A cold, biting lull of musty inactivity wafted through the gaunt, straining humidity of an
unendearing atmosphere which to most would appear to signify a comforting peace. But to
some peace does not come easy. Whispering noises in the silence; the ongoing derision of a
crafty conscience. Hearing something incomprehensible to the untrained ear, Lincoln dodged
past a string of neon clouds and noticed among drooping 'no parking' signs, flame scorched
vehicles and boarded premises, a cartel of shattered shop windows and smoldering apartment
blocks which fumigated a feculent and featureless environment as they incurred the whinging
wrath of a sulfurous sky with leering lizard tongues of frisking flame. Once a plentiful
kaleidoscope of all manner of stores from the common to the ridiculous; which would have
thrilled the simple minded and disheartened the ideological; this was now just another sorrowful
suburb of a carved and corroded carcass of a City State. "Judging by the recent display of
discommodious desolation I'd say someone was beating that carcass like the proverbial dead
donkey." When a homeopathic habitat contains a cruel culinary cocktail of roaming riotists and
unguarded breakables, somehow and sometime something's going to crack. A scraggy landslide
of glass bathed the streets surrounding West 23rd; the misshapen particles exploiting a benign
flood of moonlight as they fired glinting daggers of light back up to space with Oedipal glee.
'What's this; Kristallnauct?' Lincoln followed the crooked trail of glimmering splinters towards
their source; a white blob of light surrounded by smaller, hovering red lamps a block or so
ahead. Turning the final corner with apt caution, she made certain she blended inconspicuously
into the shabby walls around her as she scanned the landscape in an attempt to take in as much
detail as possible from her harsh surroundings in the shortest time like a super computer feeding
off a dense montage of precious information.
A jittery, densely packed cul de sac sported a handful of beaten vehicles including a burning
pickup truck draped in illegible spray can scrawlings and doused with some sort of flammable
liquid or other just for good measure. One solitary three story building adorned the site;
displaying an adamant resistance to both heat and planning permission. It stood alone in an
empty environment which, regarding its location and the distinct lack of local amenities, should
have been snapped up by some anxious entrepreneur long ago. To add to the decidedly
undelectable atmosphere, a nasty rabble of a dozen or so thugs wielding hammers, fire axes,
poles and sticks moaned and bayed at the remaining establishment like a pack of wild dogs
begging for food or a haunting haggle of long dead zombified carol singers who remained in
season despite their rotted voice boxes ensuring that they drift glaringly out of tune. A crumpled
red flag complete with stub legged swostika looking like it had just been rescued from an
encumbering existence lining a serial drunkard's car boot flew from the truck's twisted aerial;
snapping against the wind and flames with acidic defiance. "Oh wonderful; a niggling little net
of Neolithic nazi types." Lincoln whispered with votive vociferousness from her vantage point
behind a sharp corner a few feet from the yard entrance; "The 'master race'; and I forgot to
bring the red carpet. The only good thing about wars is when this lot lose them, the rest of us
can at least think we've finally washed our woe wrought hands of them. Looks like they're after
another return engagement, don't they always? Brutality is the only language some people
understand. Admittedly, their idiosyncratic ideology isn't directly my problem; hell, if people
want to smoke, take drugs or even slit their own damn throats I guess in a liberal world that's
their business. But its just that athropic attitude that attracts autarchy. When an individual sits
back and does nothing, it's an open invitation for others to do the same, and that's when society
begins to crumble." She bided her time and plotted the orthopedic eradication of a political
disease which the evolution of human understanding should have ensured decades earlier. But
sadly this histrionic hell represented but one of a gigantic pantheon of muggy, morphic holes
from which such boils on the face of humanity habitually emerge. Neo Nazis and other
extremist groups had been commonplace in New York since the breakdown and outré sellout of
law and order. As usual, they would rise up from the poverty of the day and persuade those
overly acrimonious about such pitiful conditions that they had been swayed towards the turbid
supposition that the most efficient approach to dispelling a societal depression was to make a
scapegoat of those who seemed different; normally in the most rudimentary and superficial
manner. White extremism was just one symptom of a common affliction contracted by such
newfangled autonomous states; plagued by instability and internal subversion. But it was also a
way for the new government to allow the people to do their own work. Aggressive political and
racist organizations served the government; they helped wipe out dangerous social elements who
could cause Volscenzi's City State a genuine threat. Typically, the racists didn't hold a high
regard for democratic and libertarian groups, and so dealt with them the only way they knew
how. Thus, Volscenzi didn't have to even lift a finger and his will would automatically be done;
the whole congealing concoction of charismatic counter revolution would fizzle itself out like a
mammoth sparkler gone astray in a particularly unsafe backyard firework show. Also, as
normal it was all too agonizingly clear to him that the racist groups themselves were no sort of
threat at all. "The phrase 'played for suckers' comes to mind." Lincoln was unsure which party
was the worst; the Neo Nazis themselves or the government that left them to their own
degenerate devices. Hatred and prejudice lurked on every corner and sprang from every street. It
was rare only to find an amassed murmation of such satan spawn in one given place at one
given time. The guilty party proceeded to attack the building as if it were a living, thinking
opponent capable of some sort of retaliation; hurling both physical and verbal missiles in the
form of sticks, burning planks and bad language. Lincoln remained in the refreshing shadows
for a moment and thought aloud to herself in satirical soliloquy; "Outspoken bigots are seldom
brave people. They'll vocalize their voluble volitions when promenading in promulgating packs,
but when you get them on their own they'll keep their intransigent inclinations to themselves.
Not to pander to the propensity of presumption, but prejudice propagating peons perennially
pertain to the particularly coward like and with it the predictably stupid." She criticized her own
over indulgent alliteration as if there were two psyches in there; the learned teacher and the fun
loving student; battling for supremacy. "So stupid in fact that I could probably go over there,
claim I was one of them, and they'd oblige me by arming me with one of those seditious surgical
sticks, despite my less than tomato ripe complexion." Turning down the idea, she held back for
a moment and tried to balance composure and self assigned duty with a preparatory breath of
air, and when that didn't work, with an aerobic clenching and opening of the fist. If it wasn't for
proponents of similarly pretentious persecution, she probably wouldn't be here, as she probably
wasn't meant to be. If nature had had it's way, she may never have been born in America, or; as
that devious digression in the back of her head decreed; at all. "Fascism is a gross deformity on
the once awe inspiringly superlative face of this earth, and such blights so easily make
otherwise beautiful spectacles the ugliest of things." Her grandfather had been lucky to escape
that war that many hopeful Twentieth century historians postulated would be the last on its
deplorable scale. He was a Polish Jew, and everyone knows they were very nearly at the top of
the agenda for ethnic cleansing, or whatever they called it in those days. His parents hadn't been
so lucky. In fact, they were double targets because her great grandfather had married an African
girl, and being half black and half Jewish in early 1940's Lodz wasn't wasn't your best bet if
you sought to defract the attention of the invading authorities. To make matters worse he was a
socialist, so the family inevitably qualified as public enemies one, two and three. Her
grandfather moved country twice; first escaping from Poland to England then from England to
America when the blitz brought back lingering night terrors begotten in his purged past. "What
a choice, eh?" Lincoln wondered what would have happened if her grandfather had stayed in
Poland. What if things had remained how they were in 1939; if the war had gone the other way?
She'd have had two totalitarian terrors to choose from, although which was worse was not quite
clear. There, then or here; now? Much as she hated to admit it, she would have chosen here by a
mile. It was not consoling to think that the plights of the present could only be outdone in
history by the most vile eras in the saga of this scourge called human kind. She rolled a foot
from heel to toe then back again on the flame reflecting tarmac beneath her and began her
attempt to prevent yet another personal disaster for some ethnically 'unsuitable' inhabitants at
the blood caked hand of a much smaller scale brigade of brooding and bumptious bullies.
Almost immediately she was confronted by a stentorian skulk of the riotous mob, and gave
an innocent frown as she attempted to guess who the leader was. Obediently, he stepped
forward; a lanky skin headed man with a missing pair of teeth which made his grin mimic that
of a startled pensioner having spat his mouthpiece out when accosted by a bunch of yobbish
youngsters out to solicit his state benefits. A shoal of four pirate like gold earrings hung on his
lugubrious lobe like juvenile koalas to a bending bough and seemed to fizz like television static
as they reflected the flames which danced a wily waltz behind him. He flicked a piece of what
was presumably once a wooden fence from one hand to another and held it in a swatting
position; "Who 'hell's this?" Lincoln almost jumped at his grill like southern accent, but then
realized it was actually quite appropriate on the scale of stereotypically. Andy Keller; literately
nicknamed 'And'; reiterated his unwelcome welcome with distaste and distrust; "You ain't one
a' us; git out 'here or yu git ta be the meat on tha spit" Lincoln's attention was duly directed
towards a boisterous bonfire belching out of the warped inner shell of a steadily baking truck.
She pondered on how long it was likely to take for such an insolent man to react to receiving a
more effective than expected punch from someone of her obviously inferior size and gender in
front of his friends; or more accurately; accomplices. 'Too long'. She concluded to herself;
preparing to put that theory to the test as Keller continued to stare at her blankly like a badly
stuffed ape. Sensing that the two directly behind 'And' were growing restless; brain cells
clicking into motion; having to decide whether or not to make a decision before making one,
Lincoln sped past them and did act by thumping a bruising hook into 'And's' ribs then following
it up with a side on body blow as she stepped towards him. 'Give them an inch; they take a
mile.' She was not prepared to give even the benefit of the doubt over the question of the mob's
fighting prowess. Despite the fact that a punch had barely been thrown so far, in all Lincoln had
already attained her triumph. Fighting is fifty percent mental, forty nine percent expertise and
only one percent strength, and by now the odds were stacked firmly in her favor. But when your
numbers are large and you're willing to cheat, victory is always a tangible expectation. Lee and
Molkte; the next waive of feral fanatics; sent their weapons wailing into the space before them
which Lincoln thoughtfully vacated with a quick sidestep. Then in an almost cheeky maneuver,
she ducked while tracking backwards and snatched a sturdy meter pole from the back of a
parked pickup truck; slipping past the pair with such pace and control that they were confronted
with a strange riddle; if you want to stop a current of water swirling around your feet and away,
what part of its anatomy do you hit? Having weaved past their flummery forms like a
trespassing mouse under a petrified housewife's shoveling broom; she whipped her new weapon
behind her like pulling off a snooker trick shot which made Lee bite metal and an assortment of
his own teeth before collapsing to the ground in a compost like heap. Now Lincoln took a
cautious step back; the sheer number of opponents flocking to exact revenge proving too many
to challenge. Whirling the pole around her like a staff in the hands of a sedulous samurai, she
backed off behind a clutter of broken wood which offered her a homely asylum. But she soon
noticed that loyalties in the rabble were quickly fragmenting. While a small number paused to
help Keller and Lee to their feet, the others; preoccupied by a mission of vengence; dissolved
into a muddled swarm like a glean of saltant shoppers panicked by the prosaic promise of
boastful bargains in the summer sales as they clogged the dank proscenium around her like a
herd of shepherded livestock behind the helpful few. Only Molkte and Tanner; the latter
tightening his gruff grip on a lethal looking fire ax; scrambled through the concatenated crowd
to challenge the upstart in their midst. Two on one was an appealing contest to Lincoln, who
span around in a full circle and unleashed a wide arched pipe swipe which struck both men in
the chin consecutively before whirling back into safety behind her, where she hid it to confuse
the injured party into debating its very existence. But now with the odds against her as the
fraying mob prepared to spill into her like a bout of libatious lava, she decided escape was the
best option, and breaking into an evasive sprint down a handy alleyway, she soon outran her
trigger happy pursuers, who had begun to draw firearms and jostle each other for the
pacemaker's slot in this boisterous chase. Lincoln took the race at an uncannily leisurely speed,
and even found time to chat to herself. 'If they organized themselves, they'd stand a chance of
catching me.' she knew these hapless extremists were unlikely to think on their feet and;
utilizing her own to their maximum potential, she hopped round the corner into the adjoining
street and leapt upwards onto a ticker tape twinkling tenement fire escape as the heated band of
thugs stormed into the road shooting whichever lifeless objects obscured their philistine pursuit.
Lincoln waited in the shadows until the aimless herd's screams and chants faded into the beeps,
hoots and crashes which more familiarly smothered the blossoming sound of silence until the
last two thugs to enter the street; Jerome Carter and the injured Andy Keller, drifted into view
like blurs coming out of a heat haze. 'No matter how many you get rid of...' Lincoln muttered,
accidentally chipping the top rung of the ladder as she made her way back down to street level.
However; realizing even the least able of opponents would thus be alerted to her presence, she
drew a glistening police berretta and let her arm drift out into a vague pointing motion as she
held the thing at a disorienting diagonal as if she was pouring liquid out of a glass; index finger
acting as a makeshift viewfinder down the barrel. Though slow to find his weapon in the
unknown recesses of a Jacobite jacket pocket, Carter was first to react; spinning around gun in
hand; and might have been just in time to receive a slamming puncture in the shin if he hadn't
spun so quickly that he sent himself tumbling like a stoned skittle. Lincoln almost giggled to
herself but held back. Though she prided herself on her aim, she deplored the idea of guns and
gunplay, and had always believed that the policy of the old United States to allow all and
sundry to carry weapons of destruction wherever they went was just an open invitation to the
odd massacre. 'Freedom looses its value when it becomes a soundbite. You have to weigh up
each situation; make sure you don't go overboard. Right to bear arms, right to kill your nearest
and dearest in the most obscure of domestic tiffs and ask questions later.' But always a
character of harsh contradiction, she was sharp eyed enough to skim or scratch a given target
with the otherwise far from delicate tool of a bullet without causing any lasting damage; not
that the odd shattered shin wasn't rough justice. Her elder brother had been one of those black
booted, camouflage kitted army enthusiasts and she'd had to keep up with him to defend herself
whenever he went militaristic with a pellet gun. It was a talent she'd developed further after the
mental institute had been closed down, and had always been told she had the 'eye' of a sniper by
her grandfather. He was a veteran of the Vietnam war; a South Vietnamese who had left for
America when the whole affair went decidedly pear shaped. Perhaps she could've made a good
sniper, but though she had the eye, she never had the appropriate heart; or lack of. Even in such
an insalubrious society, she abhorred unnecessary violence almost as much as she did the
typical US foreign policy she'd have had to represent if she'd been insane enough to apply for
such a preposterous profession. To cement the issue her brother had been killed on his first
assignment for some top secret hit squad who had been packed off by the army to a country
they surely should never have been dancing their trigger-happy fandango in according to a
mountain of international peace treaties, which resulted in the authorities denying all knowledge
even when the deceased officer's families filed for compensation. She had never been a patriot,
and was proud of it.
As Carter screeched to the floor like a a car left utop a hill with the handbrake off,
Keller realized it would probably be wiser to leave this fight for another day and scrambled
back into the alley with a world class sprinter's prowess despite his injuries, which he soon
recalled as the pain bit into him like a hyaline haggle of hypodermic needles and made him
struggle into the cul-de-sac as if hauling along some divine millstone which the powers of
destiny and morality had tied around his neck. Carter remained crumpled and defeated as
Lincoln hid her weapon and shrugged at a choice of career at least her grandfather would have
been proud of; 'If you don't deal with things straight off you just let them get worse. That's the
fallacy where race wars are concerned. Politicians assure us things will blow over. Germany in
the Thirties; Yugoslavia and Rwanda some sixty years later; but this stuff never blows over.
America hardly had a great record when in came to race relations, so you would have expected
things to have improved after that monetary revolution. Patriotism is often the first step towards
racism anyway.' This got her thinking; not a wise thing to do she'd admit, because she was the
sort of person who found she couldn't let something lie in her own head until she'd gone through
the problem and announced her conclusions to herself as if delivering a speech at a news
conference on such an obscure satellite TV linkup that only she could receive whichever pearls
of wisdom she uncovered and repackaged in a manner which anyone could comprehend but
which sadly nobody else could get a hold of. She subconsciously paced back through the
alleyway past the sniveling Keller and skipped behind the flaming truck and out of sight.
"Racism isn't the way forward." Lincoln had a habit of talking to herself. It wasn't the insanity
which made this particular trait a reality, but rather the simple fact that talking made her feel as
if she was not alone and besides, she had one of her most piquant pet hates; racism; to contend
with. Most people of mixed race could claim that somewhere along the line their ancestors had
suffered serious persecution. Given a rich family history, Lincoln's had suffered much, although
she supposed everyone carried that burden. The practical problem was suffering in this life.
"Segregation isn't the way forward. It's an unfortunate fallacy for people to think they can fight
prejudice with prejudice and somehow win. Racism is an animal of circumstance. You're doing
badly in life, so you use a scapegoat; you pin the blame on someone else, and who else. Those
people who you can tell are different from yourself; different through skin color, through
language, through nationality, through religion. Racism is little more than a deficiency of mind
and morality. You don't have a job, so you want someone to blame; someone must have taken
your job. Really such self centered excuses should have gone out with the bubonic plague.
Honestly, human thought is supposed to evolve through history. Gladly the generation growing
up now, on the whole, is anti racist; that's how they've been brought up, so when they grow up,
the world will be a better place. As society becomes more mixed we'll loose sight of such
superficial notions, and perhaps then the loud, jackbooted minority will turn on their heels and
leave." The intermitent chug of a passing taxicab momentarily scathed Lincoln's vision, but
undeterred she preached on to a deaf society. "I guess because I'm multiracial myself I don't see
why people continue to walk racist paths. Whether that path is that of the oppressed or the
oppressor is of no consequence. History shows that the oppressed often become the oppressors
in the end anyway; and just as racist as those who they disposed. I'm proud to be the race I am;
all of them. I'm proud to be part white. I'm proud to be part black. I'm proud to be part Asian.
I'm proud to be part Jewish, part African. But I'm not stupidly proud. I'm not proud of any
particular race, I'm just proud that I'm a rich, healthy mixture. I'm interested in my roots;
probably because I don't really have much of a history to call my own. Culture is what you
make it. If we break down these fictional racial divides society will be much richer for it, and
though some would say this is an impossible dream, that's just admitting defeat- its to fool
yourself that these divides actually exist outside our own habitual labeling of things; the
ongoing mental cataloging through which we get ourselves caught up in endless nets of fictional
differentiations. Racism is only one symptom of the totalitarian terror in which we live. The
most disturbing thing is that most people don't even realize they live in a despotic state. If you
believe you live in a ubiquitous utopia; that everyone else lives like you do; pampered by
plangent privilege; it's reassuring; to believe everyone else is in the same boat." Unfortunately
reality was not so attractive.
"Evil is most definitely a problem; spiritually as well as politically. Yeah; there's evil in
the world, but people tend to forget that there's also good." She trundled out of the smoldering
dead end like a flaming cartwheel as her body shuddered to counteract the sudden change in
temperature, which for all intents and purposes was a reliving one. Lincoln wanted to believe in
the inherent positively of humanity. She wished she could appreciate the fundamental goodness
of the world, but after what the past had dished out, the angel in her conscience often had to
reassure her not to turn herself over to the devil. "The question is is there a god; a being beyond
us who looks over us? The second question is does that being look out for us?" She stepped
over a bolting black cat which appeared to signify some superior intelligence; a power which
planted it there just to shake the cobwebs of doubt aside and keep her on the straight and
narrow path which led to a destiny she could not imagine but which the lord obviously had in
mind all the way. "OK so let's say evil exists; just for argument's sake; afterall, experience
seems to indicate that it does." Lincoln was an agnostic when it came to the existence of true
evil; surprising baring in mind her past although still reverberating suffering. When it came to
god's existence she was even less certain of her opinion. "Does the fact that evil exists mean god
doesn't? The thing is that to make the leap between the pronouncement that evil exists based on
observation and the conclusion that therefore god does not; due to logic; we have to have
already defined to ourselves the nature of god, which seems a bizarre state of affairs when we
consider that the majority of those who posit the argument that god doesn't exist because of evil
already disbelieve in that self same power. How, then, are they so convinced that god is
good, that god is all powerful, that god is still present in the universe, can understand our plight
and could conceivably bring about the paradoxical situation where he, she or it could intervene
to put a stop to evils we undoubtedly create ourselves and yet not deny us our free will? It
seems strange that people who do not believe in god have such a clear view of what god is like.
What if god is evil, or weak, or an absentee, or beyond the realms of right and wrong; suffering
and joy? What if god would prefer us to find our way ourselves rather than carry us down the
path to salvation?" She hadn't quite realized yet that she was really asking herself these
questions, although there was clearly nobody else around save a bunch of sleeping pigeons who
formed a neat, inquisitive row atop a trampled tarpaulin roof and appeared to listen as if the
theistic ramblings of a human being would prove more reliable than the peck sized insomnia
pills which the bird race had not yet evolved sufficiently to invent. The fact was that Lincoln
herself was continually persuaded and dissuaded by the existence of god. On the one hand , the
world was wonderful; a manifestation of a great design. Nature produced marvels man could
only fail to replicate. Love was a force which could only have emanated from the heavens.
Chance played funny tricks. On the other hand, the world was a calamitous hell. The theory of
evolution was bland but backed up by fact. Love could and had been quite violently stripped
away and chance had never been good to her. Still, there was a certain something; a certain
power; which part of her wanted to label 'God.' An undeniable, untenable, unspeakable force
which inflamed her wounded heart like a dash of vinegar to a gaping cut. There was an
intention for her; a path. She was really a rebellious victim of a murderous maladministration
who for her sins thought too much. Perhaps god had intended for her to just be; to abandon the
unreliable rational deliberation and experience his existence first hand. "At the risk of
commiting an act of plagiarism;" god had obviously placed those final words open not only for
the audience, but the players as well; "perhaps that leap of faith beacons." She was strong in
will, strong in soul; if only her jumbled mind and pained heart could stand up to the theodic test.
In situations like these, she felt comforted by the fact that she still possessed the necessary
faculties to clear that crippled mind of its emotional rubble for a time at least. Sometimes its
just good to forget; to let the thing heal rather than prod the metaphorical laceration. One day it
might be possible to relieve herself of the pain. Afterall, pain is a mental entity; a non physical
concept. If you prick a finger and you have some device which is quick enough to intercept the
message before if gets to the brain, you won't feel the pain, right? It's all of mental construction.
If you refine the mind enough; get to know it; you can even get to the point where you can taste
things without eating them; hear things distinctly even if you're deaf as if there's a stereo system
in between your ears. It's all a matter of being cleverer than your brain, as it were. Of fooling
your brain that a certain physical thing has happened to influence it into releasing the
appropriate chemical reactions. Lincoln clearly had a lot of refining to do yet; and that endeavor
rarely progressed far due to the plain fact that she didn't really want to get to know her mind
better, added to the fact that afterall, thinking rots the brain. She had more pressing concerns.
There is always the danger of biting off more than you can chew; of going out to save the world
before even beginning to save yourself and the people around you. It's no good becoming a
preacher if you have not yet achieved the state of realization you're preaching about. To create a
better world for both oneself and others is a momentous task at best for a single, small human
being, but like all other hopeless causes, at least it was a fightable one.
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