I am the gr,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,eat wooooooooorrrm. I aaaaaaaaaaa,,m the rot. In the darkness I feast on things which learn to kill each other.”
“WHA,,,,,,,,,T you do h;e,,,,re in the de;sert has had no meaning. We distracted you and ma,,,,,,,,,,,,de you si,,,ick like us.”
“WHERE IS YOUR G-D. IT HAS ABANDONED YOU ALL TO EACH OTHER. I am the w,,orm ,th,a,t, ,f,eeds on the dying; YOUR KIND is a flower of death. EAT OF MY TREE.”
The thing grows twice as big, its torso expanding out of the arachnid frame of limbs, a worm, a tree of death. The red-haired girl cries from behind her veil. I know Mike Washington says to kill Caesar. He ended his life and broke his wings for me to kill the clown. But what use is killing Caesar when it is Caesar’s happiness to die. It sits leering, its black heart exposed. I could kill the beast but not save the babe. The babe will be polluted with the foul things dying breath. If this world is a dead world, then I am death too. In the place of the whale there is hope. I’m going have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It thought us callous, but perhaps not hard. I tear the hand weapon out of my dying friend’s chest. I splatter open his abdomen into the sand. The gold pistol barks three times in my hand. The red-haired girl receives a bullet in her head, in her heart and in the heart of the babe. The babe with the power.
The thing screams its wretched screech. It’s bellows blow down its legion. The horsemen spasm reality shudders then stand suddenly still.
All around me is the scene of a great war put on standstill. I see the clown king reeling on its tentacles and limbs screaming, now frozen. I see Mike quite dead, splattered open, frozen. I see the red-haired girl who we protected for a whole year, whose baby was named Hope. We were close to helping her cross over. The white miniburka is stained in blood. I have just killed her and her unborn child. Frozen too is the fleet of zeppelins merging above us and the army we held off from a well for half a day the now scorched WADI FARIN.
I am SCUD the disposable assassin. I am G-d’s Knock around rebel.
But from the hills above the wadi I see two small things move. In addition to me they are the only pieces of this desert Guernica that remain unfrozen and ambulatory. I recognize them at once and am glad. These are my two friends who have been missing for eight years. They stand less than one foot tall and move about on furry, weathered limbs like plush beanbag animals. They have the appearance somewhere between bears and Klansmen. One is furry and whitish, the other is one furry and grayish. They have black marbles for eyes. I had thought them long vacationing in Mexico.
‘Black Bear and White Bear?” I ask amid the carnage, still on my knees still clutching a golden handgun.
White Bear has a voice like a smurf filled with glee. This glee-filled voice says to me, “Looks like you found the golden ticket to Palestine.”
Black Bear, called such even though he has a grey coat has a voice like a Negro Dick Tracy.
“Pedro thanks you for your going away present. He and his family are living in Los Angles now. White Bear and I joined a South Central Chicano street gang. Pedro’s girlfriend thinks I’m cute, but Whitey could use some new fur.’
“Such talk is fucking ridiculous Black Ass. Good to see you, old buddy. Looks like you’re still loose with the personal possessions. That girl is dead as a doornail.” His little voice is sickly cute.
“I didn’t teach you guys to curse.”
“The mother of the little Mexican boy did. We can’t fucking stop now,” explains Black Bear.
The two bears waddle up to me and I pick them up. They’re a little heavier than before. They also move, talk, and appear a little alive. I remember that the first time in my life when I sincerely cried and felt down and out and over-powered with sorrow was when I left these two bears in Mexico at the age of eight. Nine years later they walk about and spill foul language like milk and cheese.
“How now, Brown cow?” White Bear says to me. “I know you liked that girl, but you did what had to be done.”
“You did what needed the doing,” says Black Bear.
“I mean, you can’t kill the devil in you,” states White Bear matter of factly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I almost sob.
From out of nowhere White Bear produces a remote control. With a click he turns off everything. One click and its just Black Bear, White Bear, me and the universe like back when I was a little boy.
We are lying again in the strawberry field. Black Bear hands me a cigarette. The bears grew up rougher in Mexico. “Where did you guys go?”’ I asked a little more calmly now that the battle has receded in the distance.
“You were growing up. You needed a role model, not playthings for reckless adventurism,” says Black Bear smoking a Noblisse.
“Good adventures went on though,” I say reminiscing. For the first time I can remember a lot of my childhood. It glows like a warm memory of the two little bears.
“Remember the Mohegan Dunes near Montauk?’ asks White Bear. “Do you remember when I showed you the rocket landing point, where the spaceship emergency docked and dropped off your coding?”
I remember a hastily constructed spaceport in the sand dunes of Eastern long Island. I remember playing a vast game of capturing the flag brought there by the Pathfinder’s Day camp. White Bear and I went off to hide and unearthed a spaceship buried in the sands.
“Almost,” I say.
“Remember when you took me to that Art Barge one summer and in the sub basements of the sullied ship we found the endless maze of coffins, the great leaders of the world cloned and frozen for the coming showdown between man and his nature? The Art Barge was the mouth of a bunker, which contained part of salvation within it. It contained a frozen pantheon of leadership for when the world turns finally and fatally upon itself.”
“I remember the Barge, at least,” I mutter. “It was near a long string of metal radio towers on a sandy bay.
“There are so many adventures left for you, Sebastian. I’m halfway jealous you’ve grown too old for imaginary friends,” says White Bear.
“Is Mike Washington dead finally?’ I ask.
“He taught you everything you needed to know. And you gotta realize nothing is ever created or destroyed. It just changes form,” states White Bear.
“Physics?”
“Common sense, change, movement, birth and even death are only upsetting to you creatures lacking a fourth dimensional perspective,” says Black Bear.
“Huh?”
“You might be like, ‘Wow! Fuck! I failed! The Old Man is dead. The game is lost. Mike Washington is gone. Who’s gonna lead me to Zion? I just shot the girl and her unborn savior baby (who might just be your own child). The Clown ain’t dead. I still haven’t faced G-d and I’m stuck in a dream field talking to my two long lost teddy bears.’ You might be like, ‘FUCK, FUCK and fuck. I’m a victim and worse, a failure,’ “rants White Bear.
I have no words to respond to all this maddness.
“But you’d be dead wrong,” says Black Bear suddenly breaking the awkward pause in the soliloquy.
“We, being fourth dimensional creatures can tell you definitively there is so much more going on than even the best human can gather in their mind’s eye. There is an infinity of worlds existing parallel to the ones you inhabit. You, as of just right now exhibit limited control in two,” continues White Bear.
“Just two,” states Black Bear. “Two, out of infinity.”
“There are world’s where Hitler killed all the Judeans and you were never born. There are worlds where you were raised Christian and athletic. There are worlds where the darkness reigns and worlds where the forces of Allah are triumphant. There are worlds where art is the sole and universal means of communication. There are worlds where humanity has wiped itself off the face of the planet in a thermo nuclear exchange. There are worlds. . .”
As White Bear continues his talk, Black Bear clicks his controller again and reality unfolds about us like a vast speedy filing cabinet replacing the strawberry field with countless snapshots, playing around us like grainy, silent films of the worlds the little bear talks of.
“Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean the thing is gone,” says Black Bear. We step through one of the picture screens around us into a flat and grassy plain. It was the Midwest before there were Midwesterners to terror-form and colonize it.
“Hold onto your slippers, we’re back in Kansas,” says Black Bear.
“Where are you taking me now,” I ask.
Around me is a vast green prairie emptying off into a small electric city. I see a skeletal rail and river town in the distance that by size could only house and hold several thousand souls. A massive arch that makes me think ‘Saint Louis” anachronistically, somehow already constructed.
“Welcome to the grassy fields of Zion,” says Black Bear.
“Guess the Mormons had to be right about something,” I respond.
“You gotta be less judgmental. You gotta realize everybody sees little bits of the great truth,” says Black Bear.
I pick up the two Bears and put them on my shoulders. The plains are massive, and I see this outpost in front of me on a river running north to south, maybe the Mississippi, or perhaps the Jordan. I see a rail line, which runs ten thousand miles into the east. This is the last stop as far as western expansion, as far as people needed to take it. We approach the outpost walls. A large green stone sign in Hebrew reads:
WELCOME TO ZION
Population 144,001
“Doesn’t look nearly big enough to have that many people,” I say.
“Not everything takes place on the surface,” says White Bear.
It’s nearly dusk, but the city is bright as day on the other side of its massive stone walls. Its architecture is Victorian, wild western, but its fortifications are all red stone like the Alhambra. The tallest structure is the archway many stories above us, a giant gateway towering above the walls of the outpost.
“Everything is stone,” I mutter.
“Can’t burn a stone wall. Can’t break stone will,” mutters Black Bear.
We close in on the huge, sealed gates of the Citadel called Zion. The red, impenetrable fortifications loom above us, the archway of the City of Many, Many Lights illuminates everything.
“We’ll wait here,” says White Bear, the two little things jumping off my back. They sit their furry selves upon a small and grassy mound perhaps 40 meters before the first checkpoint established on the ascending approach to the gates.
“This place is not for Angels and Djinn; it is a sanctuary for lost women and wary men. You will find us when you get the answers you are looking for,” says White Bear.
“Try not to leave us behind again. Things are moving quickly now. Everything with a beginning…”
“Has an end?” I interject.
“Nope,” says Black Bear, his little Teddy face pulling off a smirk.
“Everything with a beginning knows not yet of God,” finishes White Bear looking like a cherub. The Bears seated behind me seem to glow with their own halos. But only Black Bear has a Halo. White Bear is a Djinn.
I make my final approach on Zion. The city outpost stands on a great mound. The vibrant green of the prairie at dusk is lit up not just by the towering arch, but also by watchtowers along the red walls. The walls are Spanish in character, massive maybe sixteen stories tall. Geometric and ornate, ZION stands like a great citadel.
The Wise Old Man and his great game were swallowed by the darkness. Mike was slaughtered bringing me here safely. It took four years to make our crossing. What struck me most heavily, what weighted down my stride were the Bears’ suggestions that the baby I had killed when I shot down the red-haired girl was my own. It was terrible enough to have fired upon her anyway. Three shots it took to keep the clown out of Zion and out of my own world of the whale. But how was it my baby and the clown’s baby at the same time? The redhead was pregnant when we first abducted her off the flying omnibus. Her name she said was….how come I couldn’t remember her name? I’d palavered with her many times in our journey, almost a year, about ten months that the three of us were together. The bears were babbling. What was I fucking saying? I was amid a vivid, lucid dream conversing with long lost childhood toys in a metaphor.
What color was her red hair, really? Orange red like Jessica Rabbit? Crimson red is like some Eastern European bombshell. She was Russian after all. Red like an Irish girl named Alice from outside Boston. Red like Rosy the working girl or Alana the Leisure Agent from Pardes Hana. I suppose if I crossed between the two worlds so could she. I suppose the only evidence of her original pregnancy was the word of the devil clown.
But I killed that little beauty because it had to be done. Either the wretched clown or I had made her with child. If she reached this place invested by it I’d be committing a vast inescapable evil. I put those bullets in the girl and her baby to save this city and my world from becoming like the land of the Pale City.
I was about to cross the threshold of a seemingly unguarded check point stacked in sandbags when it hit me like a ton of bricks. Well two things really.
Flashing through my head was the fourth dimensional truth that I was many things at many times and while these tribulations were so terrible because my condition allowed me live in two of these worlds at once, one dead, one dying. I realized I could be the scared little boy, the delinquent prodigal son, or even the romantic artiste. I could be the rebel prophet gunslinger, but if I wasn’t the black messiah and husband to this girl (which surely, I was not); then I was the rapist, devil clown too. The bears were right. The child was mine. I had forgotten what an evil thing I once was (am).
This hit me in the exact moment two men camouflaged perfectly with the ground emerged with lightning speed to bring the butts of their shotguns down upon my head. WHOOSH.
***
You can dream and still be awake. I know that now. You can struggle in the name of G-d and be confronted that you have been quite a devil, shrug and do nothing. The great whale keeps sailing upward towards the moon to make a roundabout approach upon the Pale City. Soon I will get my palaver with the One on the highest. I feel like a hanging man.
***
When I return to consciousness, I find myself chained to the sturdy, outstretched limb of some great tree. It is not so inhumane. My hands are bolted in manacles above my head to the large branch but I am seated in a wooden chair with a red pillow. It is very bright out in this garden in which I am a prisoner. There is a welt on my head from the stock blow and there’s blood in my eyes. But I’m back in the garden at least. At least they let me cross to the other side.
I can’t see so well because of the bright synthetic sunlight and the blood in my eye, but there are two chairs next to me at the base of this tree, both empty. One with a black pillow, one with a green pillow. I squint and see a young man across from me seated on a stool. I squinted again. It’s Nicholas Rosetree, my dear best friend.
“Rosetree?”
“Actually, here on the other side, it’s Rosetree, but yeah, buddy, it’s me.”
“What happened to me? Am I in Zion?”
‘Well, you’ve been down and out in heaven and hell.’
“I guess these are the trials of a prophet.”
“So, you know what you are now, buddy? Long scary ride to a simple truth if you ask me,” he smirks.
He takes a wet cloth, warm like at a Japanese restaurant and starts cleaning up my face.
“We weren’t expecting you so soon. You caught the sentinels off guard up top and security around here is tight as a drum.”
“It’s fine,” I mutter.
“They fucked you up good, this time my brother. You’re still my best wingman since Flannigan went faggot on me. You’ll heal up in no time. The women around here are something else. They got character like a Stacy Epstein, blazing beauty, super coy like Zoe or Sophie’s cousin whatsername.”
“Whatsername?”
“The one with the great tits you fooled with.”
“I can’t remember.”
“It’s been that many?”
“I guess it has.”
“Well, you’re a rock star. So, that’s what you get.”
“Am I finally dead, Nick? Did I run out of water in the deep desert and hallucinate my way to Zion through death.”
“Oh, you’re out of water in the deep desert back in the dying the world. That’s true enough. You ain’t dead yet though. You’re lights out on top of the JABAL ZIN riding the great whale.”
“So what happens next? Can you take the chains off me?”
“What happens next is you get to meet the management. Those chains too tight?”
“No, not really, the chair is comfortable as hell.”
“On some nights we get to sit on pillows.”
“Management?”
“If you have to ask at this stage.”
“I don’t have to ask. Why the chains?”
“When Pericles yearned to hear the sirens, he had his men bind him to the mast. Such rapture was the result of this sirens’ song that countless sailors had dashed their ships upon the rocks to get closer to the source. Being your best friend and an obvious player in this great game, I cannot allow you to burst afire when management bestows you with your answers and guidance. We’ve chained you to the tree of life, bound you to it so that you know that when your meeting is adorned you must return to the dying world with the gift of your life. Get it? You’re a man and you are to soon meet your maker. We don’t want a lawsuit. Clear enough?”
“Crystal.”
“I’ll see you back in the Upper West of York.”
He gave me a hug.
“Keep repeating to yourself, ‘it won’t be like in the movies,’” he says. Nick hugs me again then blindfolds me with a cool, damp veil over my head. I see grey then darkness and warmth.
In the darkness I hear violin music playing. I am a boy again of only 11 years in my grandfather’s home in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The violin turns to a crescendo of Afro-beat, classical jazz. I’m in the wine cellar on a metal-framed bunk bed. There are four bunks that used to sleep my mother Briana, her sister Annie, and her brothers Bruce and Andrew. The house my grandfather built is on a homestead several hours outside St. Louis on a highway through the prairie called Beautiful Downtown Dutchtown. The music fills the big, warm wooden home Gordon Wallace, my maternal grandfather designed and erected. His children are all grown up. Just him and my grandma now. He was an emergency room surgeon for 46 years then retired to the Cloister as he calls this farm to harvest and press wine, tailor 1940’s style men’s suits, cook elaborate meals and read a good many epic books.
I’m very small and very, very far away from New York City, half a continent away. The music is beautiful and now I smell delicious food being cooked upstairs. I climb the steps into the living room with its red brick archways and big glass windows that overlook the valley, lake, vineyards and farm. My grandmother is putting the finishing touches on an apple pie. My grandfather has retired to an easy chair with a volume of some great book. He beckons me to come to his lap. My grandmother turns down the music and says dinner will be ready in five minutes. My grandpa has a weathered grey suit on with a golden pocket watch tucked in his breast pocket. It’s a grey suit with white pinstripes he tailored himself. The man can make just about everything, but not without my grandma’s adjustments and contributions. He’s very old, older than anyone I know. My mom said he founded the Unitarian church of Cape Girardeau, Missouri because they wouldn’t let Blacks in the Protestant one. He is an old-fashioned man, my grandfather, but the traditions he upholds are the universal ones that you don’t improve on much.
My first childhood memory is being with my mother in the strawberry fields near Montauk. The second farthest back is what I’m experiencing now, sitting on my grandpa’s lap, my grandma just about to feed us. He’s reading from a huge blue volume called ‘THE MISERABLE ONES’.
“We only have five minutes, Sebastian,” he says to me as I sit on his lap like a child.
“Let’s finish the story, Grandpa,” I say.
From the kitchen my grandma laughs, “That story you’re reading has no ending, and even if you finish all the pages, Gordon will just invent future exploits.”
“Well, that might be right, but I’ll give the boy some momentary closure.”
“We’ve been reading this book for years, Grandpa,” I say.
“You don’t like the book anymore?” he asks.
“It’s sad. Everybody is poor and no one cares about each other. The man Valjean was imprisoned nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread. The women had to sell her own hair and prostitute herself then dies of sickness before she ever gets to be with the daughter she tries to provide for. Her daughter is adopted and then forced into slavery. Then most of the other characters die needlessly on the barricades of a revolution their people never rise to join. It’s a terribly sad book this old French tale.”
“These miserable ones are not just some characters in an old French story. These wretched are among us. They starve in the streets and bleed in thankless trenches.”
“We’ve been reading this book for nearly four years, Grandpa. How does it end? Do they throw the man in prison after all this time? Does the young rebel bleed to death or get to run off with the girl? Why did they shoot the little boy helping to pick up the bullets? What song are the people singing? You keep jumping around the book. I’m so confused.”
“Slowly, slowly, little Sebastian. Life is not any kind of linear story.”
“Please tell me how it ends. Please?”
The young people take to the barricades with their rebel group because they want liberty and justice for the workers. The National Guard that supports the dictator of France kills all but one of them. Thousands of young idealistic, men and women die because the masses don’t stand behind their rebellion. The barricades came down three days after. They kill the little boy trying to take ammunition from dead National Guard troops. They kill the rebel leader as he waves his flag rallying the students to keep fighting. They shoot down the girl because she loves the rebel leader and is on the barricades because of this love.”
“But one rebel survives. Marius, right? How?”
“Valjean carries him out through the sewers during the fighting.”
“Why?”
“Because Cosette is in love with Marius and Marius with her and Valjean realizes that their love is more important than Marius becoming another dead martyr.”
“What’s a martyr, Grandpa?”
“A person who sacrifices himself so that others can realize some truer freedom and some higher truth.”
“What truth did the students die for?”
“That working people must resist the iron heel trampling upon their liberty.”
“Isn’t that a good thing to die for?”
“Better to live and let a young man know what the thing is called love. In the case of young Marius, there were many, many others who fell that day in his place. He would have died had no Valjean risked everything to save him.”
“Because Valjean loves his adopted daughter, Cosette?”
“Exactly.”
“How does it end though, Grandpa?”
“With the revolutionaries soundly crushed and defeated and a thief stealing silver from the wedding of Marius and Cosette.”
“That’s a little boring. Wasn’t Valjean stealing silver from the priest in the beginning of the book and gets caught? Then the priest lets him keep it rather than send him back to prison.”
“This is the original act of mercy that rehabilitates him and puts him on the path back to G-d.”
“What about the thief at the end of the book? Does Marius pardon him?”
“No, they have him arrested and imprisoned, I think.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“But he’s the villain, Thernardiers who worked Cosette as a child and then betrayed the rebels in the rising.”
“I don’t get the point of this book. Is it about rebels, about love? Is it about God or about forgiveness? We’ve spent so much time reading these people’s stories, but I don’t get the ending at all.”
“Time for dinner, boys,” announces my grandmother.
I climb off my grandpa’s lap and he set the book about the Miserable people down on the nightstand.
“The only greater human purpose than martyrdom is true love and the only thing that catches God’s attention more than a person in love is an act of true redemption.”
“Is that the song the people sing?”
“The real story in this book is of Jean Valjean. It is not enough to change the way you live your life. This does not fully please YEHAVAH. Your G-d is most impressed when not only do you change your past wicked ways, but that you act and deeds to help the broken and the damned.”
“Why did you pick this story, Grandfather. It’s different from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”
“Only because it is epic and further from home.”
I join my grandmother at the table.
‘Are you ready, Sebastian?’ she asks me.
A great flood of white light. Everything is illuminated.
The reason I would suppose I have been chained to the tree of life is because experiencing the management, that is to say to stand in the presence of YEHAVAH’AllahAdonoiElohanuHashem, and that’s only a 32-letter name, is comparable to how a caterpillar perched atop a pebble stone of grass might feel having a cup of tea with a supernova. Like measuring a dimple on one’s cheek then using this length to gauge the distance to the end of the universe. Like the government of Grenada in the Caribbean being asked to represent the solar system at some inter-cosmic clearinghouse. The feeling of something very small juxtaposed with something great of which your cloth is cut.
A great flood of gray light in the intricacies of existence is revealed as a thing of precision and clockwork. I’m floating up and up. For a minute I see the fourth dimensionally. I see the existence of a great X/ Y axis of possibility and coinciding pasts and presents and futures. It’s like a cosmic factory, a storyboard picture showing all things that ever were and could ever be. Along my sides spanning out in an endless corridor are all possible realities playing at once. Up and down are past lives of the souls inhabiting each possible world and rising toward the lives they will live. And then a golden flicker wraps about all these lives and images spiraling this X / Y nexus into a great unified sphere. It’s not the ‘holy spirit’ generating dimension three of this perfect, endless orb as much as it is this beautiful flame interlinking these countless human journeys like a shapeless, perfect fire. I see it. This is God. The interconnectivity of the dimensions of time, possibility and space. It asks me in the form of rose petals fluttering in the wind that I do not grovel or beg. Can’t I see it’s been with me all along and could never bear to leave my side. I can.
Around me in vast, amazing linear order I can see the great game the old man sought to render on that board. I see stories unfolding about me. I glance for a second at the same story retold in infinitely different ways. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but every single time we get to choose. And even the stories with gruesome endings, whose beginnings seemed weighted for failure, these souls get round after round to bring themselves back to where they began in some beautiful place with a gentle breeze at their back. Allah is all about them whispering possibility.
At the side of such power and union, you cry out to the Lord.
“What use have you for me?”
And It needs no words to answer you. Though the gaze you feel upon has no eyes, what you can see feels like the first time you were in love and the feeling you got on the holidays giving your mother a hug. It loves me. Now I know that I can bear some other worse emotions because I have felt good things enough times to justify the fighting in the trenches down below.
A billion blue birds whisk up from the viewing post I stand upon. Up and up. Still up.
“Am I righteous yet? Am I good enough?”
The birds launch me through the pool on the ceiling on the sphere. Through the window in the ceiling underground. There’s a sound like when a thermonuclear weapon goes off and then the smell of lilac.
Drink deep from the waters of existence. I love you and have never left your side.
I am now seeing the fourth dimensionally. I am connecting dots. I am living far more than two lives at once. I am not a Buddhist monk. I am not enlightened.
As Tyler Durden once said, “Putting feathers in your ass doesn’t make you a chicken.”
Being invited to drink from the water of existence does not prevent you from drowning in it.
They say the hardest part about seeing things in the fourth dimension is returning from such a state. You’ve become one with God. You see all that has been, all that will be, and all that could be. You are briefly at peace. You are briefly at mercy. You realize that the greatest power there is wraps around you. True and total love. You worked so hard to fight your way back to this place. You may be catatonic, stumbling through the desert water bankrupt at the foot of JABAL ZIN, but that is only one time, one place. Oh how far you’ve come. In the fourth dimension you’re shed of your humanity, of the human myopic egotism that your one silly life is the center of a vast cosmic circus in which you star. I’m floating now. At any moment now, lift off is achieved. I am as pure as a baby in the womb. I am not my race, not my deeds past nor my future. I have no religion thrust upon me. I am for a short time without any sin.
“Don’t make me leave your side again. I see the terrific folly of our ways. I see what we do to ourselves when left in the darkness too long.”
The waters of existence can be anything. Man can mold them into a thing like a furnace and a hell. I will always send prophets to each world, to every man woman and child from behind those foul enemy lines. Your war is always waged with yourself in trying to believe that you have been forged in the waters of creation. In the furnace of your sweltering ignorance, in the dark of the mind’s cave, I said, ‘Let there be light.’ Who will be my torchbearers? Who will be my dawn breakers, my beloved rebel prophets? I said help was coming to your dying world, Sebastian called Zachariah. You are some help out. You drank of me and grew humble. Now drink again of me and cast your fists in iron like a hero soon to be.
Someone’s holding me as every atom of my body attempts to reject reintegration.
Shake. Shiver.
I want to refuse this torch. I want to lie in the water of eternity just five minutes more. But I can’t. It’s not what was intended for this round. I plummet free falling back towards reality.
Memories, sweet memories return.
“Roxanne I did all this for you to see the good in me.”
There was another battle, once again a giant and inconclusive atrocious draw.
The whale dashed against the gates of the Pale City walls. On a giant wave it washed this blight from the dying world. The whale launched back up to the heavens, toward the moon. In the morning it rested again in the place called Biqu’at Tzin. The Pale horsemen were but dust. The Pale rider was only a delirious boy clutching ripped up holy books, babbling like a mad man hidden in his satchel parchments and plans.
The Pale City lay obliterated. Its gate to this world closed, it lies like a metal boneyard. Only its guts are exposed like a refinery and a phosphate strip mine. The threat is gone.
I remember chasing the clown, firing at it with Mike’s pistols and putting hollow tip explosive holes in its hide. I chased that thing across the JABAL ZIN over into Jordan and into a pit of sharp spears. I rendered off its head; but it can never really die.
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer wrote to me. Michael Kreminzer had done more to train me as a paramedic than anyone else. A horrible feeling, feeling someone strong buckle, being in the shadow of their feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And now you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
She was one of the very few that had ever read deeply into any of my books. Kreminizer was one of the men who trained me as a Paramedic. Now his woman was dead from a cancer.
I was in Al-Brooklyn, U.A.S. The heart of a party and the very soul of New-York-Grad; “the big apple”. The “city that never sleeps” or slept and sleeps no more. In a clear and well-furnished safe house abutting the J-M-Z line. I never want to go above $800.00 for a room at a safe house. Okay, I’ll rephrase that. $800.00 is the cap my budget can allow such a room. I always pay cash; I never sign anything. I always put down one month in advance. The people I must live with are all just as shady as I am.
In terms of a safe house, what you’re basically trying to establish is secrecy and staging. You can’t have anyone in the security apparatus know where it is of course, you need it to be hiding in plain sight.
“Don’t bring your lovers to the safe house. Bring them to a fucking hotel,” is what Brit the German lesbian comrade always tells me.
There are a ton of women in my life, but they all do different very things, chemically electrically speaking. Without them, I would perhaps not have as much supporting strength to carry my beleaguered little projects out into the world in the face of great risk, there would also not be as much love or hope in me. Or as Kurds like to say, “Motivation.”
Broadly, I could say there are women I fuck and who I don’t fuck, love and who I don’t feel that much at all, but there is a lot more to it than that distinction. Friends with benefits competing with lovers who are impossible to win, buttressed by ex-girlfriends who still want to help the cause. I learned about Jinology in Kurdistan, but I’m not sure if it all stuck.
The “Science of Women” (Jinology) cannot be taught in two days and much of what it has to say is just a radical take on feminism. For instance, that for every position of power should be co-chairs; a male and a female running the show together. Women are not special, or complicated. In many ways they are just the same as men. I like listening to them more though, I appreciate the feminine presence.
They all want something different though, but the same. And it’s all built on the foundation of friendship, like any healthy relationship. The way they pity me is different. Very few admire me, well they do but the pity instinct is a greater driver of their behavior. Or the way my work inspires them.
Goldy Andreavna was no longer answering my calls or returning my letters. She had had enough. It sure is cold. And the worst parts of me just want to die. Life is thankless, and I am aware that it is also very cruel to most of my human people. That all makes me want to fight, but I’m sure I’ll just make myself into a new statistic. The train rattles by on the above ground track next to the room I’m renting. It doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. It sounds like living in poverty next to plenty. I worked 80 hours this week. I still can’t manage to sleep.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.” I would have them put that Mighty Mighty Bosstones lyric on my tombstone if I believed they would ever find my body or figure out how to make me die. I lean towards Hooligan in depicting myself, “lower your flighty expectations”. I will not live up to your expectations for me and my agency, me and my powers. I am an easily broken man running from capitalist modernity into dreams, poems and the world beyond American reach.
It was the icy cold night of Purim in the Hebrew year 5777. Super fucking Futuristic. The full moon was huge, and it was brick as shit, it was Friday, everyone was drunk. But that had nothing to do with their silly drunk festival called Purim. The coldness goes right through his sheets, through his comforter, the space heater doesn’t start up right away. It’s a fire trap in here with all the subdivided dry walls. But it’s brick, as the brothers say, no matter how many layers I put over him. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. He knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade tonight, but I was conserving my finances. Hoarding up my comfortable sleeps on his big Queen-sized mattress made in Brooklyn that he’d lashed now three times to the roof of my civic and trafficked about the borough. Moving rooms in safe houses. Working everyday towards my next operation. Nothing is given to you in the movement. You have to earn or take initiative. That can appear attractive to women, sometimes, for a bit. But he’s basically broke.
The safe house isn’t so bad. It has high ceilings. The train is obnoxious, and the neighborhood used to be a war zone. It’s still dirty. There are still robberies every day. But the rent was a square $800, which was reasonable. Things were gentrifying here in the Bed Stuy-Bushwhack area. Still looked and felt like the ghetto Adonaev worked the 37 Bravo unit in. It still looked like the dark place Rahula died in.
That was our first “American Martyr”, shot himself twice in the head. But now there were white hipsters and cafes. It was a cute place except for a couple little things. Like the no drinking rule which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer slash painter greatly.
Her name was Brit Tully, and we did time together in the camps a few years back. She never admitted to being such, but this is what my associate Alan Medved told Adon, and he knew about such things. Brit was a metal worker, glass worker and an introvert. Her square job was retail in a fancy SoHo denim outlet. We co-habited the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house. It was Brit Tully in the small middle room, with my room to the right and Handler Hicks to the left. A fucking nut. We had all these hippy rules none of us followed and we both kind of hated him, he was a shifty fuck.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small-time publisher and writer Handler Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed.
And somewhat muscular and vigorous looking from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good!” He is a total nut who fixates on 9/11 conspiracy theories and has all the tendencies of being a junky off junk. His little boy, when custody allowed as always there every other weekend, looked feeble. Looking malnourished and unhappy to be there, yet chipper. Handler is an endless passive aggressive pain in the ass, but Brit and Sebastian Adonaev need a house for a cash and paper trail, and you get what you pay for in this city.
The handler took me in when the safe house just before it got too hot. Right before I skipped town to Baltimore to get my assignment from the local committee. A safe house falls apart for two main reasons; too much traffic or drama among spies. This place Brooklyn is infested these days with whores, with criminal scum, with sedition and with spies. It’s a good staging area for working in the city with no papers.
Natasha Salzano, which was just her passport name was a cold cunt. Natalia Chicherova, which was her name in Russia, had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused student Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arrears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night.
A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a good fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house, whoever is on the lease is the boss.
Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a master’s in international communications, but who knew.
She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the landlord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it, and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came really, nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything’s gonna be fine!”
I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill me over $735, well, that’s life. I’d kill someone over no less than 5,000 and depend on what they’d done to deserve it.
Comrade roommate-sublessor Handler Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figurehead of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews. I guess he didn’t get the memo that the best way to be hated in America by everyone was to keep talking about 911 conspiracy theories. I know for sure I read that memo in 2001. Moving on, it got so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two-year winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. I had invested in a long heavy Soviet grey coat, and layers of thermal underwear as well as an Ushanka. The big furry hat everyone knows and loves. Fucking around with the contents of my desk I find some letters from Adelina Blazenaya, a lover long gone. She called me some time a year ago on the road to Washington D.C.
And really, I never heard from her again. Like someone with a better, more giving dick inside her or maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with ever me. I have three love letters she wrote me and I carry them around in the black leather party envelope I was issued in Haiti. I try quite hard to break that silence of hers. To get friendship or something more or less than that. No dice ever. Legally speaking, I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment.
I’m rambling about nothing useful. My existential first world concerns my laptop; I’m comparing gear I need to procure. Bags, boots, and devices. I’ll expropriate them with a fabricated credit card. About 2,000 worth of kit. Maybe I’ll even get a new laptop. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Havana to Qamishli, well it would be a damn good haul.
Comrade Handler is out first every night. He sometimes reads in the living room; we wait it out in our rooms. Brit and I are almost pure night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago, I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock. I’d been waking up at 445 am all summer and fall to drive to the ambulance base in the Rockaways. Now I’d wake up at 1 to 2pm and go to bed at 5am to 6am. I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big, long wooden table Handler built. It’s shoddy work like the bunk beds he builds. He’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. But he’s chicken shit. This safe house is ok. Even if we can’t drink here. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great though. Never emotional and always objective, she’s going back to Berlin soon, her casework never comes up and isn’t polite conversation.
We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013. Now the year is 2016. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, something about nothing. Well anyway many years later like six months ago I found it and when Handler subdivided the loft into three rooms I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with my friend Erin Moore who is dark humored and funny and can cook her ass off. But frankly Handler sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such a steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.
I plan to drug Handlers and burn him still alive in his home the night after I leave the states. That’s not because he gets under my skin. It’s because he is working for the Iranians and that’s what Brit and I were paid to do. Burn him alive.
Weird fantasies of murder still pop in and out of my head from time to time, but I’m a medical man in the emergency Pre-hospital health field.
The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is a superhero in their own mind. And you don’t pick up a blonde bimbo hipster in a bar and bring her back there to savagely fuck her in every hole in her body with a belt around her neck. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are shady fucking gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me, have something to perhaps hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a few factors.
Brit is supposedly “German intelligence”. Handler is a well-known brilliant crack pot being paid by the Iranians to enlarge the American propaganda base of Press TV. Also, the undisputed leader of a 16-year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth. Most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is a famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W. Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Handler, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, or pretending to be reading behind the chirpy banter was a killer. An Iranian propaganda asset. And I was going to dope him up with benzo sedatives and literally cook him alive.
I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a total tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, the fucker was so precocious. I don’t mean to talk so much shit; I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
I am not a great person all of the time. I fucked that little hipster like a Ukrainian by the hour. Her face to the wooden floor and my cock up her ass. For something a lot like rape, she took it seven or eight times before I murdered Handlers and jumped country after Passover. Though those acts were perhaps not connected at all, in my mind they sort of connected to my own depravity.
Comrade Handler Hicks is a left-wing zealot; I respect him only for that. Shows some morale compass anyway. And about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a lesser hero of this story I’m about to tell. But I will admit that I didn’t mind the idea of killing him. He was annoying and also human trash. Because the truth is Iran doesn’t have any shortage of agents in this city, and his theories on 9/11 aren’t that well received anywhere. And he’s big faggot dork; so why did a two-person hit team get sent to eventually cook him?
“Well, that’s because loose lips sink ships and traitors get put in the ground.”
I am one to think every other high-powered person living in the darkness is mental, a whore, a killer or a spy. It’s mostly true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy. But I am a paramedic, and it took me a while to reconcile that; helping and saving sometimes, murdering and torturing other times. But a man’s got-to-do what a man’s got to do.
So, this small plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens Border and it’s gonna fly me low down the coast to Cuba. And pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate with rum and pussy after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.
Then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropole to meet my “new attaché” and confidant Ms. Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with for about six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. Thanks to the internet. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhny Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really needs, and we’re gonna be working on a few things. Getting some paperwork and concepts in order before I fly to Erbil, Iraq then infiltrate Syria to reach the Rojava Revolution sometime in the fall. But before I leave my city for a while, perhaps forever. Handler Hicks will die! If not by my hand, then his own. He’s a black hole or vile negative sucking energy.
Polina is a cozy, coy little red head doll. Died of course. She’s overly attentive to my interests and reads my work which is flattering since, honestly most Russian women take all my money and suck on my dick, try to rearrange my wardrobe and ride me for housing and good meals. That’s cheap, but no off. Polina is looking at editing my shortest book, which means she’s manipulating me for someone. She has a little kid, she lives in the fifth biggest Russian city Nizhny Novgorod, looks provincial and bleak. I’ve never been to the Russian Federation. It will not be hostile; well, it might be a little. It’s better when I don’t talk because vaguely, I look like them. That is what people say.
A translation of a book about Haiti into Russian, a collaboration called ‘Endless Walk’ which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven-year-old son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love. Or I’ll use her, and she’ll use me, and when it stops working, we can part as nothing.
But mostly my heart is cold, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is a talented singer, a painter and really too much of an artist for Russia’s third to fifth biggest city. She should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She makes her pittances as a graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is my gibberish for fucking less than nothing. She lives with her kid, her brother and her parents in what looks worse than an American housing project.
I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhny, which according to my research survived the Mongol horde invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.
Then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhny, fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Demhat al-Jabari, my colleague and fellow card-carrying D/U associate, to arrive a week later so we get to Sulaymaniyah, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava Federation. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time; I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance. $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two-year little exile in Boston.
“I’ve been to Russia in a past life or been Russian in a past life either one”, which I hope to see again in my present and future. I spend most of my time in the Russian quarter on the Brooklyn coast. I like everything about them. I can go deep or very, very shallow on it. I have read several dozen pieces of Russian literature and deeply admire the effort of the Soviet Union. I was blowing the coke off a Bulgarian lady friend’s tit the morning after my 33rd birthday. I liked it a lot, but it felt also disgusting and cheap, and I couldn’t bring myself to fuck her, so I paid and left. I guess Comrade Malcolm Veshanti, one of our comrades who stayed up all night with us, I can’t confirm but I think she passed out there at the Harlem brothel, woke up and fucked her.
So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my keyboard, and, Handler was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little notebook to Adelina, send them to her, no response. Svetlana, her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Adelina was there with her watching me type.
Sveta says she had a man now and was surely happy. I hope she’s happy and motherfucker isn’t twice her age. It might seem like I have all these lovers laying around, or like I’m a cold confused whore mongering whatever I am; but no. That’s not true. Generally, I have a free life partner, she bares me and the movement for a year or two, and she tries to save or fix or improve me; get me out of the movement and into medical school; then ultimately breaks it off when I do some time. I’ve spent 2 ½ years of my life inside camps cells and involuntary detention.
I’m not a cheat; I don’t beat women up except when they like that in bed. Which seems like a lot, leading me to question my own sweetness. I paid for everything. I dress well, I’m smart and an artist. I’m a decorated hero paramedic. I’ve written 8 books. I’m just a little bit crazy. And I’m a communist. And I do think those things are fine in Russian Federation, no cause for alarm like here. I did bring not one but two pairs of handcuffs to put Polina in, which is kinky but also tasteless and savage.
Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messages me. His wife, maybe just his longtime girlfriend, has just died, will be cremated in the morning. That’s the way poor people do it. Burying people isn’t cost effective. It can cost over forty grand.
You must understand this man is a tank. A big Russian Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, Palestinians specifically. May or may not be a Mason, definitely some kind of strange Q-ANON enthusiast. has killed men with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan. Trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in? Not for money. No one gets saved on ambulances. It’s all a profiteering machine of mythology and greed.
After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Polina Mazaeva and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer had written to me. A horrible feeling, feeling someone who is very strong buckle, being in the shadow of their horrible feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“Ain Davar.”
“No, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael. I know how much you loved her.”
“Yup. I just came from New Jersey. She will get cremated tomorrow.”
“I remember it was two summers ago. Yulia and I were on the phone, and I was so manic, and we were talking about her illustrating my book.”
“Well. That won’t happen.”
“Not in this life, no.”
“Agree.”
“In the world to come maybe she will be willing. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to get some rest. Good night, buddy.”
I hate it when he calls me “buddy”, but his main chick is dead.
“Good night.”
“I’m leaving the States on April 12th for Adelina’s birthday. I’m sure you prefer to suffer in silence, but if you want to hang out. I’ll drive out your way. She loved you so much.”
“We will see how I feel in the morning. Where are you going this time?” he asks me.
“Cuba. Then Russia. Iraq and then Syria. I’ll leave the night after Passover.”
“Be careful. You were just lucky last time.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got more men and training now. A good team. A real fine outfit.”
“Only reason you’re still alive.”
“I’ll try and get to see you more than the one-year usual. I do not only feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own mask of a face.”
He doesn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precept-ed and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Daria, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the blacklist I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again.
I feel this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly has nothing to live for and does not fear g-d or devils; his self-destruction is frankly inevitable.
You must always be ready for suicide watch dealing with our kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos, whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen. Michael is a hard man. And he killed so many people he had to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I got into. He called me Chechen once, because he could read into me and see many of my past lives.
I felt so sad, like I had not been sad in so long and I thought about Adelina. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?
Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot crazy. We both love Russian women. And he’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.
“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s an endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” the dancehall song says.
Late at night, I join Comrade Brit on the roof for a smoke.
We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was. Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. It was really nice out for mid-March; it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.
“They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.
She was so dark, introverted, and cynical, as well as a lesbian. We only went out together a handful of times, but we smoked on the roof together a lot and both hated the passive aggressive Handler. Brit would always say she’d leave for a lover in German, soon, I always said I’d leave for revolution in Syria, any day now. We were both suffering in the Brooklyn ghetto, in the loft of Handler Hicks the conspiracy theorist and Iranian puppet man. Who we had just been paid to rub out of circulation. But you can’t just kill a man and get away with it in the United States. You must be realistic about that. We weren’t really gonna light him on fire, nobody really paid us to kill him and neither of us were really intelligence agents. We were all just living in relative poverty of conscience and slight material poverty deep in the Brooklyn labor ghetto, where you lived paycheck to paycheck. Where your collar is blue shade.
“It was all just a transit point to death or possible greatness. But a pointless death is more likely to come first and make the second proposition meaningless. What use is greatness when you cannot see the results of it?”
“You sure make a lot of dumb American movie like inner monologues when you smoke,” says Brit the German spy.
Dedicated and shared exclusively to Ms. Komrade Elena Anatolievna Komarova
Written by: Walter Sebastian Adler
Every time we kiss it takes me out of this place!
And there will be more time for kisses!
Hold me fast and take my tongue from me as well as all my new found essence.
Absorb for me and let me then carry you further than ever before.
When man is submerged in the flood water of his longing,
When the rapids break the legs below him,
Voluptuous folds of over powered temptations yielding bed sheet utterances, belonging.
The desire to muster his best qualities,
His full works brought to bear for that singular woman thrust before him.
As my rough parts are made a puppy faced rabbit!
And my soul into a naked exposure,
Your hands, hips lips a flush of all endless ways to bring the winter to better closure.
And then tight ripped verse.
To chainsaw the rough cut marble of composition, to bash apart the inadequacy of poor form which might hint that all done for you was not unique.
Depart.
Komarade Komarova! You sometimes amaze me how much.
Such, I shall tell you what rights mean to me, dare we be glutted, yet so cold in Babylon make plain your wishes, I will get us free!
I see you not judging, or hiding well judgments!
From my past escapades or the demons in me!
Not judging we, I am beyond aleaved that we is now two and has been cleaved down from three.
Yet, wet lips still spout insurrection.
They bite the tongue, I bite my tongue in only one language. And lips which once from words but strike keys into bloody history, misconception.
See the melee!
See the thrill of “to us impending victory”
She asks:
“How many of your poems sound close to same? The want of affection of a daughter from Russia, the toll of such women, the toll of your struggle, the playing too hard of no rules at the game!”
She says:
“Take a short blade and cut the warble off the words, trim the American vernacular down to half the size.
Surmise, drop vanity, your chornay like use of countless profanity. Make again proud form, verse you rehearse until ere ready to perform.”
“Make language a beautiful thing!”
No instrument to bludgeon about thy demons an enemy’s down with the Winter and up with future, the coming of Spring!”
“And who,” she asks “art thou biggest enemy? Thyself-Thyself Comrade, squandering don’t you dare, stare, look in the mirror see the source of past troubles, he’s laughing at you or crying at you! Comrade take care.”
“Thyself if so untrue is pleasing to no one, not one single no one, not even the darkness in you,” she declare.
I respond; “Kamrade Komarova, my sweet Elena I will moan every moment touching you and beside you render myself a smiling man with a past of no great countenance, you’re not like other woman we can’t be labeled by our continents!”
“Our consonants!”
“Most wanton. Touching you or looking through!”
“I long every day for your touch!”
She sometimes amazed me how much!
Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.
Scheming into dreaming, another bridge called Karlov!? I love to dream beside you, separated by nothing but desire, but happy always for the dreaming we do.
The duct tape that when I lived impoverished I used to patch my dressing shoe.
Take that blade that you were offered,
Cast that thing aside!
Seize control that vessel, bleed it red or bleed it blue.
What mean that Haitian flag to you?
“Talk of love or talk of sin or talk of rights;
You are too happy now to die before winter has finished setting in.”
I want nothing more or train robs, nothing more of winless fights.
“I want us to dream of ways to win!”
It’s all or nothing motherfucker! She imitates; “For a Baha’I Russian Haitian fighting Irish you sure still like to make your dradel spin.
“What’s now not haunting you ought make your words more beautiful,” she says, “No more Victor Gin.”
“And are not small beautiful moments, dreams and things, smells and tastes and landscapes also dangerous to make tunes and tomes too?” she asks.
“Are not sad barricade ballets just belligerencies to thine enemy self?”
“Do not invite fire into your home, the Victory Gin is for self-murdering men, who don’t know how to begin the sniff of a win. Onto the shelf.”
“Your guns and your bullets your lies and worthless desires of dueling with devils!
“DREAM CORRRECT! You command my respect, your humor in nightly visitations to Burma to Paris to Trinidad; you call that all love, your love is forever suspect!”
When I see the smile of Komrade Komarova, I know her as a plural woman.
I profess her my longing and I take her commands.
A woman who like I is disconnected from aspects of realty so she might better love the place where she lands.
A pause again, cheers to now and cheers to never again; might never loving trysts rip out hearts asunder, might never ideals take needless lives, cost rivers red of blood, denying life all grace or wonder.
I cheers to total truthfulness, a pause’ I’LL SEE YOU; WHEN?
Again and Again and Again.
I speak freely before you, I dare.
Until fireworks over Bagan’s skies are but a symphony of promises kept to me and you, and Blood red balloons of the Banshee insurrection not a spark compare.
She asks:
“What for then comrade! When you kiss my lips and write your poems on the softness of my stare; what is you’ve set yourself to do?”
“If you promise we, or the entire Breuklyn Soviet our liberation true then mark my words your words will return to stab a blade in you, and dash yourself and burn apart for the emptiness of the promises you sew.”
My hand overtakes her finger, her hand on the clutch.
She sometimes amazed me how much!
Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.
How much she knew my heart and yearned to know the plots of my soul. And perhaps I could amaze her too, not with all the adventures to come or the tall orders of deeds I had promised her and the world I could do,
I say.
“Just remain by my side and all of the happy you put on to me, I’ll reflect it actions right back on to you.”
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 and 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 was to spend 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 a 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 on 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.”
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.
SCENE (III) — JERUSALEM / YERUSHALAIIM / AL QUDS — STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001 CE
In a land soaked in history and under the unblinking eye of total surveillance, rebellion cannot scream. It must whisper. Ha Irgun, an underground movement born in the urban sprawl of Be’er Sheva, grows like cracks in the wall—impossible to see until the whole foundation trembles. Phones are tapped. Emails read. But handwritten notes, strange symbols painted on walls, quiet meetings in basements—these leave no fingerprints.
Led by youth too tired to wait for freedom, the movement spreads fast. Judah Command in the desert, where punk kids and street fighters train with M1 rifles. Manasseh Command in Tel Aviv, filled with Black Israelites and expats, base of operations in a crumbling loft and a converted nightclub. Asher Command in Haifa, built by Arab Christian youth and disillusioned art students.
In Jerusalem, there is only silence.
Emma, a revolutionary hardened by loss, walks alongside Zachariah Artstein, her mentor, a burnt-out dreamer haunted by ideology and love. Together, they attempt the impossible: spark a cell in the holiest, most militarized city in the region.
Their journey is built on quiet acts. A food basket on a doorstep. A stranger with a whisper. A child trained in Krav Maga in a park once ruled by junkies. The Bedouin School House—once overrun with addicts—now serves as their headquarters, swept clean by the young and the forgotten. Girls with tattoos. Thirteen-year-old orphans. Soldiers of the shadows.
On August 9th, Zach and Emma return to Jerusalem. Third attempt. They stop at Mike’s Place for lunch. They talk about organizing. About art. About exhaustion.
Then—boom.
Just up the street, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonates inside a pizza shop—Sbarro—a place that still served pepperoni. Dust, blood, fire. Screams. Panic. Then a second explosion—first responders taken with it. Seven children die. Over 130 wounded. Hamas and Islamic Jihad take credit within the hour.
Zach and Emma sit frozen. Bones vibrating from the blast. Emma wants to help, but they’re not medics. They’re insurgents. And the rules are different now.
In the cab ride back to Tel Aviv, Zach finally mutters: “I ain’t gonna be caught dead in that city again.”
But they both know the truth. They’ll return. They have to. No one else will bring the fight to Jerusalem.
Because revolutions aren’t born in speeches. They are born in smoke. In whispers. In terrible silence after the blast.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 