The Final Showdown

He saw that Igor was standing with James Farragut, Marcus Griffith and the men Daniel had seen in the mountains. Holding their batons high, they advanced on him with saddened frustration. Dmitri ran through his living room and through the back door and ran until he arrived at a quieter, more deserted part of town.

When Dmitri turned the corner of an alleyway, he saw Peter bruised and beaten and limping as Daniel’s friends chased him. Feeling torn about what to do, Dmitri stood paralyzed for a few moments and then ran past them. When he left the alley, he saw Daniel and several other federal officers running toward him. Turning around, Dmitri saw them enter the alleyway, and he immediately became curious about what would ensue. As the officers pulled off Peter’s attackers, Peter pulled a gun from his pocket that James had lent him. His seemingly plasticized and eerily neutral expression was gone entirely, contorted in anguish and struggle, as he shot at the federal officers multiple times, until Daniel shot him in the chest. After having watched this spectacle with gregarious sensitivity, a looming seriousness that tranquilized their nerves, Daniel’s friends ran off as the officers picked up Peter’s body. His wizened, triangular face that had died in fear and malice, was now like a rotting reptile.

Dmitri speechlessly hurried off and wondered what feats he might accomplish to uncover these mysteries. Since he was no longer plagued with this fiend, he felt that all could be restored in years instead of centuries. The lizard had been removed from his cage of pampered thoughts and hungers and banished to a realm elsewhere, in which the muses could attend to him. Dmitri wished that he could have watched him ascend, out of a dutiful sense of compassion that revolted his other sensibilities, the kinds that would have brought him to suicide within hours prior. But what would come of his brother? There was a profuse tendency among so many of these men, bred of philosophy, to be less deterred by the possibility of punishment, since they saw themselves as martyrs who persisted while all odds were against them. Dmitri began glancing around him and wondering whether Igor would show, but he didn’t see him. Luckily, the city had become far mellower and he could no longer hear any commotion. A small part of him that entertained magical thinking, proposed the likelihood that a collective consciousness had been hit so strongly by Peter’s passing that troubles everywhere ceased unanimously. He felt that a chapter had to end on an unrealistic note, which brought the meaning in its destiny full circle.

Dmitri noticed two plastic snowman statues outside one of the antique shops, where a Russian Blue cat wandered around and between them, licking the snow while looking at him. An old bearded man emerged from the shop and carried him inside, slamming the door in irritation as Dmitri continued walking. Symptoms of his lingering illness returned, and he vomited into the gray and white slush on the ground. He sat down on a bench and waited for his slight dizziness to stop, feeling such enough vigor to view the changes that surrounded him. The flurry of snow began as a supernal stasis his body, though he hallucinated shades of pink that flickered in clouds and windows. He nervously rocked back and forth as pedestrians moved away from him, searching for other benches.

When Dmitri heard the clock tower, he snapped back into reality, got up and struggled through the Christmas shoppers, hoping he wouldn’t see any clues of his nemeses: pasty flesh and pedant’s clothing. But was there was peace instead, which he somehow felt was undeserved for his pursuits. He was shameful about the virtuous things he had done. Igor’s fragileness cried for a likeminded sympathy, in spite of the evils it allowed. It leaned his selfish martyrdom on powerlessness, lending his unoccupied hands to anyone who passed him. Dmitri felt tempted to acquiesce to his desires, since he hoped so fervently for him to survive. He didn’t want to find him bludgeoned or stabbed somewhere before he reached his mansion. To calm himself, he went inside a bookstore and saw his father sitting with his friends, in a coffee shop near the bestselling novels. When he tried to say hello nothing came out, and he stood there transfixed and torn between staying and departing. He then went downstairs to see if there was any classic poetry to inspire him, but was only met with boring contemporary books about personal issues he took no interest in: marriage, relationships and drug addictions. They mimicked the slogans and inner narratives of each-other and brought him nothing more than tedium and rage. He was certain that there was something special and exhilarating waiting somewhere, especially in the climate woven by his own intelligentsia, the young rebels who had endured so much and were making their voices known.

Dmitri eventually succumbed and picked up a banal psychological thriller novel, which had a caricature of the red-haired nymph on its cover, resting on a Lilypad with a lollipop in her mouth. He dozed off as his delirium sometimes returned, and at one point he hurried to the bathroom. But the sickness ended by the time he reached the door, and he returned to his chair. The atmosphere became thick with private gossip and surprise, while parents held onto their children protectively. Katya then approached him, trying to stifle her tears.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked him.

Dmitri looked at her affirmatively, while his words failed to emerge.

As Dmitri and Katya walked home together, their thoughts seemed nearly aligned with each-other, with a sliver of distinction between them. They sometimes looked at each-other as if they were about to speak, with wise and furtive expressions that suggested mutual feelings. When they passed the snowman statues, they saw a light-brown rabbit running around with the cat while carolers sang outside the church, first in the minor and then in the major key. Meanwhile, Igor alternated between walking and running haphazardly through the streets, having heard from James about what had happened to his mentor, the essence of all he had desired and experienced. He suddenly wished to copycat Dmitri’s tactics, and hide in marriage and romance as a way to be comforted like a small boy who needed nurturing affection. The heartlessness of his escape would be what most frauds dreamt of, the space between action and inaction out of which disaster was avoided, and nothing worthy was ever attained.

         Igor wrung his hands as he limped through the narrow alley, having been shot in the leg by a protestor who was on neither the side of the mystics or Griffith Alliance. He was a depraved anomaly whose vicious and moonstruck expression suggested that he was from the fringes of this town and had been made from the uneducated culture of the poor whom the elites had exploited. Igor saw his own reflection in a puddle of melted ice, when he ascended into the animated, particularly metropolitan part of Ocean City. He was out of the muck he had left behind, in the worthless community he had owned for his own pleasure and spat out when academia had fully corrupted him, the rotting gold at the rainbow’s end at which his blood had run completely cold, without even traces of mercy and contentment. The mirror of the water was living proof, at which he turned away and proceeded, thinking back to when Daniel conceded that Igor reminded him of his father, even though he regularly kept these matters to himself. Something diabolical emerged when he emulated people of older generations, since its conformism was worsened by his own deranged tendencies.

         Igor saw one of the nymphs standing at the pond in front of the distant mountains, holding the ghost of one of the young boys who Peter had killed in prison. His golden blond hair haunted the freshness of his features that had somehow been rejuvenated in the hereafter, as he looked up at her in a kind of embraced helplessness that was enchanted by her immovable care.

Chapter Fifteen

         Two muses lay in the lemon grove while everyone else retired their day. One caressed the other’s hair as her semi-wakefulness made all seem ever more pleasant. Though this race of women always pulsed with epiphany, Griffith Alliance somehow believed that they did not have souls. A fox trotted through the sand toward them, having invaded their lush fortress with eager prods and awful inhalations, becoming raspier as the residual hallucinogenic toxins in the sea affected his lungs. It had been months after Daniel’s victory, and the mangos and pears dangling in the maritime climate wore patches of oozing nectar, as a large cavern spewed codfish from below the waves. Various pages from Peter Rawson’s diary that Christina had torn and tossed in rage two days ago, were scattered on the shore of oak trees and raspberry bushes, some slipping into the waves.

On the page drifting out the furthest, it said, Tonight, I felt like I could write out what was going on in me, as a way to take a step back from myself, and study it. Yet I feel like I can finally get this off my chest, is through some form of human contact, to keep my mind centered and rational, to keep it from veering off on horrible tangents. I’m beginning to realize that this would be impossible, since I’m not built for such a task. My objectivity continues to decrease as my joy increases, since my will power is incompatible with my inner life. Ha! Here I must stop myself because I am indulging. Now, I’ll be clear and honest with myself and you: I shut you out for a while, and refused to talk to you because you reminded me of what I was incapable of, the empathy, strength, decisiveness and will that I have suffered to keep up, but then I fail because of my own callousness. Even though I am sitting in prison, and have everything taken away from me, I feel the constant urge to take back the power I used to have, as if that’s possible. I want to rejoin society and dominate it again, with the help of my friends who destroyed my sense of self, and rebuilt it again in a new form. I became more and more desensitized from others. But I disguised this with the pretense of wisdom and intelligence, and I wished that I could just shut out the rest of the world, without the need for anyone else. I could just turn to people whenever I felt they were necessary, but otherwise, they meant nothing.

Meanwhile, the androgynous beings ran along the seabed with the finest agility, while smoke and dust rose in mushroom clouds that covered schools of salmon, as corpses were swept and toppled in the tides. These were the entities who had not been recruited into Griffith’s organization, and who instead remained among the wilderness and unwatched corners of society. As the beings began swimming to the surface, they saw a gigantic lotus peering down at them from the waves, with three eyes on each of its fleshy petals. This was a less developed manifestation of their species, whom the starlit water had given the air of an infernal sentry. In a network near one of the subaquatic, underground bases, medical personnel were attending to Scott, Andrew’s sixteen-year-old brother whose forehead was hooked up to a touch-sensitive machine. The kind of abdominal treatment he required was far more intricate than Dmitri and Daniel put together, since it involved injecting a blue liquid intravenously given the far more pervasive, respiratory impacts of his illness. This substance contained multitudes of microscopic devices in the forms of clear and transparent, rubber cells, responsible for fertility and liver function. The reproductive organs were in far greater danger than in most cases.

         In addition, the screen with wires attached to his forehead contained channels with energy emitted from the nearby facilities. One of the doctors, a girl with dark auburn hair and smooth skin, felt for any more abdominal lesions as the sea’s banging echoes began reverberating off the walls. He was then attacked by a vision that repeated his prison ordeal, in which Adam Rowe kept him strapped to a bed with ulcerous wounds forming within his stomach. Adam looked down at him as if he was tampering with Nature, in an experiment that took its course through inevitable causes that were partially outside his volition. Having been one Maxim’s patients and accustomed to the psychiatric sphere, Scott could read the difference between the temporary suspension of emotion and utter foreignness to it. He was undoubtedly witnessing the latter.

         “So why did you run away?” Adam asked.

         “W-What do you mean?”

         “I mean, from yourself. You had all these years ahead of you but sold yourself short by chasing happiness, instead of thinking about me or anybody else. That’s why you don’t know who you are. You let it all slip away, like I warned.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Yes, I do. You’re a criminal, a thief and a delinquent because—”

“I’m not prejudiced! I just want what everybody else wants.”

Scott grimaced and kicked as he ground his teeth.

“That’s what you keep telling yourself, and that’s what keeps you planted here.”

Scott struggled and begged with a kind of suffering that, at the time of the actual experience, Adam felt he had never seen, since it was pure desire and hopelessness instead of the whining and pleas of those whose abstractions kept them lying in a bed of laurels. What he had discovered more acutely than his fellow man, was that wealth enabled these meditations more than poverty.

After Scott’s vision ceased, the medical procedure was complete and he was released without any inquiries about erratic or spasmodic behavior. He had somehow managed to keep his delusions in utter privacy, a skill he felt was incongruous to their stark barrage of sensations, as he departed to the subway on his way to his appointment with Dr. Maxim Sokolov. When he arrived at his office, books were misshapenly placed on the shelf and a stuffed, taxonomic sparrow was lying on its side on Dr. Sokolov’s desk. Two security guards were standing at the back of the room, whom Scott hadn’t noticed at first. They were looking through smudged glasses at the sterile abyss to which this comedy had devolved. A stuffed goat head was hung above the vent in this den of habit and misery, and there was Dr. Sokolov seemed so lost in thought that he didn’t greet him. Instead, he launched into the matters he had wished to tell him all week, “The cult has disappeared, Scott. We have no idea where they’ve gone, and I don’t know how they are going to be prosecuted. I wish I could serve you and your family some justice, but this is starting to be out of my jurisdiction. I feel they’ve pulled a stunt that is beyond my grasp, and I am digging for a solution. . .”

“We should all just take a swig of cyanide now, and then we won’t have to worry about this any longer,” said Scott angrily. “Everybody! Every single one of us in the United States!”

“No, we’re going to handle things like the people we know we are, not that those nobodies who came before this whole movement got started,” said Maxim.

“What movement?”

“You should know by now how much my son’s mysticism has changed everything.”

Scott snorted. “I don’t see that at all. It seems like we’ve just got more of what I knew was gonna happen, but nobody listened to me. I’m tired! I don’t care about my life anymore! I’m done!” He got up and walked out of the office, as Maxim called for him.

As Scott made his way to the bar lounge, Daniel was celebrating his triumph there already, having laid his responsibilities to rest after they had delayed this anticipated ceremony, during which all his beloved people could unite in his boasts and quips that resurrected the gems from his former personality.

“It was priceless!” he exclaimed to Dmitri. “I felt like I died with him for a moment, as if I was dragging him away kicking and screaming. Except I knew I had something to return to, and nothing was really over.”

“I’ve had that feeling before,” said Dmitri. “That explains almost thirty years’ worth of my dreams.”

Daniel was surprised at Dmitri’s taciturn responses throughout the party, since he believed he would be more joyous and engaged in this historically monumental event. Several of the female mystics wore pale-blue makeup as they danced to the exotic, Armenian classical music.

“I wished I had been more with-it all along,” said Daniel. I feel like I had to wait until a disaster for me to take action. But I was too caught up in being skeptical about everything, and also too lazy to get involved. Now I got that garbage out of my system, I can lay low for a while and take stock of what’s going on, without getting in my own way.”

Staring into space, Dmitri said, “I was thinking . . . when I look back at Peter Rawson in my head, I just see a crazy old man raving in the streets. When he was alive, I was so obsessed with every twisted thing he said or did that I was like a dog jumping and barking at random shadows, without seeing the whole picture. I often wonder what I would see if he showed up at my doorstep now. I might laugh uncontrollably. I don’t know whether I’d be more or less frightened.”

Gulping down more of his beer, Daniel scanned the crowd for Dmitri’s models. The boats were moored in as European fans of Dmitri came to see his latest work, while the Russian Blue cat entered the garden from the harbor front. Rose’s gaping mouth was sometimes seen in the watery mirror of the sky, with her hair blowing in her shaded and pupil-less eyes. She was sometimes confused with a woman who swam below the surface, as if there was something unanimous and special in these appearances.

“I want to leave the country soon though,” said Daniel. “That’s what Miriam always talks about, and I guess I should take her word for it. I think there’s something in store for me out there, which is a lot better. I never thought I really belonged here in America. Yet I hated you and your values so much. You had that cultural touch of those places even after you moved away from them.”

“I wish more people thought that about me,” said Dmitri sourly, and walked away into the zenith of obsession.

Chapter Sixteen

         Griffith Alliance, in the midst of their travel into the ocean’s depths, repeatedly saw sloth-like and wretched things peeping out from small holes in the rocky masses of coral, giving the sensation that a clandestine destiny was stalking them from behind and ahead. Rose’s ghost frolicked among them miles away, as wispy configuration with legs that became more evident in motion. Peter Rawson’s spirit also walked in their midst, but he was unable to see them given the knots of self-serving reluctance that were disappearing in tiny stages of salvation. The greenery was a voice of the earliest era, in which masses of energy and psyche governed the primeval realms. Reconciliation and forgiveness hung in a place from which these feelings were so ancient that their causes couldn’t be traced, yet they made a slew of creators and followers.

It was 2 am and the submarine had been changed to self-automation, while the men of the new age hung around in their cubicles that were spread throughout the vast rooms and offices. A jar of smiley-faced, spherical candies of multiple colors was on Griffith’s desk as he sat with his cheek against his fist, writing reports of various events that had recently taken place, including the protests and Peter Rawson’s murder. As Adam Rowe slept in his chair near him, a fly buzzed around his neck and then landed on his forehead, but he didn’t even flinch or make the slightest movements. A few minutes later, his head tilted back and his mouth became somewhat ajar, revealing some of his seemingly false, perfectly blanched teeth.

         The organization had already formulated their escape and were heading to a subterranean network in St. Petersburg where some of Maxim’s rivals were collaborating with trying to erase his psychiatric theories from literature, mostly involving his efforts to stop the ostentatious and deviously fascistic revolution that Griffith was stirring up. Maxim believed that many of the victims of he treated were gravitating toward it, instead of their aversion intensifying or imploding like they had during the year Dmitri was born. These rivals were priests and aristocrats who had laid the foundations for the cult’s paradigm, though they never directly participated in it since there were too many differences that set them apart, as they wished to avoid cross-contamination of lifestyles. These men who resided in St. Petersburg were not keen on self-soothing asceticism that drank from the breasts of ease and security, justifying means with exceptional ends. Honest barbarism was their main course of action, though they admired the elements of liberalism in the organization’s practices. Griffith Alliance planned to work in a society among their network, where they knew they couldn’t be found since this place was unheard of and was embedded in the deepest tunnels on the planet.

         As James Farragut drank his small, decaffeinated cup of coffee in his office on the top floor, he was in the mood to impress his colleagues with his longwinded drivel, beginning with, “I think this is the place where we were always meant to be. Even if we’re not on the same page with those people about everything, we’re certainly a step ahead of the game and we can be of tremendous assistance to them. I want to show them that underneath our harsh tactics, we have the softness of poets and artists who have been treated as these kinds of groups often have by history. We’ve been thrown against the wall so many times that we’ve become numb about its effects, and we’ve forgotten ourselves.” James looked outside the window and into the watery landscape around them. He pointed to the dryads silhouetted in the swaying forestry, and said, “By destroying their world, we’re setting a firm standard, and making a bold statement to ensure human beings don’t become tempted and distracted.”

“You’ve got that right,” said Dr. Morrison. “I’m tired of the United States. I’m glad we’ve found something so much more fulfilling. I think that we’ll have better luck from now on.”

James got up, concluding with, “It’s time for me to go to bed and mull this over, since we don’t have much time to clean up this mess. I’m pretty confident no one will find us, but I have to be extra cautious.”

They said goodnight and he departed almost soundlessly.

         As Adrian lay in bed with his wife after getting back from the lounge, he was certain that the country’s troubles had come to an end. Judge Donovan, who had given Peter such a light sentence a while ago, had been fired and replaced with one of Maxim’s colleagues, Ronald Voight, who had been on close call for the dramatic changes that had avalanched, and he was ready to take on these thugs. But Adrian also wondered why the process had suddenly become so delayed, since like Daniel and Dmitri, he hadn’t yet heard of Griffith Alliance’s disappearance. He had just heard that the law was taking these matters far more seriously than they ever had. Their Achilles Heel had been punctured with a reverse counterculture, and he wished he had been there to see Peter’s bloody demise. Katya’s hand on his neck almost made no impression on his petrified and ecstatic fantasies, in which Peter’s cries were drowned out by Adrian’s overstressed perception. Even when Katya tried to get his attention, he turned over on his to keep pursuing these horrors repeatedly as he felt that this might keep him from fulfilling his worst desires in reality. Though he knew he would never harm any innocent people, he still felt that his ambitions could become more misdirected than he wanted if didn’t keep them in check.

         “Adrian, what’s wrong?” Katya asked.

         “I’m fine. I’m just working some stuff out.”

         “That’s your default. You always say that. I’m never sure whether you’re telling the truth.”

         “Yes, I am.”

         “Well, how about you just talk to me about what’s going on with you. Let me in on everything. You’ve been mute all week. You’re driving me crazy.”

         “I feel like Dmitri did when he tried to steal that book from the monastery when he was a kid. I’m just as out-of-control as I was when I was his age.”

         “What makes you say that?”

         “I dunno.” Adrian sighed with frustrated laziness. “I guess I’m just recovering from all this mayhem that’s been happening. Maybe I’m losing it.”

         “I’m sure you’re fine,” she said while stroking his hair. “You just need to get some perspective on things, that’s all. You just need to be able to take a step back, like Dmitri did to get out of the mess he was in.”

Adrian fell asleep as she was talking, which she realized a few moments later. She turned off the light and listened to the ocean where the nomads persisted in their adventures and enlivened the values of folklore through their song and music that rejected civilization’s regressions. Hunger and thirst were not known in this place outside the needs of the flesh.

Chapter Seventeen

In Dmitri’s last appointment that marked the final stage of his recovery, he was instructed to lie inside a small room as the x ray searched for anything left, and Dr. Abigail sat beside him. Nothing was found so far, as Dmitri watched the blue and transparent images flash across the ceiling. The x ray sometimes magnified microscopic activity where the bodies of various nanotechnological entities swam about in his blood stream, colorless and elastic and featureless with their humanoid bodies twisting and contorting in their efforts. There came a time in this process when Dr. Abigail was a mere mask of beauty, without love, hate or even indifference visible in her expression, since focus and diligence became her. She intimidated him in the way he often desired, the times when she was without self-awareness or the social instinct to impress or convince. She was herself only, leaving a photographic shell of persistence.

It was proven by the end of that has entirely cured, at which he looked at her in amazement and disbelief. He felt that this had come too soon, since the delusions of his abused history still claimed that he had to surpass muck, fire and water to prove himself eligible for what everyone else had without question. Why did he feel he had missed a step, and was going to fall through a crack from which he might never return? Nonetheless, in spite of this wasteful fretting, he was elated about this breakthrough and he thanked her for all her assistance. He left his doubts at the door of this facility, expecting their imprints to be bound here with the same inanity as Peter. Imagining him in his absence brought an obvious picture to all else, which followed in his crimson footsteps.

But when Dmitri left, he found his brother lying on the sidewalk across the street, bloodied and battered with automatonlike vengeance behind the sun shining on his spectacles. He was motionless as Dmitri ran over to him and checked his heartbeat and pulse, discovering that he was dead. Panting, Dmitri slowly came to the conclusion that he had been killed by protestors, as several people gathered around them and police got out of their cars.

“What happened?! How did this . . . no . . . I knew this wouldn’t . . .”

Dmitri’s conclusions were confirmed by several hysterical pedestrians who had been subjected to these catastrophes for the two years.

“I thought that these people had been brought to justice!” Dmitri screamed as his voice faltered in mournful fury. “I thought it was over! What was my brother doing out here, walking around as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed?!”

         “Nothing has,” one of the officers said as they examined the body. “The cult has disappeared! No one knows where they’ve gone, and it looks like he stayed behind for reasons we don’t know. We’ve gotten a lot of reports of him walking around this neighborhood for days, talking to himself and seemingly having gone without any sleep. He was hassling people on the subway and getting into fights, and we’ve had to keep an eye on him.”

         Dmitri hyperventilated as he changed from pity and devastation to venom toward Igor, and he kicked the body that once housed this ungrateful coward. Without being able to hold back, he ran off and left everyone else to handle what was left, and without even a plan of where he was headed. The dial of his selfhood had been muted to total surrender and incapacity, as if he might become an invalid at any moment, coveting and hitting and lurking as Igor did before his elimination. Dmitri was beyond wanting sympathy or affection at any point in the future, since these things would from now on be insults to his mistrustful retirement, expressions of things that he thought were useless customs meant for show. He wanted to give up his career and provide no care or thought to anyone, feeling that he needed more self-attention than he ever allowed himself, a goal that was sealed when he departed into the mountains, planning to return to town at dusk. The chorus of women awaited him ahead, but he knowingly deviated this path.

Chapter Eighteen

The muses gathered with sultry poise in the cemetery, as the gray and jaundiced souls of the deceased stood behind them in infamy that they began to savor in its endless allure, attracting others only to be repelled in surprise and indignation. The sloth-like men had scars across their faces, and bloodshot eyes that seemed to glow when peeping through their famished skin. In a state between this world and the next, one of the muses lay on the river’s surface, looking into it as a deer ran by her. As dawn arrived, her hair emitted an aroma of diverse layers, which even these connoisseurs of natural art were unfamiliar with. Rose sometimes playfully sat on her back and imitated the expressions of the stern sentries who paced around nearby, checking for any obnoxious histrionics among the louts who saw this place as a joke to be spat upon. Solemnity to them was what the crucifix was to the Devil. To the drunkards, Rose’s ghost may have been nothing more than these matters, in spite of her disruption of the unremarkable, and her heresy against continuity.

A rainbow refracted from her phosphorescent hair, as she hopped along the large rocks and the women discussed what issues had come about recently.

“I think this is given us clear enough of a message,” said the youngest as she stood near Rose, who became respectfully militant and focused on their discourse. “Dmitri’s brother was capable of something that I didn’t know was possible for people of such low caliber, the ability to see his own ignorance. . . even though that never really motivated him to do anything differently. But now, everything’s fallen apart. I see Igor continuing to do what he did in his last days. The difference is that here no lies are believed, and he can’t pull the kinds of stunts he did when he was alive.”

“I am conflicted,” another woman said. “I don’t know whether rectifying these circumstances requires stepping out of people’s affairs more often, since whenever we are seen we’re painted with whatever superstitions or expedient definitions that the masses want to give us. At least if we lead the course of things inconspicuously, we’ll cater to their comforts far more easily. It’s time we stop putting ourselves on display, since that allows us to either be seen as savages or gods. Those things do not even seem that different from each other when examined very closely, which is why I want to get beyond those judgments. I want to be just as free as anyone else.”

“I think that is the best course of action,” said the youngest. “We don’t have any other choice. We must proceed stealthily.”

The women began walking toward the valley.

“I feel that this is the cleverest thing we have attempted,” she continued. “We can exist undisturbed, which would be the most peculiar concept for Griffith’s men who believe that suffering is the way to perfection. We can safely say that their struggles are not going to define or affect us.”

         They felt the mossy stones beneath their feet change to dirt and concrete, as they advanced on their new oasis. An owl hooted as it retreated to its nest and the mist was heavy against their supple bodies. Their garments were caught on the branches of bushes where bleeding white berries oozed with nameless intoxicants. The sun had risen, and Daniel was visible in the distance, strolling about with cheerful air of unsophistication.

The women looked back twice to see if any affirmation might appear in this wilderness, some shrill sound, mark or sign that would seal their decision. But they were instead rejected by the gloomy glances of the deceased, who made their way to the city while knowing they would never be seen.

Chapter Nineteen

After Griffith Alliance arrived at the station that intersected with the passageways, Marcus Griffith looked sadly and awkwardly at the rusty, eroded stone walls around him, giggling to himself. These walls reminded him of the times when he kept Dmitri in solitary confinement, suspecting him of being a closet profligate who would have perished without his guidance. A glass sphere floated on the surface of the deep basin, from which the submarines emerged and parked in the various lots that led into the network. Inside the center of the sphere was a thermometer in the form of blue light, in case of chemically induced temperature changes that sometimes occurred, alerting the facilities to danger. Nurses and doctors curiously glanced through windows at this gang of strangers, who seemed to have walked out of some older time, a chic underworld that had dwindled away. Their immodesty was comparable to an uninvited guest, ready to challenge a witless host with jabs and tricks.

When Griffith Alliance entered the subterranean city, Valeria, one of their nine-year-old victims, tugged on James’ arm with a kind of tedium in her implorations, as if her plateaued and unexpressed misery was trying to communicate to itself, and show its presence to others.

“Just take it easy,” said James sheepishly. “Just leave the hard work to us. No more wild goose chases this week, alright? We’ve dealt with enough from your family, and we’re gonna put that behind us. You’re not one of them. You deserve a lot better.”

“I wanna go home!”

“Cut it out now! You wanna embarrass me in front of all these people?! Come on!”

“I thought you were gonna help me! That’s what you said, remember!”

“Shut up! I’m warning you!” James shouted, raising his fist as if he was about to punch her, while they entered the city. “When Peter and I consummated our love for you, that was a rebirth, a way to get you grounded for everything else. If you can’t accept that, you’re a lost cause, trust me. There’ll be nothing else for me to say.”

         “I’m not ready!”

         “Yes, you are! Stop telling yourself that!”

         The first level of the city was filled with medical offices and equipment, as well as supply stores and rooms with technicians staring at holographic screens. After they took the elevator ten floors deeper, they went through a tunnel of veiled women who brushed past some of them with a hinted vindictiveness. Very few medical personnel wandered around, and the only ones there were masked with turquoise plastic windowlike shields on their thick and leathery attire. They walked with zealous but unwieldy gaits, which came from age and poor health that was never counterbalanced by their fitness.

         Business districts and studios holding raves and affluent parties, were lined across the hall that stretched on for a mile as menial workers came to and fro, some pushing large dollies that carried light-brown, cloth bags. One of these men was eccentric character who Dmitri had seen in his dream, sitting and smoking in the wine cellar. In one of the stalls that Griffith’s clan passed, boars stood in the darkness and ate piles of trash that were deposited through channels connected to corrupt medical facilities, where allies of Griffith’s organization worked and disguised their hallucinogenics in fake medications. A smoky smell emerged from these stalls, as the animals stood in fateful unity.

They then passed a gentile and expensive diner with a jazz band playing, and red carpeted floors. A smell of spice, herbs and meat trailed from outside the door, and the clatter of metal plates was heard from the kitchen, giving romance and hardiness to this imperfect paradise. After this came the office building where Griffith planned to work as their new administrator. The moment that they entered, they saw clergymen pushing beggars out of the exits a few feet away, while a bearded priest stood behind the main desk, tracking this growing catastrophe to determine whether or not to intervene.

“This place isn’t yours!” one of the beggars shouted before he was kicked down the stairs. Valeria tearfully watched and then looked up at the pedants who held her hostage, knowing that she was eternally barred from her friends and family. After they took the elevator to Griffith’s office, she almost collapsed but James saved her as she was less than an inch from the floor, while the rest looked at her as if, through some epileptic monstrosity, she had entered from another dimension. The effects of their actions had been separated from their established meaning, which was a blessing and curse of the holy rhetorician. From then on, in the years that loomed irrevocably over Ocean City, Valeria was held hostage while the organization was never found. Dmitri found a hunger for relationships again, six years into his devastation and listlessness. But he had given up art and poetry and, as a reprisal for Igor’s past sins, he spent his time enjoying his own luxury, indulging in food and drink and refusing to work at all. He wanted back all the time that Igor had torn him from limb to limb, while idly simpering and stammering and relaxing in his mansion.

Adrian and Daniel were enraptured by this hilarity, though they felt incredibly sorry for everything that had happened. They sometimes showed up at his home in the evenings to comfort him, bringing him champagne and sitting with him on the balcony. One night, Daniel said to Dmitri, “You can’t spend the rest of your life like this. What do you plan on doing? Is there anything you value the most? You used to talk about all these things you’d fight for. What happened to that?”

Dmitri caught onto the timid, failed generosity of these words, which Daniel had tried to represent as merely kind and encouraging. Cheerfully lighting a cigarette, Dmitri said, “I don’t wanna think about that now. Frankly, I feel I’m less of an asshole when I’m not held accountable for anything. I want peace and quiet. I don’t wanna any more cucks or brainiacs bothering me.”

“You know . . .” Daniel hesitated for a moment, “Dmitri, I completely understand. I used to feel the same way. I never wanted to grow up, but, here I am.”

Dmitri changed the subject as he blew a ring of smoke, “That was the kind of thing I always decided, but I knew I could throw it away if I wanted to.”

“So, what? You’re just gonna throw yourself into the gutter now?”

“No,” Dmitri said. “I’ve already done that. This, however, is the most normal I’ve ever been.” He smiled as he detected a coconut perfume, hovering in the air.

THE END