We are on the side of the species’ eternal Life, our enemies are on the side of eternal Death. And Life will swallow them up, by synthesizing the two terms of the antithesis within the reality of communism.–Amadeo Bordiga
I
The night Trump was elected, there were celebrations on the streets of Juba, South Sudan.
Orson, a thirty year-old State Department employee, groped for a word from the nauseous pit of his groin–a groin inhabited by a succubus of pure fear–and found (implausibly, for an unconscious child of the Sokal Affair) “lumpen.”
Lumpen: a Marxist word, more or less.
He used to taunt his younger sister when he was a kid–years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the very neighborhood where the Rosenberg children were given new parents and new names–with the epithet “dirty commie.” She taunted him back: “dirty faggot.”
Now that they were grown-up, all the rage, respect, and paranoid, Wittgensteinian love they felt for each other could be summed up in the Punch and Judy characters of Dirty Commie and Dirty Faggot.
Orson’s sister was a career activist (she received money from Soros to siphon off Alex Jones’ bodily fluids) but actually a crypto-Bordigist with a deep libidinal hunger for revolutionary violence, or a deep revolutionary hunger for libidinal violence. And he was a career semi-deep state heterosexual but actually an agnostic wavering apolitical anhedonic, more or less.’
Both felt, naturally, a lingering vanguardist Judeo-Leninist smudge of guilt and dirt, a neurosis located in their bodies’ twitching desire to be normal and, at the same time, to resist the imposition of normality, which they intuitively understood would annihilate them.
Some–the tech writer Milo Yiannopolous for instance–might have called them Jews, though they were only a quarter Jewish, at most.
What does “lumpen” mean?, he asked himself.
Lumpen: a criminal element mixed in with a saturnalian element mixed in with a marauding, lubricious, misogynist element: subtended by the kind of cannibalistic (Africa was making him racist against his better instincts) vengeance of the Third World for whom U.S. elections are a paradox and a party, to the extent that anything empirically new in an accelerationist desert is a paradox, a party, etc.
They were saying, he thought: Now we won’t be castrated by a kind of weaponized sanctimony, by U.S./Samantha Power.
From now on it’s White Power and a certain kind of Black Power, too, not the castrated black power of Obama but the the reodipalizing black power of Paul Manafort.
Another word he’d learned recently was “Hotep.”
Hotep was like the black alt-right: onanist otakus, worshippers of the black amphibious Kek, cuckold fetishists in reverse (the hook-nosed, priapic usurer-Jew substituting for the fetishized athlete-Ape), their homosexual-Oedipal avatar not Putin but some pervy combination of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Papa Doc Duvalier, or of George Lincoln Rockwell and the fantasmatic Malcolm X who never met with Castro in Harlem, split between a “black Orientalist,” anti-Islam faction and a faction that shitposts old photos of the Nation of Islam fraternizing with the brownshirts of the American Nazi Party at a stadium rally: Mary Lefkowitz’s nightmare, Marty Peretz’s wet dream.
Once, when Orson was on leave, a girl he was vaguely interested in invited him to an avant-garde Peruvian film in the Mission in San Francisco about a post-ocular mediatic pseudo-world, or post-world, or surreal or infrareal world, or even a post-fact world, in which the city-dwelling Third World lumpen‘s desire to shoot upskirts, to make it big in pornography, to consume drugs, to dress up as various furry characters, etc., is exposed structurally and through a series of cinematic techniques to be a kind of dark-Deluzian neoliberal-cyborg dreamscape, a panoptic Breitbart-bukaki torture chamber, a geopolitical battlefield between the competing carcinogenic images of the rival or friendly financial-libidinal dictatorships, nationally manifested, of American, Japanese, Russian, etc., content/shitposting.
Though sometimes, he thought, things get confused.
For instance, Sarah Kendzior’s Larouchite and Muscovite orgasms are in fact dependent upon a pornified version of a diabolically horeshoed right-left Russia, promoted only the day after by opportunistic media oligarchs (Russian or arriviste/dissident) more than by the State Department.
And Tulsi Gabbard’s fevered, hopeless, social-climbing orgasms while doing solidarity tours with “alt-left” mustachioed Assad are more the result of CNN psy-ops that are intent on fracturing a left anti-imperialism into ethno-nationalist Bannonized bantustans than they (her orgasms) are produced by any kind of genuine Russian-hegemonic propaganda.
Because everyone is cynical, and in a cynical world only the cynical and the false have any charismatic power.
Though one could say by watching this film and by life in general that the fear of viral diseases and of vaccines is hegemonic. We’re all anti-vaxxers now, Orson thought to himself, and wondered if there was any truth to the idea that Antifa was sticking college Republicans with HIV needles.
We’re all autistic barons of a brave new world, Orson thought.
By Aaron Lange
Even before the credits, something strange had happened. In fact, two strange things had happened.
Orson had forgotten why he’d even bothered to go on a date with yet-another American hipster girl who brought him to shitty avant-garde films filled with hyperbole and a kind of conformist radicalism (he didn’t read alt-right stuff but he did like Houellebecq). And he remembered that his aversion to hipster girls had always driven him into the arms, for better or worse, of striving but accomplished, attentive Chinese women, or sometimes Japanese women, in the Pearl River Delta or in Africa or in Cambridge, Massachusetts or on vacation in the Maldives.
And that contemporary life was in fact as the movie had portrayed it: an insane sexual thirst, a ventriolquism and transvestism one way or another, a submission not to being watched but to watching a pornographic post-material voyeuristic-algorithmic watching of watching, enfolded in its own eyeball, a watching of yourself being watched abstractly, in a pool of your own gelatinous necropolitical sex-fluids.
Orson’s dream:
Talking to a well-meaning though naturally anal DSA activist, his sister said that the left was fundamentally unserious and not only that but its unseriousness was manifested in the fact that though an occasional hipster novelist would express pomo retro-lust for Leila Khaled, and an occasional Antifa kid would punch Richard Spencer twice or three times or however many takes it takes in the face (with the full-throttled support of The New York Times, former charter school activists, and “We Are The Left” types), no one has taken any of the idiot children of the handful of truly oligarchical families hostage, and no one has assassinated even a lowly Republican official in North Dakota, and Oakland itself is flooded by “Keep the KGB off my pussy” signs and geriatric men wearing pussy hats…
II
It’s undeniable that the election changed Emma’s life.
But the fact is that all historical time (as well as every Pauline, retro-white supremacist Greek word like kairos) is anachronistic, a tedium and misreading that lasts forever, a kind of permanent disequilibrium in which the most disciplined left-Proustians remember–in their orthodox memories or in the memory of orthodoxy–Paris, 1968.
(And why not Santiago, 1973, or Cologne, 1977, or a PFLP-hijacked airplane around the same time coasting above all cities as if communism itself were an unknown city not even on the radar, or Bologna, 1980, or San Cristóbal de las Casas on New Year’s day, 1994, and why not Baghdad, 2003, or why for that matter not Tehran, 2017, or Mexico City, 2020, or why for that extreme matter not any city or any year, why this chronotopic fetishism and why this vintage urban-Hegelian focismo?).
*******************
Emma’s life was changed two months before the election, when she met Egle, the Lithuanian, who in her stoical suidical depression, her vortex, took on all the evils of history and of neo-Nazi men, and their Limonovian avatars, and spat them out.
They met at a grad student bar in downtown Berkeley. Egle didn’t drink or smoke and Emma, when she was away from her boyfriend, drank and smoked constantly, manically.
Egle was a UC grad student in psychology and like many UC grad students she was starving. But for her, that was nothing new.
She was tall, blonde, and thin, like a model or like a fetishized alt-right “European Beauty.” She was also gay and someone for whom survival was the beginning and perhaps the end of life, and of politics.
Emma came from an anti-psychiatry background. She was a fanatic of Fanon, of course, but also of Basaglia, of David Cooper, of León Rozitchner and of the left-wing Lacanians in South America who spent the first third of their alcoholic nights in tears, discussing their therapy sessions, the second third discussing the dystopian political situation that inevitably led to state violence, and the third third dancing, puking, and fucking, though not necessarily in that order.
Egle, on the other hand, studied cognitive-behavioral therapies for PTSD, tortured rats and their algorithmic-capitalist behavior, the sadness of fascist mammals.
At first Emma was skeptical of that kind of thing. In terms of the ’80s Cold War, she was on the side of Latin America and not the Baltics, though she didn’t go so far as her left-communist boyfriend (a Litvak Jew), who spent all his time shutup in their dark apartment, reading and watching occult news, fake news, trying to decipher the signs of the end of the world, and not only its signs but its effluvia, its hypotheses.
Egle left her home in Vilnius at the age of twelve. She’d been a traveler and a trafficked person, a migrant worker and a temporary student. She’d been a sex-worker, a model, a knock-off fashion designer, a sex commune-dweller in Autonomia-style houses in central European capitals, a passionate though indifferent reader of book and situations, a learner of languages inscribed through the most brutal subcutaneous means, an informal drug-dealer and a studious avoider of everything that altered consciousness, even everything that altered false consciousness, an itinerant for whom cynicism was deadly and absolute faith, absolute love, was a kind of cynical means of survival.
Egle thought she was alive because others were dead, or in spite of the fact that others were dead, or tangentially to the fact that life was governed by absolute chance, and that nothing could change the fact that at every moment desire is deformed by fear, that fear is the truth around which the vulture of desire circulates, pathetically and often insanely.
When Egle arrived in Berkeley, she made painstaking efforts to make friends and to unite herself with various leftist, queer, and anti-fascist groups on campus. The problem was that as a Lithuanian she was met with extreme hatred by the Soviet flag-waving Avakian-types, who called her a counterrevolutionary Nazi, and extreme suspicion by the BAMN social-justice types, who constantly demanded that she acknowledge her complicity in white supremacy.
She decided, as a so-called racist counterrevolutionary, to retreat into her own poverty and memories and into lonely nights of reading at bars in which the people she talked to invariably expressed their superficiality and their contempt for reality.
And into relationships with other gay grad students who treated her like Melania Trump, like a piece of romanticized or sexualized Slavic meat, at the end of the day.
At first, when Engle arrived as a PhD student, she was homeless. She slept in People’s Park or in MLK Park or in coffee shops or on the couches of abusive liberals or lumpen rapists.
Finally, she found Alexey, a thirty-something Russian expat with a three bedroom apartment in north Berkeley.
Alexey subletted his rooms exclusively to women who were willing to fuck him at least once in awhile (though not every night or even every month, because his desire was patient, epistemic).
On Craigslist he stipulated that housing “interviews” were required and his interviews were a combination of Myers-Briggs sophistry and of Pornhub racial taxonomy.
In his interviews, he asked questions strange questions, questions that to him were entirely logical. His questions were about whether it was better to travel back one hundred years or travel forward fifty years in time, whether it was more important to stop Pearl Harbor or Operation Barbarossa, about whether Toussaint Louverture should have been killed at birth, reined in by the Atlanticist tradition, or set free to kill every white baby, about whether Russians were white, about whether one sides with The Daily Stormer or with Timothy Snyder, or both, about whether Richard Spencer’s busty wife qualified as Aryan in spite of her Mongol-Tatar background, about whether Aleksandr Dugin had smuggled in Heideggerian post-structuralist faggotry through the backdoor of healthy Varangian thought, about whether Joel Pollack and Juliah Hahn weren’t deracinated fake fascists, confused, sexless Ivy League Jews who had infiltrated the alt-right through Ashkenazi linguistic IQ, through Breitbart, about their favorite Eisenstein films…
After two or three attempts to rape her, Alexey finally concluded that Egle, as beautiful as she was, was in fact gay.
As a Russian left-fascist, as opposed to an American-Anglo right-fascist, he respected that ontological category.
Afterwards, in exchange for below-market rent, he didn’t require sexual favors. He only wanted to talk to her, obsessively, about his plans to found, in Northern California, a Putinist pan-Slavic communist movement: a Philip Dick base.
What I’m saying, he would say, is not that we need to embrace the vulgar homophobia, or ethnochauvinism, of the contemporary Russian Communist Party, though we certainly shouldn’t reject those trends out of a misguided western individualism. What we need to recognize is that communism is, as the Moor said, the real movement. And the real movement today, the one that defeated Hillary and her mafia family, is a threefold karmic reaction against the following: NAFTA, the crime bill, and the starvation of half our population after the end of the Cold War.
And yes, I know I require you to talk to me instead of fucking me, in exchange for rent in this gentrifying, tech-fascist city. But the reason I require you to talk to me is that I know you and I are on the same page, and that I love you as a Slavic sister…
The friendship between Emma and Egle developed rapidly, passionately, though there was an absolute absence of speed or of pathos in all their interactions.
What would happen is that Emma’s boyfriend would go to sleep (he slept Samuel Beckett’s twelve-hour sleep, Beckett’s Resistance sleep lugging around his soiled chamber pot at lunch), and Emma would go out in the frigid Oakland winter weather to meet Egle at her apartment. And then, affectlessly, they would talk in ways that contradicted each other, for instance Egle read neuroscientific texts and Emma talked in a way that made her think that Egle thought she was a First World fool, buying into some cultic Althusserian Marxism when in fact everything was rapidly progressing towards a futureless future, and Emma was skeptical of hipster art and found artistic sustenance only in the dilettante memoirs of Red Brigades Italian terrorists or in trap music. For Egle, the acme of every romantic relationship was convincing a girlfriend to cuddle and watch Béla Tarr. For Emma, the heart of a relationship was a mixup of pedophilic atavistic care towards a flailing, psychosexually monstrous hipster boy and the promise of adventure, of terrorism.
In many ways, they hated each other, but for a number of reasons they avoided cutting each other out.
Egle was needy.
Incessantly, seemingly, she demanded that Emma come over to console her.
Egle’d bought a ticket home to Vilnius for Christmas with her new girlfriend who wanted to meet her parents and then broke up with her the day before the trip, leaving Egle alone with her travel plans. Her best friend had died of a heroin overdose. She wanted to kill herself, etc.
Then when Emma got there to comfort her, Egle scoffed and said that only Americans, weak sentimentalist bourgeois, cared about feelings.
********************
A few days or weeks after the election, Emma went to Egle’s apartment and brought over a bottle of bourbon, which, as usual, Egle watched Emma drink with curiosity: the dispassionate, anorexic curiosity of someone born into an ex-Soviet country stalked by alcoholic violence abetted only by cirrhotic depression, by criminal but self-defeating appetites, by neoliberalism: a word Egle thought was absurd, as if there was anything neo about it, as if it wasn’t just a matter of the same old Nazis and child rapists taking power with the hegemonic cover of the puffed up intelligenstia (in this case economists and the NGOs) on behalf of racial-multinational finance, as if liberalism could ever be new because it was only another name for the worst and most sadistic–and therefore most adequate, the most just–system of torturing human beings.
At some point Egle’s friend Vishal showed up and he also drank from the bottle. Emma, as usual, drank more, but Vishal was a good drinker, too.
They went outside to smoke a cigarette.
Emma saw nothing at the time and in retrospect she saw even less.
An SUV pulled up to them and three white kids attacked them.(They were from Walnut Creek or wherever else in the Bay Area’s fascist belt that extends from Seattle or from Fort Bragg down to faggot Nathan Damigo’s Stanislaus, and of course trailing even further south along the limp dick of I-5 all the way to its death-throes in a Tijuana brothel, from wherever in those territories in which the drafters of the Plan de San Diego failed to exterminate “every Anglo adult male,” even if that document was a kind of Mexican Protocols).
“Get the fuck away from our White Women!.”
They started beating the shit out of Vishal, and they also
threw a volley of punches at the girls.
They had tasers.
The two boys beating up Vishal were archetypal skinheads, but the second-to-last thing Emma thought before the girl tased her and she passed out was that this girl is fucking obese.
The last thing Emma thought to herself was that this made sense, that this was exactly the right thing to be happening, that each blow was a kind of masochistic dispensation, that this was the summation of a long arc of a useless petty-bourgeois leftist’s life, that at last she was getting not necessarily what she deserved but what she needed, what she wanted, and that she didn’t know if she was coming or if the intense spasmodic wet pain in her groin was the result of the potentially lethal levels of electricity coursing through her body.
“Fucking Trump,” they yelled.
The whole performance had lasted no more than ninety seconds.
They all passed out that night.
Vishal felt embarrassed for not putting up a better fight.
Emma refused to go to the hospital or report her so-called hate crime to the ACLU.
“Fuck the Glenn Greenwalds of the world, who would rather defend fascists than their victims.”
Egle didn’t know or care who the fuck the ACLU was or were.
Egle laughed, thinking the whole thing had been a joke and that Trump was nothing more than a cosmic joke on the American people.
The funny thing about your country, she said, as you saw with that woman, is that even your fascists are fat. And I’m not just talking about your obese, piss-fetishist president. I can’t tell you the number of times and the number of countries in which I’ve been beaten up by fascists, and your fascists are the fucking worst, the absolute least worthy fucking pseudo-fascists. First of all, they’re all kids or I suppose gay-Jewish new media tech-writers from the British public schools pretending to be kids but pushing forty or even fifty. Richard Spencer is a fucking alcoholic rich boy with a failed doctoral thesis on Adorno (“poor Adorno secretly wanted to suck Wagner’s cock”) and even that punch he got was fake. And your antifascists are even worse. Half of them are in the pay of charter schools and write for The Huffington Post and the rest are just losers from Portland who got bored of going to the local artisanal donut shop.
Emma appreciated Egle’s laughter. Her (Emma’s) response to life was either a scornful laughter or a solidarity laughter and sometimes, usually, admixtures of the two laughters.
After the election Emma’s best friend, Vick, had turned hikikomori and refused to talk to her for months.
Vick blamed Emma–or at least that’s what Emma thought, because Vick didn’t, on principle, explain herself–for Emma’s apocalyptic insouciance, her ultraleftism, her boyfriend’s white nihilism, her vestiges of accelerationist jouissance.
Not that Vick herself hadn’t voted for Bernie and then for Gloria La Riva.
Vick also blamed herself. For instance, for her proselytizing to her post-industrial, Pennsylvania family, for having administered her out-of-work father steady doses of Marx over recent years and having given him State and Revolution for Christmas.
The entire family then voted for Jill Stein in a swing state.
A Harvard education is, for people of her background, nothing but indoctrination and self-betrayal, Vick thought.
She believed that people of color had been issuing warnings about American fascism for decades and that white leftists had solipsistically ignored them.
Eventually, though, she bought a playstation and decided to devote herself to Frogger and to forgive Emma, since within a matter of years all of them would be dead, or at the very least in the concentration camps that were being prepared for them in evacuated Walmarts in Colorado. Vick believed that come the time of the concentration camps, or in the concentration camps themselves, heterosexuality would probably be abolished or, as woke Marx would have said, would wither away.
A week later, still feeling symptoms from the concussion and the tasering, Emma agreed to meet Vishal to discuss what had happened.
Vishal told her that being beaten up by fascists had changed his life, had made him fall in love.
Emma wondered what he meant.
He said that he’d displayed a necessary cowardice.
All my life, he said, I considered myself, more or less, to be a strong, assertive person, as every Cartesian subject considers themselves.
In spite of my readings, my struggles, and the hallucinogens I’ve taken regularly but intermittently, I still believed until recently that I had a kind of narrative governing my life, and now I know that’s not true, that my constructions are macho and repetitive, that the battuta of horror is less important than the fluttering of scared, abstract desire…
That night, Emma fucked Vishal, or let Vishal fuck her.
She’d always found cowardice tremendously sexually attractive, though she didn’t really believe in cowardice, ethically.
What she liked about cowardice was its forays into the unknown and its sudden, necessary, panicked retreats.
She liked the cowardice of artists and of militants and also of anonymous people who only dreamed of being artists or militants, the ones wandering around cities as eternal shadows of temporariness: the girl from the city bureaucracy who secretly and sadistically cheated on the boyfriend she loved or the doorman who wasn’t in the position to kill his boss but who instead silently fucked the wife of someone else’s boss with his twelve-inch cock, and the quiet, unassuming father, cop, terrorist, librarian, liberal, etc., who in his moments of thoughtfulness relented, jerked off, shadowed them all. In her opinion the presence of cowardice was a kind of vestal devotion and the presence of courage was a sign of decadence or of utility.
She didn’t feel guilty about her boyfriend because she knew that if he understood (and he always understood) he wouldn’t care, or he would care too much. She also knew that her boyfriend was incapable of feeling pain or of giving himself up to pain, that there were whole zones of his body and his self-esteem that were cordoned off, that were reserved for a death-before-death. He wanted to understand the world and his doom but he would never, as a precondition to his existence, experience his doomed world.
“Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one?” he asked once when he was pissed off.
“My last boyfriend was one of our generation’s leading Wittgenstein prodigies and I started to date you precisely because I thought your cock was bigger or at least more willing than his, even though I saw you lugging around the Philosophical Investigations, and also because I thought between us there would be more understanding, kindness.”
Her love for her boyfriend was a catechistic, a repetitive, an unyielding love.
For instance, at night, during the throes of her insomnia and his permanent narcolepsy, she would ask him questions.
Her questions would always be saturated with a faux-naivité, an exaggerated gamine ignorance.
His answers were heavy, gnomic or self-defeating, sleepy, certain up to the point at which certainty gave way to the discomfort of his body in the temporary truce with his lusts.
“What’s really going on in Syria?” she asked.
“I already told you.”
“What’s going on in Africa?”
“Ask your brother.”
“Am I getting fat?”
“No, and if you were, who cares?”
“Are my tits getting bigger?”
“Your tits are always getting bigger.”
“And what about my ass?”
“Your ass, too.”
“But how can my tits and ass get bigger without my getting fat?”
“Ask Zeno, ask a paradox.”
“…”
“…”
“Should we quit smoking?”
“Obviously.”
“Are we going to quit smoking?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you regret drinking a bottle of liquor every day since the age of sixteen?”
“You’ve forgotten about the days when I was too depressed to drink, those interminable days, like when Beckett’s antiheroes used to force their heart to stop beating for minutes at a time in order to better understand German Idealism and practice better, too, autoerotic asphyxiation.”Will you write your own ‘Notes from the ersistance?'” (she chortled).
“I’ll write my lucubration,” he guffawed, in a way that was more a clearing of the esophagus than a laugh. ” I’ll title it Notes Frum the Existence, in which I, as David Frum, out myself as the most fascist of neglected fascists, the most existentially tortured crypto-faggot toiling away in obscurity, like Spengler, like Vilfredo Pareto, and like Jaime Guzmán, like Steve Bannon’s forgotten futurist, Julius Evola.”
“I’d like to read that.”
“Me too.”
“Why did the DSA kill Rosa Luxemburg?”
“The question isn’t why the DSA killed Rosa Luxemburg. It’s why, having killed Rosa Luxemburg, like the latter-day Jew, they never recognized the millenarian pulse of history, why they never cease to kill her in their hearts.”
“In the fullness of time, can PissPigGranddad be redeemed?”
“No one can be redeemed, especially in the fullness of time.”
“But is PissPig really a monster, a Zionist hatecore punkie out of a Jeremy Saulnier slasher movie that hasn’t yet been directed, a NATO proxy killing the brown men he’s always wanted to exterminate, ideologically and psychologically and phrenologically?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“What is the meaning of the word filibusterismo?”
“It means filibusterism.”
“Is it a war crime to piss on the corpse of an enemy combatant for lulz?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it would be better for PissPig to take up a gun against the actual fascists at home than at the imaginary, or at least secondary, fascists abroad?”
“I do.”
“Do you know if PissPig’s Christian name is actually PissPig or if it’s just Piss?”
“I believe it’s PissPig, but that Piss works, for short.”
“Do you think there’s a leftist case to be made for Pizzagate?”
“I do, in a sense.”
“In what sense?”
“In the sense that the ruling class, intimately connected to the Clintons, are hyper-connected to the bacchanalian child-sex abuse scandals like those of Jeffrey Epstein.”
One night Emma wanted to know if it was right for her to join up with a scrawny white anarchist poet who’d decided that the failures of Occupy Oakland, in which he’d been a leader, though “not a leader,” had been due to a failure to pay attention to the translations of the Septuagint Bible, to Lurianic Kabbalism, to how the word “paradise” had been transmitted across pseudo-history.
“His poetry isn’t great but his decision to become a pastor in a black Marxist home-church, on the other hand…”
Her boyfriend scoffed.
“What’s the matter?…”
Once again, he scoffed.
“I’m thinking of attending his church.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your problem?”
“He’s smuggling hipster esoterism and patriarchal Christianity through the backdoor of communism,” he said.
“Maybe, probably, I’m sleepy…”
“Me, too…”
“But we won’t sleep.”
“Obviously…”
“If everything we think is going to happen actually happens,” she asked, dreaming or not dreaming, “with its fascist and banal concentration camps, and if we’re lucky and international travel isn’t suspended, is there a bar waiting for us in Concepción, Chile, run by a southern couple, a couple in which the girl sends me emails calling me her “bella gringa” and the guy who’s a bit of an anarchist and a more than a bit of an alcoholic believes you’re an absolute artist, hacia la nada creadora: a bar in which there’s live music every night and maybe we drink ourselves to death, slowly, or maybe we run a terrorist cell out of it, maybe we join up with the Mapuches or maybe with the patrician remnants of the ETA, etc.?”