King of the Californias Pt XI

by Monk Eastman, NYC, USA

I recognize Montoya Dred by his painfully chalky skin, visible from the other side of the market as he reclines by a tiny folding table, chipped little espresso cup balanced on his egg-shaped belly, coffee splashing all over his flower-print shirt. When I say chalky, let me be clear: Dred's skin is ashy, like a fine dust has settled on him. Dull as marble, undercut only by the Niagara of sweat crashing down his face and neck. Soaked up by thinning mud-colored hair, looking like he's spent the day hiking in a rainforest, followed by a perpetual funk of fermenting milk and orange peels. Facial tics, nail biting, constant palsy in his hands, insomnia, scratching until his skin is raw--Pilkner's Condition, they call it. Damage to his thyroid. Ongoing nervequakes. Developed back in LA, when he strung himself out on supamedrin and thurgoprexin to stay awake for weeks at a stretch.

This was when he was Kelvin Black's war chief, of course, lean muscle swabbed in camouflage and body armor. These days, it's kind of difficult to imagine this palsied, stuttering ghost as the man who forced submission from a professional baby-killer like General Li Shen (affectionately known as 'Genocide Li' to the survivors of Taipei). The same man whose tactics are studied at West Point, King's War College, the Robb Institute. Montoya Dred: holy terror of southwest Los Angeles, reduced to a spastic hobo, fallen and lame--although (perhaps thankfully) not under his real name. 'Montoya Dred' was something Kelvin Black cooked up in the aftermath of a khat-and-gangrape binge, most likely atop the ruins of Universal Studios. The man who turned back five armies at Laguna Beach was born Baruch Melman, originally of Royal Oaks, Michigan.

How do I know?

He was one of the first expats I interviewed for my project. Eighteen months back, in a musty motel room, wallpaper peeling, shouting over the boom of transports leaving orbit from nearby Newark Liberty. In between flights, he told me he was consulting with a few different people. 'Little things,' he said, which I suppose was a polite way to say 'training death squads'. Since that interview, Melman has popped up in Hanzhou, Naxalstan, Brunei, Wahabi Arabia, Juarez and Iowa, always just ahead of some noteworthy crime against the species--and now he's here, which does not auger well for the Republic of Northern California.

Sometimes it feels as though this project of mine has made tracking these creatures my primary function. Meticulous records of even their most casual antics are shared and updated by a network of people you could characterize as a cult, I suppose, who determined from Melman's travel patterns and spending habits that he is never paid more than travel costs and a hot meal, and never stays in one place more than a few weeks. The price of his life, it seems, is to be indentured servant to the world's quiet kingmakers and their backroom bureaucracies. No trials for Baruch Melman. Much too valuable an asset as he is.

Seeing him here, sipping coffee with Cecilio Goncz, curdles something in my stomach. There's a fundamental wrongness to them taking coffee in the middle of a crowded market, children chasing each other around their ankles, families shopping, lovers laughing, kissing, holding hands...

Realistically, Goncz and Melman would slaughter the whole market between sips of their coffee, if need dictated. Yet here they are, politely slurping Guatemalan Antigua like they're functional, healthy members of the human tribe, discussing the weather, current events, energy prices on the Chicago Wind and Fuel Exchange...

I reach the table, find Mr Goncz in his trademark sunglasses, shirtless, body a mosaic of living tattoos, grinding together across a scarred, brown body starting to show the sag of age. Starched, creased khakis, held high on his waist by black suspenders. Vintage canvas trainers on his feet. Jesus bleeds perpetually from the cross on his chest, crown of thorns dragging furrows into his brow every time he shakes his head. Some people add audio to their animated body art, little generic screams radiating from their tortured Jesuses as they pass you on the street. Mr Goncz has thankfully foregone this feature. As livetattoos go, his is almost tasteful.

"Funny running into you like this, huh?" Goncz chuckles. "You know my man, Monty, I think."

"Don't be calling me fucking 'Monty'," Melman grumbles, "I God-damn told you, already."

Goncz replies in a mash of maybe eight languages. Whatever he says, Melman rolls his eyes, throws the rest of his coffee back, and stares absently at his fingernails, which I see have been chewed to bloody nubs.

"Take a seat," Mr Goncz offers. "Have some coffee. It's excellent."

"Don't be listening to prickfuck, over here," Melman warns. "The coffee tastes like it was made by boiling a pack of rat terriers."

"You'll like it," Mr Goncz says smoothly, pouring me a cup from a dented metal pot. "Trust me."

Melman laughter sounds like a mule choking.

I swish around the nicked cup. The coffee's thick as horse spit. I let it cool on the table, and casually ask Mr Melman what brings him to NoCal.

"Eh," he mutters, left cheek twitching like a butterfly with a pin through it. "You know. Little things. Consulting. The usual."

I think of last night's bombardment of the Far East End, and something tightens in my throat. How would I tag this story? What would it net me to air this pair out to the press? Allied Info would pay me a panda's weight in gold to publicize two of the century's greatest atrocity-makers in Oakland, operating in plain sight of the authorities. Goncz would gut me like a trout, of course, but I'd die a rich man, having done my civic duty outing him and his cohort. Because given the less than jovial basis of their relationship, I'd venture their coffee klatsch has nothing to do with catching up on old times. There are plans in the ether for NoCal.

And I genuinely wonder if any of us will survive them.

King of the Californias Pt X

by Monk Eastman, New York City, NY, USA

The corner of Broadway and Embarcadero smells like fresh earth and mother ocean. The sea breeze is signature California: rolls across me like Nirvana. My shoulders unbunch. The tension in the middle of my forehead loosens. Suddenly I'm grinning like some kind of drugged idiot. Back in the 20s, a professor at UC-SB theorized the local flora stimulated human production of endorphins––California as pheromonal Feelgood Factory. Only the Department of Tourism was sold on the theory, but fresh-faced tourists from every corner of the globe still walk, bicycle, and skate past, that same subtle grin on their mugs. It's got mythical qualities, California, and when you've got it good, the place is Eden.

Across the street, construction on the Memorial Promenade continues. They wanted antique, sun-bleached cobblestone walk, and have actual workmen digging up Embarcadero all the way to East Street: picks and shovels, grunting and sweating. What they used to call 'honest work' before that kind of labor became pointless. Some would argue when I say 'pointless'. After all, could an engineering firm wave a magic wand and generate the same rustic artisanship? Would there be the quaint imperfections of hand-quarried stone? Any good fabrication engineer would agree with me and tell you that science has square-rooted the subtlety of natural-looking limestone down to the final decimal. That as a civilization, we're so far removed from even knowing what natural quarried stone looks like; the fabricated stuff is indistinguishable. Antiquarians swear we'd know the difference, though. Normally, I'd ridicule, except I can taste the difference between locally-farmed coffee and the fabricated stuff, which isn't supposed to happen. Score one for the antiquarians, I suppose. They get their hand-crafted promenade.

I'm just glad the men are working by the waterfront and not sitting idly in the East End, waiting for the rain of decompiler bombs.

The Promenade falls in the shadow of what locals call the Embarcadero Curtain: a brand new skyline that blocks the sun. The Palma de Baía is one of twenty luxury hotels on the strip, and one of the few with rigid construction: solid frame for the hotel, but a liquid interior, meaning its iconic, candied shell is constant, but the interior layout and decor is customizable and programmable. Al-Ansur/Menschowicz+Yiu (realspace Saõ Paolo, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Boston, and Kingston) maintain the interior fabrication based on designs by the Hubert Vokker Firm of Soho. Its immediate neighbor, The Bacon-Yeates, is a growth culture, shaped like a giant green jellied dome. Yesterday it was a beautiful blue 35-story porcupine quill. Beside that, the Auld American looks like the Washington Monument. The owners are Japanese, and keep a rigid, highly-publicized schedule. This time next month, the hotel will look like Mt. Rushmore. My mother's wife has an alarming desire to spend their anniversary in Theodore Roosevelt's nose, and who am I to deny her? There's a world of frenzied tourists looking to cash in before the Republic of Northern California falls apart, crashes the economy, or both.

I turn up Broadway, towards one of a dozen markets, marked by bright pastel tents and kiosks made of stray bits of wood, plastic, and corrugated steel. Sounds of farmlife bleating and the somber capitalist mewling of people with nothing useful to sell. A bent crone offers recycled cotton from the back of a mule marked 'property of NGen'. The company leases clones all over NoCal. 'Telefauna', they call them. 'The ultimate renewable resource.' NGen has been banned in Europe and South America for usury. There's even a bill waiting in Congress to penalize the company, but it's pretty toothless, by all accounts. New England, the Greenbelt and Florida have banned clone leasing, but otherwise, there's not a lot regulating NGen in the States--or here in California. If the old lady sells every scrap of cotton, she'll probably still owe money on the transportation she used bringing it downtown. Rough market, Oakland.

I purchase an orange from a toothless Okie no older than fifteen, swastika and crossbones in the middle of his forehead, little black lightning bolts dancing across his knuckles. I wonder if he even knows what they mean. The orange is bitter, probably grown at one of those terrible organic farms up in Mar Verde. Buy coconut water from a Jamaican woman shrouded in full hijab, smile visible even through her veil.

Mill past stalls offering scavenged junk from the ruins of San Francisco, stalls selling hand-carved wooden toys, stalls selling home-made housecleaning robots, stalls selling 'salvaged gourmet' from luxury hotel garbage...block after block of stalls, voices risen in English, Gonja, Ewe, Portuguese, Spanish, Farsi, Cantonese, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Arabic, Russian...every exile in the world, here. Say what you will about Prime Minister Pivens, but his open door policy for refugees has probably saved more lives than his domestic agenda could ever ruin.
Stop at a tent selling military surplus, supposedly from Sacramento. Cracked pieces of ceramic armor, optic fragments from siting equipment, scraps of camouflage. Hunks of metal, twisted by unimaginable fury. I linger over the military patches. Mostly Golden Bear stuff. A few animated paramilitary patches. Then I spot the sword with three lightning bolts. U.S. Special Forces' patch. 

America in California.

It doesn't even sound natural. I'm about to ask the price of the patch, when I spot a great terrible smile beaming at me from across the market, made of alligator's teeth grafted into a human mouth.

Cecilio Goncz raises an espresso cup in my direction, seated delicately at a small folding table by a steaming coffee cart pushed by a crusty-looking Okie with flat eyes and a bent nose. The subject of my project's smile is ghoulish in dusk light--in daylight, it's positively frightening. He waves me over, pointing to his drinking partner, a creature I recognize on sight.

Montoya Dred.

The Devil of Laguna Beach.

Sitting for a cup of afternoon coffee with my father.

King of the Californias Pt IX

by Monk Eastman, New York City, NY, USA

I am pleased to wake up without my throat slit. No warnings painted on the wall in my own blood, no severed horse's head laid artfully at my feet. Just the warm, familiar smells of roasted coffee and steaming plantains. For a moment, I am almost fooled into thinking I conjured Cecilio Goncz from the bottom of a shot glass, and that I am actually hungover in my bed back on Pitt Street, Mississippi lapping a lazy tattoo at my door, Althea in the kitchen, preparing chickory and mofongo. Smile faintly, thoughts of sunning in my garden, watching the river roll by, maybe going to the French Quarter for some afternoon shopping.

Then I see the amber bedposts, the crennelated diamondine doors, great blue emptiness where Althea should be beside me, and the smile fades.

This is not Pitt Street and I am not in New Orleans.

This is Oakland. It is not my home.

The room knows my favorite smells, music, and foods; the room knows my news habits. So, before I'm even out of bed, I've seen Northern California's armies continue their police action on the East Side, because Sgt Enrique Pernil of the Golden Bear Republic Guard is broadcasting, with attendant maps and footage dancing across my skin. I listen to Khaled Bhargouti snark New York City's mayor for his latest public cocaine-and-ladyboy binge, bug-eyed mug-shots spinning three-sixty in the space behind my eyes. I chuckle as Eiko Orizumi's scathing assessment of Alaskan President McMenniman's foreign policy trickles through my left cochlear. That chuckle dims when my other ear echoes with news of sabotage on the Minneapolis SonicRail en route to Chicago (still counting the dead, aerial view of the disaster splayed beneath the skin of my right thigh). Above the chorus of morning news, word from the east, where The Voice of Free Sacramento declares his insurgents' victory over Prime Minister Pivens, images of the gutted city rolling across the palms of my hands.

Having met the Benny Pivens, I have a very clear vision of the tantrum he must be throwing right now. He had planned on parachuting into the wartorn city from California One, make a media event of it, sound the horn of the Golden Bear. After all, he made reclaiming Sacramento a keystone of his domestic policy; the whole 'Project: Normal' phase of his Golden Bear Initiative, ending in a single, functional government. Given the resources he's thrown at it, Sacramento's continued disobedience has become this terrible hemorrhaging gut wound in public perception. A Padanian commenter whispers seductively of regime change as the quick fix. His counterpart in Bogota cackles that regime change implies swapping heads, leaving some kind of system intact. As all his opponents have been dispatched with russian efficiency, Benny Pivens is the only system left. Somewhere in the chorus, I hear an economist moan of the next global contraction. Guandong's investment in the NoCal peseta, she says, hangs around the economy like a lead weight. Others hope at reconciliation with America to offset the creeping chaos. Or some kind of deal with Canada. Or Alaska. Or even Federal Mexico. A thousand geniuses light the dark with their brilliant analyses. It is, after all, the age of the prodigal amateur, and we are only too eager to engage.

I rise, shower, let the sonics flow over me, through me, shaking the filth off like a shaggy dog. It's not the same as a water shower, where there is at least a loose sense of baptism, renewal. The soundbath just insures no one gets me by spiking the pipes. Paranoid? Not after Ottawa, where the subject of my story tried to very politely shake me off his track with a tailored H-621 virus in the plumbing. I reason that if you're running among wolves, why tempt them with an exposed throat?

I throw on a simple white kaftan and orbiter boots, grab my gobag and let my luxury quarters go about cleaning and sealing itself from prying eyes. Once I'm out of range, the newsfeeds slough off like dead skin.

This morning, the lobby is a vaulted cathedral of white Italian marble, its streetside entrance a psychedelic animation embedded in diamond doors. Tomorrow it could be an angular ice palace made of sharp crystal and topaz. Or a replica of Napoleon's Court. Or a kitschy remix of Katz's Delicatessen on New York's Lower East Side. The whimsy of the Palma de Baía is legendary.

Onward to Oakland and a day without the specter of Cecilio Goncz and his pall of rape camps and genocide.

I hope.

King of the Californias, Pt. VIII

by Monk Eastman, New York City, NY, USA

The walls of my room pulse with Turkish ouds, soft bassline from a Tijuana garage, and Gregorian wails. Latest from Ç1Q, my favorite band. Of course my room knows it, and at the Palma de Baís, it even has access to the pirate tracks from the legendary Gastown Sessions. 'Rare' is not the word. 8 Feather and Rafiq Angeles took Ç1Q's first release (arguably the most listened-to album of the past fifteen years) and battled each other with it, remix for remix, in front of a live audience in Gastown, Vancouver. Ç1Q's stuff is normally like scented oil poured over silk. Kind of music that starts baby booms. At Gastown, they inverted it, turned it into godclash: what was in the Lord's ears when He razed Sodom. I thought data sieves at the venue meant no recordings made it out alive. Somehow, though, my room plays it, at a volume that accents my foul mood without exacerbating it. My elevated blood pressure, eye movement, personal kinetics, and listening history give the room just enough information to strike such a vital balance.

I'm reminded, very acutely, how little I like this sort of thing. Being under a microscope. Dissected without a single cut.

And I find myself desperately missing Chicago.

Wandering aimlessly along the green belts of Englewood. The great glass ziggurat of Kennedy King University, where I spent my latter days cultivating this (almost) useless mobile journalism degree. Countless midnights at the Tibetan food kiosks of Archer Avenue, served warm pockets of momo with volcanic, greasy red sauce on my way home from the artists' lounges of Bridgeport. Whisper of the Orange's Line's maglev trains sweeping past, kiss of ghostwind as it twisted into the night, snakelike and graceful.

But mostly, the Appleville Quiet Zone. Lone concrete tower, sanctuary from the continuous avalanche of a world where a song listened to on your way to work is logged in the depths of the nebulous Network, alongside your love of lung-scorching Central Asian cuisine and snarky Lebanese newsfeeds, odd collection of vintage '40s footwear, and baffling predilection for 20th century rap music. All there, always updating. Only private in the sense that you don't know who else is looking at it. Your tiny vein of personal data, mined endlessly by faceless, nameless things, scattered across the globe, feeding on the minutiae of daily life. Masticating the delicate ephemera of your life with great insectoid jaws and expelling it out over vast, intersecting planes of data, picked through by shit-merchants, sold to the highest bidder.

All so the Palma de Baía can play back the music I lost my virginity to, in the witching hours of that sweatless, fog-breathed Gastown night.

Now, as then, Appleville was the only place that felt real. Substantial. Single telephone per floor. Voice-only, hardwired into Chicagoland with copper-and-spit. Newsfeeds replaced with passive content. An actual hard library, where I read Upton Sinclair for the first time in print. Analog music, on antique standalone machines. An oasis of silence in a world of endless, low-intensity chatter. All right there, on W. 24th Place, just under the Dan Ryan. In retrospect, my nineteen months there was a gift. To live in such blessed antiquity...

And all because Chicago is the holy land: unique as a city that cherishes cloistral peace almost as much as the wild howl of its own progress. A place where tranquility is sown with the practiced hand of a Zen gardener, in Quiet Zones just like Appleville. Or Dalton. Markham. Bronzeville. The Low End. Modern day ashrams in the financial capital of North America. Such peace I'd never known...nor have I since.

And I compare it now to Oakland, where the night screams with attack drones, and the hills crash with artillery thunder. From Chicago to Toronto is a two hour trip by SonicRail. Here, it takes just as long to travel from Jack London Square to San Antonio Park, because the old 880 Freeway has been bombed to its component molecules by so many overlapping armies. Federal Unionists. The 321st Nevada Counter-Insurgent Insurgents (U.S. Volunteer Irregulars). The Alameda Independence Army. The Northern Aztlan Front. The New-New Wobblies. White Power Militias (Orthodox and Reform). The Golden Bear Unity Party. The Party For the Dignity of Angeleno Refugees. All of them mixing in the flats of East Oakland, trading shots with Prime Minister Pivens's choice assortment of heartless eye-gougers and ear-pullers. A fellow mobile journalist made note the other day that the Republic of Northern California proudly advertises itself as a nation without POW camps.

That is because the NoCal army is no longer taking prisoners.

In order for Prime Minister Pivens to give Los Angeles' expatriate war criminals respite without embargo or censure, he must provide the Hague at least an illusion of respectability. He is crafting that illusion with ashes of the dead and the blood of dissidents.

And my mind keeps wandering back to Chicago. To Appleville. Where I slept at night wrapped in the sweet impenetrable cold of anonymity. Ignorance. Perfect disconnectedness. Back in it now, tangled at the center of a burning web, (perhaps not surprisingly) threaded of all the weird, bad moments I'd sought to escape in Chicago; tied together to create this poor, weary author, eking out his literary pittance to a mixed soundtrack of Californian massacre and Ç1Q's remixed ouds. And I sadly recall this web has always been, and I always at its center.

And I wonder for the first time if I will ever enjoy the blessed silence of Chicago again.

Or if that silence ends here.

In Oakland.

King of the Californias Pt VII

by Monk Eastman of New York City, NY, USA

My subject steps onto the balcony as if his night just segued from a dinner party with foreign dignitaries. He sits, one leg folded delicately over the other, scoops up his abandoned martini, drains the glass in one gulp. Were it not for the pistol dangling from his free hand, there would be no obvious indication he'd survived an assassination attempt forty-three minutes ago, or that the sole survivor of the incident was perched in his hotel suite living room, pinned to the floor by a softknife. His livetattoos scroll by, a Gutenberg Bible worming across his brow, one prayer at a time.

I ask if he is alright.

Mr Goncz chuckles, extracts a vial of tobacco from his black linen jacket, some rolling paper, and reclines in a chair I reckon cost roughly the GDP of Guatemala. "I should be asking you the same thing, eh?"

I assure him of my condition, and ask who is attackers were, if he knows their motives.

"'Motive'," he says, popping the finished cigarette in his mouth, lighting it with a candle from the crystal tabletop. He inhales, brow furrowing. The livetattoos morph into a long line of question marks.

I tell him that if he doesn't know, it's an equally acceptable answer.

"Where you from, homes?" he asks.

I remind him of the dossier my employer forwarded to his press agent.

"I didn't ask about a presskit sent by some piece of shit necktie sitting behind a desk in Chicago. I asked where you're from."

Someone dumps a bucket of ice down my back. Heart rate spikes. Sphincter clenches. A battledrone built somewhere in Guandong swoops by. Someone has painted 'Central Coast Surfboy Nazis Say Hi, Niggers!' on its side. I wonder if whoever painted it thought the insurgents in East Oakland would ever pay that much attention, as the automated raptor dropped decompiler bombs on their nursery schools and churches. I think about the dead and dying just a few miles from here, and wonder if the Palma de Baís's security staff will be disposing of my body the way they disposed of Goncz's would-be assassins. I wonder if they would wake my mother from her voluntarily induced coma to tell her how her son died. Or if anyone would ever know.

I tell him where I'm from.

The answer pastes itself against Oakland's neon skyline, screeching ceramic warbirds flying past, bombing the Deep East End into a flatland of crushed mortar and powdered bone. Artillery thunders, cry of emergency sirens fifty stories below, soldiers clear Jack London Square; sound of bent-hip California thrashing in its bed. Cecilio Goncz, warlord and entrepreneur, still as a baby's corpse, his thousand-dollar-a-gram tobacco wasting away as his cigarette dangles idly from the corner of his mouth. The moon above seems to hold its breath.

"If that's the case," Goncz says slowly, "then you know 'motive' isn't always what does it."

I ask if he thinks the woman in his living room would agree with that sentiment.

"Ay," he growls. "Don't be getting smart with me now. Just because you're—" He stops, flicks some ash, uncrosses his legs. The livetattoos turn to lightning bolts. "Just because we're talking here, like people, doesn't invite you to get all fuckheaded with me, get it? It's a whole world out there, would kill you for something a lot less rational than 'motive.' Things in this world, you can't always put a name to them."

I agree, and tell him so.

He looks at me sideways. "Figured you might." He finishes his cigarette, flicks the butt off the balcony. Stares at me for a moment, then brandishes his pistol. "Am I going to need this around you?"

I ask why he didn't ask that before accepting my interview.

"Because I used to have an assistant. And a chauffeur. And a bodyguard."

And now he doesn't. He has to be his own security. Reminder that the old days of murder and pillage are not so far away, even at the Palma de Baís hotel. And that maybe, just maybe, he's grown tired of them. I tell him he won't need the pistol for me. He smirks, lays it on the table.

"For my peace of mind, then. Or maybe for mi amor in the living room."

When I ask him what he intends to do with his prisoner, his shoulders move a little. It's almost a shrug. Given his time in the bedroom, communicating with the shrinking community of expatriate Los Angeles warlords; I ask if there have been an similar precedents.

"This is the Palma de Baía, homey," he says reproachfully. "They don't call it a 'bedroom'. They call it a 'sleepvault'. Bed's this bean-shaped fucking coffin, filled with warm saline and those acoustic things that shut your brain off. And yeah there's 'precedent', and yeah, I'm going to have a little talk with my new ladyfriend at some point, but you don't need to hear all that. Take your ass downstairs. Go to sleep."

I ask him when he will sleep.

The livetattoos fade. He raises his chin to California's sky, closes his eyes. "There is no sleep. I maybe rest, some time. Maybe later, if the night lets me. But the biggest maybe is maybe you fuck off 'til tomorrow, write up your little write-up. Let old Cecilio do what he does best without those eyes of yours on me."

I make for the door, pause as I look at the woman nailed to the floor.

"She ain't gonna hurt you. Just go."

Look back, and those organic, grafted alligator's teeth leer at me from the darkness. If he has not had me killed in my bed, and I am alive in the morning, I will continue the interview. Do my best to remain objective.

And find out exactly what kind of man my father is.

King of the Californias, Pt V

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

As its guest book reads like a who's who of global atrocity-makers, disposal of dead bodies has become a premier feature at the Palma de Baía. Oakland's foremost hotel has an experienced staff of morticians, equipped with forensic-baffling equipment that would give the CIA a mile-long erection. That, and the hotel's love affair with municipal law enforcement, makes the three dead women on Cecilio Goncz's living room a nuisance instead of a felony. From the balcony, I watch the men in papery silver jumpsuits strip the corpses naked, and clumsily dump them into transparent bodybags filled with some sort of icy green fluid, vapor rising sickly. They throw the giant bladders onto gurneys, and trundle out of the room with all the gravity of errant bellhops.

Goncz's prisoner slumps over her crucifixion, long passed out from shock. Hands pinned to her thigh, she looks like a supplicant, bowed in prayer; though I can't imagine to what. Her breath is audibly ragged to even my cheap recorder's amplifier, some twenty feet away and separated by a pane of artificial diamond. Mr Goncz hasn't caught on that I recorded his initial encounter with the assassins, and as he is busy making calls from the bedroom, I have no plan on stopping. I see him in the distance, hands flailing wildly, livetattoos above his eyes dancing through a dozen languages, always the same message: Only God Can Judge Me. When he gets like this, his tone takes an undulating quality: loud one word, quiet the next. It's impossible for my little recorder to make any sense of it.

I observed the first such call upon my arrival in NoCal. I waited at Pivens Aerospace Center for five hours, bleary-eyed from intra-orbital flight, assured by Mr Goncz's assistant that a driver would be there for me shortly. When one finally did, it was the assistant himself, in a rental car. I was told in hushed, cautious tones that the driver, Silvio, had been picked up that morning by agents of the Carter Center. By that afternoon, he'd been tried for war crimes in Los Angeles, and by that evening, publicly sentenced at West Hollywood's Sunset Plaza. Shipped off to Angel Island for some time with the Big Chair: fifty years of sensory deprivation compressed into ten minutes, courtesy of a hack directly into the parietal lobe. Survivors tend to wear diapers, and have trouble producing complete sentences. Mr Goncz spent the bulk of that day screaming at the phantoms on the other end of his communicator, at his assistant, and finally at me: the Piece-of-Shit-Reporter-From-Chicago.

Three days later, Goncz's assistant disappeared.

Another cycle was wasted on Goncz's rant, blasted to his peers across the globe in every medium available. He was unsure if Glen had just run off, been killed by one of his long-standing enemies, or defected to Los Angeles in exchange for leniency. Goncz's greatest fear is still the Simone J. Carter Center for Peace and Justice. Based out of the Watts Refuge, its agents span the globe, wrangling expats back to the Republic of Los Angeles, where their trials have a circus atmosphere: defendants paraded about in bright orange jumpsuits, barefoot, shaven, starved, ball-gagged and drugged; the proceedings little more than a high-verbal horsewhipping before the inevitable sentence, always the same: the Big Chair at Angel Island. The prospect of which sends Goncz into nervous fits, making hour-long calls to anonymous power-brokers, demanding midnight assurances that his position is secure, and the vulture-beaked specter of retribution is well at bay. As he has pointed out, his once-vast wealth is heavily invested in the Northern Republic of California's reconstruction. His belief is that he is insulated from his enemies.

That assessment may have undergone a dramatic turn with today's events.

Assurances aside, it seems to me that Cecilio Goncz's life has become defined by a series of concentric circles, himself at the center. As each surrounding ring is worn down, his response becomes more frantic. I'm concerned that this has yet to translate as violence towards me. My host has a long, documented history of ending interviews at knife-point. Since my arrival, two of his closest companions have disappeared, and now, these assassins. By my own reckoning, I'm bad luck, writ large in neon. What Mr Goncz is thinking is beyond me.

But as he comes from the bedroom, pistol in hand, it is of rising priority that I find out.

King of the Californias Pt IV

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

A softknife isn't much more than a floppy length of plastic, malleable enough to tie in a bow until contact with electricity, when it goes rigid as aircraft-grade aluminum. At ease, the human body generates about 120 watts, and since electro-sensitive plastics aren't detectable by anything short of costly tight-bandwidth spectrometers, the softknife has become modern upgrade to the common prison shank. It’s not actually surprising, then, that Cecilio Goncz sneaked one past the Palma de Baís’s security. What's dazzling is that he got an actual chrome-and-ceramic pistol into his room, and used it expertly on the invaders who crashed midway through our interview.

From the balcony, I have a reasonable view of the suite’s living room, where Goncz confronts his attackers in the brutally forthright manner that death-proofed him against rival Los Angeles warlords. Three black-cloaked forms litter the floor, haloed by evaporating pools of their own vital fluids, decompiled by the expensive self-cleaning rug. Goncz stands over a fourth figure, bowed on its knees, hands pinned to a single thigh by the softknife, pistol to the throat. Goncz leans in, his lips moving. The lightning bolt livetattoos above his eyes flicker red and black, pale nictitating membranes blinking out of sync with his actual eyelids.

Distant bomb blasts over East Oakland remind me I was left outside for reasons apart from safety. Separated by a door of synthetic, grown diamond, I have a moment for contemplation. It is an important moment in my project. I have only gotten this far with Mr Goncz by being passive. History is littered with men like me, who maybe thought too much, pushed too hard at the wrong moment, and abruptly discovered just how disposable they were. Modesty has worked to my advantage thus far. So long as I balance my subject's monstrous past with my own clinical detachment, the project can continue apace. But as much as I want to remain in his good graces, I know this thing will never develop without some initiative. Scripted questions and canned answers won't get me my Pulitzer. Minor risks, I reason, will take me further than the safe route I've taken. I adjust the acoustics on my recorder, set it to use the balcony door as an amplifier, and am soon listening to my subject’s conversation.

“...did you find me?” he asks.

The survivor makes a moaning sound. I realize at that moment those aren’t black cloaks. They’re hijabs. Goncz’s attackers are women. When the survivor doesn’t make any meaningful sound, he twists the softknife. She shrieks.

“I’m asking nicely,” Goncz says evenly. “You can make this last five seconds or five weeks. I have all the time in the world to get an answer out of you.”

She shakes her head violently, mumbling rapidly under her breath. I adjust the volume. She’s praying.

Goncz clicks his tongue and shrugs. “Fine. Okay. I’m just going to leave you here to think it over for a little bit then, okay? Let me know when you want to have a conversation like a grown-up.” He presses the softknife to its hilt, effectively nailing her to the floor through her hands and thigh.

The soundproofing of the room is all that shields the rest of the hotel from the cries: piercing crescendo, tapering to gurgling sobs. Almost blows out my eardrums. I reduce the volume on the recorder. Loud enough still to hear Goncz smack his lips as he leans forward, kisses her lovingly on the veiled forehead. I see him pocket the gun, start sifting through his attackers’ bodies.

Hundreds of miles away, Los Angeles’ provisional government continues trying war criminals as they trickle in from the international manhunt, handing out lifetime sentences as soon as they step into the courtroom. They’ve imported thousands of counselors, therapists, medical groups, and health systems from mainland America to compensate victims of some of the most brutal human rights violations in modern history. Half of Los Angeles’s national budget is set to build a permanent healthcare apparatus to repatriate and normalize freed factory slaves, crippled Hollywood gladiators, and brutalized rape camp survivors. The women inside could have been any of these. Whatever their beef, they came to Goncz for justice, and leave this life disappointed. I watch Cecilio Goncz pick through their remains.

The ghosts of Los Angeles find no peace here in Oakland, a place where exiled kings dance atop crystal castles, and weak men sit at their feet, chronicling safely behind the wall of journalistic neutrality. The recorder's still going, animal grunts from the survivor as she desperately tries to un-skewer herself. Goncz whistles the tune from a children's show that was on in the background of our early interview. I'm sweating. At some point, I've squeezed the recorder tight enough to draw blood. Set it aside.

My project is mutating. I've lost my balance, fallen directly into Goncz's narrative, trapped as witness to another of his horrible secrets. Wondering how much longer I can hold out.

Before he discovers mine.

King of the Californias Pt III

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

Midnight at the Palma de Baía is surreal and alarming. Atop a fifty-story spire shaped a bit like a melted candle, you can still hear the artillery in East Oakland's flatlands as the Northern Republic of California continues its purge of the Deep East Side. Guandong, another breakaway republic across the Pacific, has long subsidized arms sales to NoCal in return for preferential shipping rights, and with all this money floating around, the Pacific Arms race is at full steam. Combat drones made in the factory hives of Guanzhou screech overhead like pterodactyls, dropping decompiler bombs on ghostly suburbia. NoCal's Army uses Guandong-made bioweapons and nerve bombs to 'pacify' great swaths of urban NoCal, against almost every recognized convention of human rights. And while the old men in Beijing stomp their feet in impotent rage, their dreams of Chinese hegemony stalled when the wealthy provinces quit the country. They, like their counterparts in Washington, have learned some hard lessons in modern politics the past few years. None could teach these old dogs new tricks better than Prime Minister Benny Pivens, whose Golden Bear Party made its bones reclaiming vast stretches of the country and putting them back on the grid. Yet as the country's largest city, Oakland has proven particularly difficult to tame, especially given meager police resources. While NoCal's constitution gives Pivens sweeping power to maintain order, using the Army to clear the Deep East Side seems excessive to my tender Yankee sensibilities.

Cecilio Goncz fancies himself a scholar of the human condition, and I haven't the backbone to dispute him. He thinks my outrage is cute. Amusing, even. His own human rights record consists of petabytes of footage that might convince Dante to re-write his portrayal of Hell. Goncz's former territories were among the most savagely oppressed in Los Angeles' history. He justifies this often by remarking on how his was one of the few enclaves on the island with electricity and clean, running water. People ate regularly. There was rudimentary net access. Running local newsfeeds. Hospitals. Relatively low murder rate. Lowest infant mortality rate in Los Angeles. But all that was alongside death camps and narcofactories. A burgeoning slave trade and vigorous gladiator culture, arguably unparalleled since the days of ancient Rome. To this day, the provisional government has found his the least manageable of all its cantonments. Cecilio Goncz's throne was built of human bones. In his mind, Benny Pivens is an amateur. He says so.

"If he was smart," my host says, picking at his sharpened teeth, "he'd arm a counterinsurgency. Get one of the other gangs to do his work, absorb the survivors into the police or army. It's win/win. Blooded vets loyal to the state, and you've cleared the streets of dissent."

I have nothing to say to that. Our silence is interrupted by a distant explosion that rains combat drone over Jack London Square. Rumors place U.S. military advisers in East and West Oakland, arming guerillas. Pivens' public rhetoric has heated up over the past weeks. I quietly wonder if North America can take another war.

He lights a little black cigarette and answers my unspoken question. "People can take anything, kid. Human rights bastards wring their fucking hands all day, but people are resilient. I mean, shit, we didn't always have electricity, the net, cars, mortgages, and a Bill of Rights. We lived a long time before that stuff. Loving, hating, fucking, killing, making babies, losing babies—the whole thing. I mean, shit, homes: you think the first caveman complained about human rights when the next guy tried to step on his neck? Hell, no. He picked up a rock and beat the guy to death, or rolled over and showed his belly. That's what it boils down to when you strip away all the fatty tissue. That's people, homey. Get yours or get got. You'd be surprised how quickly people get used to that, no matter how civilized they been brought up. They adapt to adversity. It's what makes us what we are. Our dreams are only as deep as our nightmares, yeah?"

The livetattoos in place of his eyebrows have translated into animated Japanese, kanji characters tracking across his brow: 'Only God Can Judge Me.' I ask if he's saying humanity is only as good as the evil it does. He smiles.

"Look at us, esé," he motions to the penthouse balcony overlooking the Bay. "We're sitting on top of a building that was grown out of the fucking shattered Earth, yeah? Brasilian engineers come up the coast, seeded the ground with nanocrap, and five weeks later, I have a private suite with spigots that pour any drink I want. Furniture that grows out the damned floor and changes color when I clap. That's pretty amazing, right? But flip it around. That same nanocrap goes into decompiler bombs and man-eater bullets. Side by side, homey. That's the human condition. One foot in the gutter, one on the curb."

My follow-up question is interrupted by a crashing sound from inside the penthouse. Shapes move on the other side of the balcony's crystal doors.

Goncz's alligator smile widens, livetattoos morphing to red lightning bolts above his eyes. He passes me his cigarette. "Hold this, and don't smoke it," he growls. "Pendejos found me. Only a matter of time, I suppose. Stay out here. This shouldn't take too long." He pulls a long narrow strip from his belt buckle, quiet buzz as the softknife goes rigid with electric current. A tiny pistol has materialized in his other hand.

I had no idea my host was armed with blade and gun.

Or that I would witness him use them.

King of the Californias

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

Cecilio Goncz favors the Indian side of his Ecuadorian heritage, sort of an ageless quality trapped in his high cheek bones and almond-shaped eyes. His neatly-trimmed mustache is his only facial hair, livetattoos in place of his eyebrows. This week, they read 'Solamente El Dios Puede Juzgarme', solid animated monobrow in pulsing Old English type. His head appears recently shaved, beads of sweat popping between veins and faint wrinkles. Dressed in an informal black linen suit, matching cowboy boots, he sits on the balcony of one of Oakland's thousands of bistros, overlooking the twisted graveyard of the Goldengate Bridge, coolly sipping a blood-orange martini. I make sure the recorder sits prominently on the table so there is no impression of guile on my part, frame him generously with Bay over his shoulder, and listen, translation services running to keep up with his pidgin of Spanish, English, Korean, Tagalog, and Russian.

"I was maybe ten when the Little Big One hit," he says. "We lived in Pico Union back then. Few of us. Came up for work, ended up spending most of our time hiding from Customs, Immigration, Homeland Security. Little Big One hit, everything south of Santa Barbara became its own real estate. I mean, they say SoCal actually took it light, you know? Ended up an island overnight. NoCal's the one got screwed. Nothing left standing. Frisco...well, you can look at Frisco from here. Nothing pretty anymore."

When I ask Mr Goncz about the Inglewood Five, he smiles, showing off the seven-hundred thousand dollar organic alligator tooth graft that has become his trademark. When he doesn't answer, I ask about what most newsfeeds refer to now as The Shadow Years. The killings. The dictatorship. The narcotics factories. Rape camps. Slavery. Goncz chuckles, drains the rest of his martini, looks out at the Bay.

""It was bad days, right? Lot of bad days. The Fed pretty much walked away, right? 'Southern California is no longer viable for reclamation,' the President said. Well, I mean, yeah. Bad days and all, but we made it. And yeah, some people got stepped on along the way, and I'm not going to say they didn't, but ordo abchao, right?"

I check the translation services. Mr Goncz lays a callused hand flat on the table and looks at me. "Order out of chaos."

I ask about his diplomatic status now that Los Angeles has had its first democratic elections in twenty-plus years. He drums his manicured fingernails on the black matte table and looks out at the Bay. "U.S. wouldn't take me, but NoCal still got love for me. Put a lot of money into rebuilding up here. Californians know how to show appreciation."