The Algorithm of Chaos

In the war you live posthaste as if being late all the time. Move it! Giddy up! Even when it’s, like, nowhere to hurry to you still keep revving up. Quickly finish your meal, quickly be thru the quickie. Why hurry? Where to? Still you can’t help being on run. Constantly. Except for, maybe, a barbecue party. But even then way down your belly there sits some hard clot, nagging. At a party it kinda retreats and you relax and forget but now and then the bitch pings back, intoxication or no intoxication.

We relaxed in the house I rented, his buddies came to the parties. Cliff, Viking. They used their nom-de-guerres even at the table, that’s the W Group regulations. No names. Both Cliff and Viking got married for the current war. Took temporary wives from the local girls liberated from the fascism. One of them blonde, the other brunette. As if they had much of a choice, the chicks. A girl needs protection even in a whorehouse. A roof she could count on. Viking and Cliff were swapping their wives, one party the blonde was his squeeze, next party the brunette. Only we, the hosts, kept stable.

In war the meanest of shit hid in people pops up. I hate when they capture a prisoner, no matter who, both sides camouflaged, and start torture him making a video for some channel in the internet to frighten the hell out of their enemy. Or put him on his knees and smash the head with a sledgehammer. Mudak motherfuckers.

And the war sky is way too low, simply hanging overhead, kinda pressing, doesn’t let you look up for longer than a split sec not to call on your head a round of bursting artillery shells or a drone and you jump up in shock with that clot in your belly turned the size of a tennis ball already. No life in war as before sitting in the cafe by the corner and chatting with Ninka of nothing. You can look wherever you want, up or down, no one rushes by, screaming…

And that constant feel as if all of us are in an express train, some iron beast of lots of cars, shooting along the track faster and faster, and all we, in the cars, know that the track ahead is demolished and any other moment we’ll crash derailed over down the embankment. That’s where that haste comes from, you can’t enjoy neither meals nor fucking…

They liberated a big city. Bombardments and shooting over, he took me over there for a kinda excursion. A pretty big city for so scanty population. The non-combatants were moved away after their liberation, especially kids. No traffic to speak of, armed vehicles mostly and small buses marked “Press” to shoot material for their news and political TV shows. A big meeting convened at a local concert hall. My hubby was on the orators list to make a speech on the behalf of W Group as one of their field commanders. That’s why we went there in the first place. But we came way ahead the happening was to start and went to wheel about the city in his Land Rover. The sidewalks almost empty, about a couple of passers-by in a block looking like pensioner zombies.

We turned into a mighty big factory, no gates, bombardment holes, yet the buildings erect. In between them the breeze plays with light garbage. We stepped out the SUV into the vast silence from a horror movie. Entered one of the buildings, bigger than a football field, dead silent. He gave a yell, it echoed about the hollow and died. That moment I spotted someone stretched behind the rail in the track and called out, ‘At nine!’ He slung his Makar up, pointed it at the figure and moved closer.

‘Nah!’ sez he. ‘For this one it’s game over.’ And put the gun back.

I came nearer, yeah, dead as a nail and the body was dropped there for two months minimally, since the start of the battle for the city. A Godawful cadaver stench. I wanted to pick up the blood group sticker from his fatigue an go. Blue letters in the legend, not like ours.

He stood by watching me then slapped his forehead and cried, ‘Fucking, yes!’, before darting out of that huge workshop.

I walked after him but he’s running back already in working gloves, clutching the hatchet he kept in his SUV for barbecues in the nature’s lap. In a heartbeat was he by the body and hack its head off. Grabbed it by one ear and trotted out again. The ear tore off with tatters of the rotten skin, the head fell on the cemented floor rolling onward. He caught it with his both hands and carried on before him squeezed with the hatchet at arms length.

‘Are you fucking mad?’ screamed I .

‘Shut the fuck up! I know what I’m doing!’

He picked a piece of cellophane stuck in the garbage by the wall and wrapped the thing.

‘No sweat,’ sez he. ‘Time’s enough. I’ve learned the know-how in Africa’.

In short, at that show-meeting he took the floor together with a peeled-to-bone skull. The dead white skull kept in a black-gloved hand, and he talks to it, face-to-face.

‘So what?’ sez he. ‘How about telling me one of your jokes, Yoric? Tell me if those Poles were of any help, fool? That’s what awaits all of you, fascist bastards!’

Then he blah-blahed for a couple of minutes more, where inserted a verse of his own production. Some romantic motherfucker he was. I’ve told that already, or what?

At night, when at the hotel after a big drinking bout, I asked him:

‘What was that hooey about? Yoric? Poles?’

‘Who know they know. It’s from Shakespeare and Gogol’.

‘But that shitty verse? Like a snotty kid at a kindergarten matinee’.

It was the first and only time in our relationship that he punched me. Too plastered he was. My bad too, couldn’t zip up in time. A stupid cunt will always find an nasty adventure for her ass…

Then we went back to our location in war theater. Forgave each other. A girl needs a roof for protection even if its romanticism is fucking leaky. He downloaded from the internet that TV show of his stunt with Yoric. A bearded romantic rehearses lame lines to a raw skull who grins back at him…

It was winter already as Cliff came to our house, bleak as grim clouds.

‘They smoked Shore,’ he said

There started some strange piercing ring in my ears.

‘What the fu.. No!’

He shrugged, ‘Taken to hospital’.

I whizzed over there. Shore stretched on the cot white as the sheet over him, black beard, shut eyes, thin tubes and that beeping thing above his head. All as in serials. It beeped for some 20 hours.

They never found who it was to make Shore on his knees and execute with a shot in the back of his head. It could be prisoners who had a big fang against W Group personnel sending them, the prisoners, to attack and shooting those who retreat. Or, maybe, Caucasians for Shore happened to keep a couple of their big shot at his gun point hollering what motherfuckers they were. The regulars also could do it or even his co-employees from W Group after an anonymous fascist announced on the internet $4 million reward for Shore’s head. Just his head, they did not bother for the rest of him. The murderers might have been after that jack pot. They didn’t have time to cut the head off though. Something had shooed them away.

A soldier from an MP patrol dropped in the ruins to take a leak and saw the body on the snow. Neither falling hot on the trail nor later investigation brought up a thing. Or, maybe, they just didn’t want to find it out…

And then I was sitting in the luggage car of express train over his zinc casket, wearing all black. 2 yokels from W Group sitting at a distance in their fatigues, harnessed with sidearms, just in case, because of the anonymous 4 MM prize for the head in the zinc box. Full of grim respect sat they over there as is appropriate beside the widow of the legendary warrior from the elite W Group seeing her hubby off from the battle grounds.

I was not keen on talking too. Under the hollow ramble of wheels beneath the floor swaying me too and fro, I smoked over the box caring for no yokels, feeling as that bitchy clot inside the belly began to dissolve little by little, spinning some idle thoughts, like, if, say, somehow wack these 2 assholes, could I find a way to veer off away with the head? 4 MM of green is not a thing to shrug away.

Then I recollected the book I read when in the 9th grade. Ninka gave it to me. What motherfucking fools we were! Naive book-reading virgins. Italian stories on sex. Her brothers stabbed her beloved, so she cut his head off and all her life kept it by her. In a big flower pot filled with earth. The flower turned real meaty. A! I remembered! The name was Boccaccio's Decameron.

Such recollections make you smirk. Books. Passing the folded message slips at the classes. At the parties in the school gym we played Brooklet. Lined in pairs, one behind the other, I and Ninka hand in hand raised up. He walks bent low in between the pairs, grabs your wrist and pulls after him in that narrow tunnel beneath the upshot arms from both sides. Laughter, shouts, you feel swoony, and in the tunnel’s end you straighten up, your hand in his warm palm, he smiles at you, and it’s so good, and all your life’s ahead, and no need to rush, and… Shit! Where the fuck is all that?!.

In short, I came to the HQ as arranged. You can’t miss the skyscraper building with a huge W over the entrance. Yet when I appeared in the said room, the bitch of a secretary began to squeal:

‘He’s at a meeting now’.

‘What the fuck! I’m on the appointment!’

So the slut says into her phone:

‘Victor Evguenich, here’s a visitor who’s on the list… Yes… Not quite adequate though’.

But the bitch was too dumb to switch the speaker off in her iPhone, and I could here:

‘Sorry, Evguen Pavlich, it’s the Shore’s cunt after to graze out her 50 G’s…’ The communication’s over.

Shit! I had to wait, what the fuck could else I do?

And those 2 yokels stayed by the casket till they took the body in at the crematorium, just in case. Saved 4 MM’s for the anonymous order-placer. Fucking guards of honor a sort of.

Shore’s daddy, a dried up ruin with the bold spot over all of his dome yet shaved to glitter and equipped with a tie kept his mug turned away from me. Then they brought out the urn and gave it to the man, a kinda cup for sport achievements, as if I was not there at all. Only when I was getting out a swarm of local paparazzi started to click me from all angles, my deep mourn and medium V-cut…

Now, comes the boar I had the appointment with. The jowl hanging down to his armpits, the belly to his knees. Went over to his office and when he’d seated his obesity there, the secretary let me in.

‘Let’s talk business. Can you flash a stamp in your papers to attest your marriage? Then take my healthcare advice and don’t stick out. You roger that?’

No odd words. He knew how to run business, that fat fuck. The memo which Shore left at the HQ no one had ever seen, $50,000 of the compensation went to the winner in the race.

With empty hands I left that the shitty HQ with their American W above the entrance. Fuck you, fucking motherfuckers!