Psychosexual Special Ops: Escape from Kharkov
In March of 2022, the war in Ukraine meant everyone’s collective wires were getting crossed: sex and violence were becoming intertwined in the collective subconscious.
Liveleak was gone, but Americans rejoiced, they could once again access gore, depravity, the darkest corners of the human spirit during this month-long holiday. The mods looked the other way, the hall monitors were stuffed into lockers, and digital blood flowed freely as it did in the golden years of yore, where a littler version of them saw Saddam getting hung, saw the fear in his eyes before he cried out to Allah, pleading for redemption.
The shadowy forces that govern what we consume claimed the descent into barbarism was simply “accurate journalism”, flaunting our first amendment rights to an authoritarian Russian government. I knew the truth. This was a bold faced lie. It was to conjure up some libidinal energy among the American public, boost the birth rate, strengthen the post-pandemic economy; see how graphically a life can be taken, and the innate biological response becomes: what is the fastest way I can replace this life? Who shall I empty my seed into?
This theory came to me while taking in the spring air, seeing the tank-topped strut out across Manhattan, faces flushed, pausing between sips of iced coffee to remark to a friend how “concerningly warm this summer would be”. Double-death drive, I thought: sandwiched between climate fear and war hysteria would be this brief moment where she: Louisa, Stella, Samantha etc.. made her mistake, frazzled enough to let someone like me, with my kratom-dirtied lips, slip through.
The tank-topped woman I was trailing stopped to greet a man four inches taller than me, so I slinked away to the café across the street to lick my wounds.
I spotted the backside of a familiar barista performatively pinning the Ukrainian flag onto the window of the café. I had ogled her many times, her measurements were memorized… or were they? Were her hips not especially wide today? Was her bosom not unexpectedly full? Were the souls of Russian teens sent to the meat grinder reincarnated as progesterone particles, who through the grace of god, slid into our tap water, forcefully feminizing this goddess before me? Or was this pathology I detailed earlier distorting my vision, transforming average to siren, warping reality? After all, on the train in from New Jersey I consumed seven minutes of pure eastern European gore; a Ukrainian boy squealing in agony because his cat has been pancaked by fallen concrete, a member of Azob facetiming a Russian babushka while sticking his erect cock in her dead son’s mouth, and finally a vertical video of a Ukrainian woman with that funny little arm patch that looks like a crooked bicycle wheel, sprawled out, mangled, intestines showing how long they really are, before it faded to black, cuing blown out audio of her fiancé weeping, prompting me to bump it down a few notches so I could hear the conductor tell me my train had been rerouted.
“It fills me with warmth to know that this local haunt, one I frequently frequent, supports our brave brothers and sisters in Ukraine.”
She turned to me, saving the pinning of the fourth flag point for later, and paradise became lost. Staring into her sunglasses, I peered deep into my own soul, I saw myself as a pathetic sniveling fool, a man just as performative if not more than she let on to be, a fabricator, a phony-
“I know! I love the colors! Reminds me of the University of Michigan football team!”
On the train back to New Jersey I would watch a Russian prisoner of war sputter out how sorry he was, but I would be desensitized to his forehead scar oozing blood, my eyes would be drawn to the gun carried by the man forcing him to say these falsehoods. This stocky Ukrainian goon brandished something familiar, not exactly an AK-47; it was similar in make but more compact. It had been in Jacob Friedberg’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare II loadout, I was sure of it. I imagined myself back in his basement, my prepubescent lips salivating as I gunned downed Spetsnaz troops.
My erection calmed down. I drifted off to sleep only to be awoken by the conductor many stops later, after several nightmarish visions; the movement of the train transformed me into a paratrooper standing above Kharkov, ready to jump, anticipating the drab brutalist apartment complexes getting bigger and bigger, short-circuiting the sex and violence wires, leaving me with a brief moment of stillness, where I could remark to myself about how blue the sky looked and how yellow the fields of wheat appeared to be.