Prologue

I am projecting something saintly, something venerable and worthy, straining my eyes to

observe my likeness splayed across three separate mirrors, halo dangling fluorescent
above my throbbing head. I am emptying myself, melting into my reflections until they have
devoured their referent, leaving only an image bled and consummated as triptych, more
alive than its model—form purified, devoid of content.

That is what it means to be divine: to affect while remaining unaffected, to move and be
unmoved and, ultimately, to be free of entrails. But violently voiding the body of all its
constraints amounts to reversing evolution, dialing back the clock far before it began to
tick, before the first suicide, the holy obliteration mirrored on Earth in the side-wound, the
outpouring of blood from self-mutilated Divinity as it waters and fertilizes the fields of
creation.

Shivering with warmth and fervor, my arm groans and oozes where it parts to expose
styrofoam the color of my teeth. They’ve packed me, cleaved through my skin and stuffed
me with the basest, most artificial matter to forever anchor my body to the deepest
trenches of generation and Leviathan—and just as I had set it adrift…

I must expel whatever it is that lays inside me, only in that way can I claw my way back to the
Heavens … which must explain the box-cutter on the sink.

I see. And there, slithering on the ceramic beneath the blade, is that mine as well? It drips
into the hungry drain, trailing red-brown like the streaks oxidized on my arm.

Something within me is humming, gently, so gently I think it my own, but it scuttles beneath
my skin, shifts spots as soon as I attempt to grasp what it could be. It must hate me, must
have something to conceal, and as I digest this, as I clutch the thought within my very hands,
the hum breaks into a shriek, mounting quivering, teeth-rattling, stinging pulsations;
spreading. I seize the box cutter, tearing into where I felt it last, but it evades me, mounts an
embittered assault.

So I glide my thumb across my veins looking for a bump or a capillary I did not have before.
Searching, searching when my door starts to bang and now I remember now I know they
stuck something in. Thought they could misdirect me with the styrofoam packed inside my
body or maybe the warping tiling beneath my feet I am just now right now noticing – the
bangs at the doors are picking up the pace and I cannot find it no matter how much I hack
at my flesh so it hijacks my airways – I cannot breathe nor bear it so I dig in … my vision
reddens and my throat tightens and the tiles wheeze sardonically to the peal of the electric
chorus radiating from my skin and filling my ears so brightly I no longer hear the door nor
feel the blade harsh against my arms body legs…

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— What the fuck?

— Hi, Alma.

The crescendo sublimates, silence washes over me, the hum is gone, gone like a scorpion
when its beady, compound eyes catch the outline of an owl circling overhead, its prey left to
suffer an incomplete assault.

I return to gaze on the mirrors, clear, impassive. They reject my projection, spit it back upon
me. A body imperfect. They sever it beneath the waist and leave the rest for reflection: a
saint, arm torn to shreds, the few unassailed veins on that pallid limb convulsing with fear of
sharing the same fate—a shocking icon, a martyr caught in the throes of despair, then,
which reflects in the saint’s countenance—only that it doesn’t … no, the saint looks ahead,
placid, as eyes shaped like almonds stare vacantly behind thin glasses that crown a large,
flat nose, flanked by long streams of black hair that stretch below to a barren collar. The
saint is captured at the verge of disintegration.

My legs buckle. I fall to the ground, paralyzed.

An icy grip coils around my arm like a viper, unflinching and predatory, tightening until my
hand numbs and the floor resounds, clattering while startled red droplets plash the naked
ceramic, settle the grout, or disappear into gobs of crimson scattered across my bathroom
floor.

A hand breaks into my vision in a flash, departs just as quickly, now with the boxcutter held
firmly in its fist. It intrudes into the canvas, my canvas, and abducts its most crucial element,
wordlessly, with neither insult nor gratitude.

— Snap out of it.

A voice, not mine, then whose?

— And put some clothes on.

Again, but different, and so another I cannot recognize.

My constricted arm is released, but the viper trails up to perch at my shoulder, where its
frozen grip now yanks me to the doorway: there two murky blurs lurch over my hallowed
space, and as they step into the light of my suspended halo, as its luminosity grazes them,
a thousand signals flare and race up my spine, flooding me with images filed away for
moments like these.

— We’re the government, Alma. We’re the people who take people like you in their sleep.

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The gun!

I throw myself towards the figures’ shins, they sidestep, exposing the doorway; I shove up,
my feet skid, slip on the smeared tiling – no traction – I push into the floor, break into a
sprint, careening, I reach the mattress, lift it– – –

Where…?

Over my shoulder, closing the distance, hands beneath their coats, under their arms, where
holsters go—I need to run.

The door is open, but no. Reinforcements must be in the halls. The window is my only
chance.

I turn, leap, feel the shattering cacophony as it slices my skin and rings through my skull. At
last, I taste the air of freedom.

Something snaps. Searing pain.

I shuffle through the dense shrubbery, snapping sticks and crushing leaves beneath my feet.
Sunbeams seem to blast through the canopy in concerted shots, orbital strikes the
diameter of pencil lead. I am far, far from the city, past its steel-beamed stems and glass
flora, my bare feet unbloodied by asphalt substrate. I approach a clearing, step out onto the
shore of a lake, where I stand amidst retreatants, lakegoers, fleshy in the haze of my
adjusting eyes, sprawled on what must be their towels, unburdened by my sudden arrival.
The smell of the moist and earthy air brushes by with the breeze. With a few steps I stand
above the water. My pupils attune themselves to lucidity, but I do not see myself peering
back from the blue. I look back up. I am alone. I see a dozen severed phalli washed up on
the bank.

My eyelids throb, nerves knocking from inside, vengeful spirits in my haunted head
demanding I open the hatches to my eyes.

There by the foot of my mattress sits the agent, straddling a chair I do not recognize as
mine. He fiddles idly with my .44. He has been waiting for me to rouse, to dripfeed on the
fear inherent to my final moments, my sweet horror, that he intends, soon, to feast upon
when it all comes rushing out of my decompressing body as he lays my own bullet into my
skull with, I cannot emphasize enough, my own pistol. That is why I have been spared up
until now.

My eyes want to jump from their sockets, hounded by the beating of what must be my heart,
so fragile, now torn from my chest, now placed inside my skull—undoubtedly as I slept—
with such cruel precision it would be of no use to explain my condition to the so-called, very
uncritically-minded, sane. Who would believe me if I told them?

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Across the corner where I have hidden my mattress, set diagonally into the wall is the front
entrance where the second agent—who covers his nose with the fabric of his sleeve—
hesitates to look back at me, pacing outside my apartment with the other arm buried in his
coat. The other, the one at the foot of my bed, observes my revival with a tired look. He
adjusts his tie and sets my revolver beside him, dragging on an ersatz cigarette that tunnels
smoke upwards and above where I can adjust my aching neck.

He snaps his fingers, whistles to get my attention, then stabs the air with his finger,
downwards at the floor. There, a vial and syringe lay carelessly discarded. A moment later,
a cigarette butt soars into my carpet with a thud and joins the clutter.

— You aren’t in excruciating pain ‘cause of that.

The agent picks his teeth for loose “leaves.” Wipes the plaque and brown specks that
collect beneath his fingernails off on his forearm.

— Courtesy of us.

I choose to count the creases that line his lips, which leaves me with the impression of an
outstretched…

— Y’know, he shakes his head, you should be thankful. With the bull you push out onto
the ethernet, coupled with this here duster, evasion, et-cet-era, et-cet-era, you could be
facing some serious shit with, uh-

He whistles again, now for his partner in the hall.

— What’re they called here, now?

— U.N. or the Ruskis?

— Latter!

— Still’s the FIB, I think!

— Really? Alright!

He swivels to me again, same deadpan expression, arms lingering on the backrest.

— Where was I? Right… well, we could dial FIB, send you for another stint in the ward
and, shit, with what we have on you now, you’d be there for life, or in prison, and you know
how Slavs take to… well, anyway, we’re willing to forget about all this commotion, your
blog and the, um, he glances at my arm, then back to me, in exchange for your
assistance. How’s about?

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— Forget? Forget? Is that your mercy? As if the damage you have done me can be
reversed by your forgetfulness. Burial sites hum for centuries, deep below the
desecration of freeways and cathedrals, only that one day, their frequency changes for
just a moment and calamity soon follows. You’ll leave me for dead once I am expended,
then bury me beneath a poor outcast’s home for my vengeful spirit to haunt in your
grand-

— Jesus, shut the fuck up. What’s this dumbfuck decked out with again?

— Sluggish psychodysfunctionality, his partner interjects, reading from his PDA, paranoid
ideation, philosophical intoxication, ecological dissonance…

— Ecological dissonance?! Shit, that’s good.

Doubtless my file from the ward. Labels that mean nothing. Mental illness is biopolitical
manufacture. None of these terms objectively describe anything. The DSM-VI is a
handbook of speculative metaphysics. I suppose that makes me a pariah for positivism.

— You smell like shit, and you look it too, the agent adds, his eyes gone icy. I’ll put the
proposal on the table one last time, you take it or leave it, won’t mince words neither, he
takes a deep breath and places a hand where he put the pistol, Work for us. Condor type
shit. Read into that? Yeah, of course you did. We’ve already put together a few other
wackjobs, so you’ll have company to… do whatever it is you types do, besides what we
task you with which, by the way, we think fits your collective, shall we say, predilections?
Temperaments? Oh, and, he draws my magnum, aims it just past the side of my head, you
get to keep this, provided you don’t blow your brains out with it.

A few moments pass beneath the drone of my apartment’s fluorescent lights.

— So?

The saint’s tender lips contort in deception.

5
Chapter One
The city’s intercom bellows like a horn of apocalypse. Vibrations that rattle my vision. The
blare fades into a woman’s voice, and I fight the impression that she is sounding from my
spinal column, or worse, my nerves. How close, how clear I hear her wracking words … I
must persevere against this atmospheric intrusion, must displace it, and so I am imagining
a stern figure adjusting her uniform, climbing the steps of the city hall, being pat down
before she is let inside, her black boots are gliding across checkered floors; she stops
before a door with a red light above it — like the ones shown in documentaries about radio
stations — and minutes after she steps in, the light shudders to life and the city has its
voice. Like clockwork every night, going through the motions, this is my prayer, to be
retraced whenever the sound system first sputters and groans. It soothes spasming nerves;
fortifies this body against a monolithic infrastructure of malice.

I choose to believe the announcer lives, like me, that she is not a ghost bound to a roll of
tape to be punctually tortured at dawn and daybreak and noon and evening and midnight. I
am now, at this very moment, choosing to believe she does not siphon all the fear her
recurrent proclamations tear from the chests of denizens like me, reminded as they are that
they live in a torture sarcophagus designed with savage precision as punishment for their
urban parasitism.

I am one among these urban parasites, though I did not ask to be, and I would prefer to be
sentenced like the Kampuchean municipal, under the strikingly benevolent image of the
Red Khmer. A method of mercy in comparison, where deaths were quick and torture was
immediately present, crude, that is: grounded. Nothing is grounded here, where
psychology’s worst discoveries have been readily applied in an invisible industry bent on
demoralization, a vampiric economy of cognito-molestation.

Three weeks have passed since I was conscripted into the apparatus. I have not slept for
three days. I am light as a feather captured mid-descent by dead, static air, like a God-ray
beaming through stained-glass could strike me in chapel and I would ascend, there to the
Divine Council, where Gazelem is now, where I will be vindicated for all I must do
enchained and all I have done misembodied. Not a single soul knows I have entered
superhuman levels of sleep-deprivation.

I am awake, and I am alive.

— Stop talking to yourself.

A gaze pierces my back. It burns me like an ant beneath a magnifying glass, murderous
scrutiny. Who is this invader?

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— What? I murmur, turning, racking my brains and craning my head. Dandruff falls to the
floor/clings to my shirt with each clumsy motion.

A man perched on the foot of my bed. Why?

He runs his fingers through his jet-black hair, his eyes are squinting but… no, not for fear of
my appearance, which is often the case, but because– – –the textbooks at the right
uppermost corner of my room… Of course! A Tungid-influenced North-Sinid, common to
Sakhalin. Smoking, not afraid to look in my direction, and “squinting” because of his
epicanthus–common to the aforementioned anthropological grouping. And now, yes, now I
recollect that he has been here before, checking on the progress of my convalescence, as
a doctor would, not as a father or mother does for their sickly child–as in movies about sick
children. I recall my time in the ward where such a gaze was commonplace and I despised
it, but now I am at peace, because the looks of bystanders are monstrous and much, much
worse.

— You talking to yourself. Where Russian?

— I don’t know.

— Must be getting high.

He has the build of a manual laborer, which is different from the dainty and managerial
Yamato race that selected for his appearance, or his ancestors’, no less disinterestedly
than they must have selected for traits in hunting dogs. I know from this that he descends
from the older stock, the ones imported to Sakhalin a century ago, when Nippon still
revered its emperor as divinity manifest and before the Soviets crossed the 50th parallel.

His cigarettes are real and not ersatz, which means he is either a loyalist or a criminal, but I
am venturing towards the former, if only because he’s wearing THE ARMBAND.

— Until cigarette dies, he says and taps his watch, staring ahead, If not, leave without him.
He takes a long, steady drag, and racks the slide of his PISTOL which I am just now
noticing. He adjusts THE ARMBAND, and its gilded rim flakes, and bits of gold leaf settle a
hole in his jumpsuit, dissolving into the film of sweat that layers his exposed skin. The paint
on the ceiling above him bubbles and peels when the smoke meets it, exposes the mold-
blackened endoskeleton of the apartment. Abyssal infection tendrils out of its wooden
recesses, and when my eyes lose focus the mold seems to crawl further, attempting to
communicate with me, spelling something I cannot make out, not as long as I am interfered
with on the psychic wavelength, not as long as others are present.

Movement down the hall, shambling woozy footdragging screaming I AM A DRUNKARD or

I AM A CORPSE REANIMATED, but the former is more likely, as the requirements have not

7
yet been met for the End of Days. They freeze at the front of my apartment. The doorknob
starts to jiggle, a twitching that tells of divorce and desperation, not the kind of test a state
agent would give a lock, with determination, with suppressed sadism.

— That’s him, the Korean says.

I pace up to the door and with all my strength wrestle control of the knob, heaving it open to
olfactory barrage, lingering sickly-sweet on a subaltern HOMINID who eyes me hungrily.
Idiot persons would scan his drowsy eyes and take him for a NONTHREAT, but I am not an
idiot person and so I smell predation clinging between the threads of his tattered, sweat-
stiffened jumpsuit, hidden among the trace particles of opium and generative excretion
misspent. I am facing vulgarity down in my doorway, and the world demands I let it in … His
miasma envelops me in an instant as I remain standing by the door, now facing an empty
hall. A moment ago he was right there, now he calls from behind me.

— You have not cleaned this place? the words roll off his tongue lazily, You need, eh,
such shit they banned in 2057 to get close to good smell - to make sterile, you must go
at least another ten years. You know I was janitor at the SOKBol?

His gaze lugs itself over the room, violates everything it touches, and then settles on the
Korean.

— Right, Park?

The Slav hovers a hand over the Korean’s shoulder but seems to have second thoughts
when met with his gaze.

— How come he not speaking? He never speaks. Not since we meet week ago, when
you still bound to bed and your bandages still fresh, he points to my arm, You know you
will get infection not swapping them out, yes?

I’m ailing and my vision is a blur. Figures are in my home and I scarcely recall them from
before today. The Russian romps around my state-designated housing and his air wafts
into everything he passes and I see cultures sprout forth from them. Who is Park? He is the
Korean because Park is a Korean’s name and also an English word but no one here
names their kids after English words not even the missionaries who name their children
‘Alma’ or ‘Joseph’ or ‘Aaron.’ Which is correct and civilized and the Godly thing to do.

— Oyyy!

The Russian shakes me from behind, circles to my front and pats my cheek with his
calloused hands, and I can feel him shed a sliver of his vulgarity as it jumps and burrows
into me like a flea from atop a blade of grass. In the corner of my eye, I catch Park’s thumb
twitching at the sight of his pistol’s safety switch.

8
— So we going? You remember where, right? Poklonskaya Hall, where Zelyonyye
meeting. We get Ichihara, bring him here. Easy. he breathes his words into my face and I
am helpless to recoil.

The edges of Park’s mouth tighten for a moment as Ichihara is mentioned, but only I notice,
there on the periphery of my vision, where I’ve fled to avoid the physiognomy of the
HOMINID before me.

The name stirs something encyclopedic up from the pits of latent memory: the remigration
of Japanese from the mainland up to Sakhalin, after the revolution. The most valiant heroes
of the venerable Yamato race, ardent nationalists and monarchists, noble families, along
with the middling bourgeois and Zaibatsu, all fled Nippon when the students and the proles
rejected their position in society and rose against the status God ordained they occupy.
Socialists: the hands and feet of Satan on Earth. I can only hope that Ichihara is a socialist
subversive, that I have been drafted as an agent of regime change and that soon the
Chrysanthemum Throne shall be occupied once more. It cannot be true that all the royal
family was slaughtered. An ancient lineage can never be severed so easily.

— You listen? Why everyone so quiet?

— Yes, let’s go, I reply.

We file out my apartment, and in the corner of my vision I glimpse the scarlet glow of my
residential terminal, its monitor emblazoned by the branding of a Sakhalin-based Zaibatsu:
a sun cutting through the horizon. The screen glistens, almost burns itself into my retina.
When I blink, the sun throbs against the dark of my eyelids.

— On your shelf was a book about Shinto, Park starts in Korean. We trail behind the
Lusiphone, descending the stairway. Are you a sympathizer?

THE ARMBAND and his cigarettes tell me, Be careful. They say, Perhaps these questions
are meant to test your allegiance, Alma, so be careful. Yes, I am very observant. I will not
reply to this provocation, and maybe the apparatus will notice my fortitude and cool head,
which will entrust me to their blueprint.

— There’s nothing respectable about jjokbari. You’ve donned an Orientalist’s rose-tinted

glasses, take them off, look all around you. See the product of this venerable race;
Sakhalin, the final stronghold of the Ainu, depleted of its people.

An image of a solemn woman is plastered in the corridor. She dangles off a sliver of tape.
Why haven’t I noticed her before? She beckons me, her gray eyes, her blackened lips–
sealed, burdened by what remains untold. I am magnetized, each step becomes lighter as

9
she pulls me into her orbit.

— A martyr, Park continues, slaughtered decades ago. The last Ainu not to die in
subservience… Don’t stare at her like that.

I break with her beauty to meet, with stark contrast, the flat, dusty face of Park, accuser in
potentia. We halt on the flight’s landing–steps away from the poster–only him and I. The
Russian must be further down.

My back faces the woman of the wall–a martyr!–and she caresses me. Her warmth breaks
through the concrete she clings to, like the sun through a prison window. I feel her sexless
love, its soft shimmer the city has failed to dim, and I want to cry, cry, cry. I feel it, the
tenderness of my oldest memory: the painting, Moroni’s Annunciation–the day I realized
my impotency–my first failure to soothe myself, my face buried in the pillow and the lights
shut off, my parents fast asleep, and I, thinking of the angel, his or her placid countenance
and transparent garments, there in Cumorah…

Park crosses the gap between us in a blink before I can register his proximity; the burnt
tobacco on his breath torches what lines my nostrils; a blurred impression of where he
stood stains my vision.

— Stop, he sneers.

Park’s breath scalds my chin and throat. I claw at the neck of my jumpsuit for relief. His
eyes dart back and forth across my face, probing for reaction, before he steps back.

— Let’s go, he mutters as his cadence resumes its monotony.

No one drives cars. Ecology is important now.

Park and the Russian are walking side-to-side, but they do not speak to, let alone look at
each other. I am reminiscing, as one does after special encounters, but not as one does
when faced with, for example, an angry customer–as in movies featuring a scene at, say, a
customer service desk. My reminiscence is happy because it is about the icon on the wall,
that dangling martyress, who breathes anew in all the minds affected by her image, by her
intercession in their lives. How beautiful it must be to die for something, how sublime to
mount the summit of terror in the face of death and say you have conquered it, just before
you plunge from the peaks.

My feet ache. I am not used to walking, and the two ahead go so briskly. My soles’
curvature have only half to do with my shambling misery, for overhead run the city’s strung-
up capillaries, entangled against the exteriors of buildings and dangling above streets, the

10
droning wires of our patchwork ethernet. Every message sent, file shared, website visited
is a barely-audible blip in the radar of my vestibular organs that wreaks havoc and
disorientation. This body is anything but mine, and every waking hour it must remind me.

W.I.P below

We approach Poklonskaya Hall, past the sleek, once-modern facade of a Sovcombank, a

sore thumb amidst the lifeless competition of Soviet architecture. Just up ahead, the street
where we’ll take a right, another relic of a past even more distant: Kommunisticheskiy
Prospekt.

As for the Hall, some time ago it was renovated into an office space, whereas formerly it
served as the seat of the city’s Japanese administration. Yet again it returned as a seat of
power when it came under the possession of Russia’s environmentalists. I have read that
once climate catastrophe was dismissed as millenarian–things of worth tend to be.

11