Conditions for Affinity (Intro and Chapter 1)

Intro

I didn’t pray as Kremlin tanks groveled past my Polish driver’s abjectly new American F150 hidden pat in a forest thicket. Instead, from the observer’s backseat, I internally rewound a brassy Shostakovich overture to piss off any reapers who dared take me in a soviet killing field at 37. My frontal cortex, still soused with greasy hair and plum slivovitz drug out for the previous night’s Warsaw embassy meet-and-greet, failed to reconcile the compulsory musical pomp of 85-odd years ago with the brute, pulpous appendages floundering for the same nationalistic vision before my incurably dispassionate face. God! Too many kiddie arms were leaking blood way too early, like stillborn egg-yolks flecked with shrapnel shells and scrambled into detritus for wiser animals.

And yet, despite all the B-movie biological gore crudding my ride’s windshield, the bucolic vantagepoint I admired from my window framing the pine fringes of the Kursk battle lines made for an offputtingly engaging backdrop to a what nine out of ten of my colleagues calls an objective atrocity. Frankly, I think the trope-ish Disney appeal of a sun grazing verdant treetops over rolling hills, at whose base I conveniently forgot twitched corpses, threatened my raison d’etre for the hour. At any rate, it certainly deflated my chances of sourcing my usual overt, saleable portrait of humanitarian decline. 

This scene wasn’t how I pictured the pre-USSR shtetl farmland my great-grandparents derided as their parents’ old country from a saltbox with views of the sublime natural phenom known as suburban Hopewell, New Jersey. I can’t, and therefore won’t, try now to articulate any deeper symbolism that I should’ve plucked from a foreign wood thrice removed from my genetically modified generation of keyboard scrollers. But I, coddled chief correspondent for Global Frontline’s Eastern European Affairs Bureau, can admit this much. I was not prepared for the uncanny valley pastiche that rattled my bullet-proofed, private-schooled guts that morning.

Even later, as I suffered through flat white spritzer in the good-enough confines of an economy plus lounge, my wired body refused to nip at the alcohol bait. A less jaded Jules Sapir, who usually takes over when I’m buzzed, couldn’t suppress the cinematic dissonance of witnessing dismembered limbs sprinkled atop what otherwise would be a decent North Face promo shot.

At the time, I made a point of never being prepared to write anything worth sharing with the world in the 48 hours after intensive field work. I suppose that’s the shameful luxury being anointed top prick of some organized group afforded you in 2024. Yet, evading the eye whites of young, confused soldiers as they lulled asleep in their socket wombs, no doubt left an impression on me. I was crushing my second melatonin (kid’s size) in a free juice box, planning a mental low-road hike, when an older gentleman in my flight group tossed me a nod. I soon cowered myself into a performance for him, jotting a few sentences in a Moleskin, if only to commemorate my having communed with and outmaneuvered Death.

I figured I could do the bare minimum at my no-collar day job and plod through some lines on the quote, authoritarian destabilization of power hierarchies in the surrounding Baltic states due to Western pressure, unquote. Or I could try a little harder to sublimate my latest personal realization into a coherent essay. Really, all I wanted was to confess to an audience. Catholics have their priests. We agonist Jews have the internet. And I wanted someone, anyone on the world wide web to validate me with a stranger’s uninformed tenderness that I could never lavish on myself. 

I would scream at my spiritual ShamWow, “I am an obsessive consumer of injustices. I savor every last drop of aggrandized virtue I can wring out of decrying heinous tragedies that are never my own! My life, on whole, is disgustingly satisfying! My greatest adversity is lacking any justification for being a bitter critic of the human condition!” That’s what I wanted to release in the four hours I had left while waiting for my Boeing’s technical inspection to barely pass.

Chapter I: Beginning of an End

Following my war watching stint, I found myself loafing out of a makeshift ascetic’s Walden in my soon-to-be-former Georgetown pied-a-terre. My furniture, all vintage Ikea dorm in 2008’s hopeful shape, was tangramed my first morning back into one of those U-Haul minis. It’s still, to this day, being ferried by my second-cousin’s kid into an old storage locker near my alma mater, Princeton.

Despite only having a blowup from my landlord to sleep on and zero AC for a full week, I wasn’t itching to face three-star hotel niceties, especially after dodging an offer to overnight at a Ukrainian campsite near Crimea. And honestly? I was enjoying my almond butter and Red Bull meals alone, set to Fugazi knockoff riffs on the local radio broadcast from the commercial drag behind my block. Besides, I’ve always liked the au naturelle dark that penetrates my world the second time I forget my electric bill is due. I often feel like playing intrepid pioneer with my cellphone flashlight (a far cry from Donner party) as I stumble over my own shadow, kicking furniture with perfect logic. It’s a chance to be careless, even a bit transgressive, with the mathematical insurance that no one will ever know that appeals to me.

I’m also proudly allergic to the kind of inappropriate loneliness that straight, single men my age profess to their better-educated female therapists. In my Freudian book, it’s a dirty hit job under the guise of emotional disclosure from a faux feminist ally. I’ll pat my own shoulder. I’m a socially stable, preemie-bachelor of rare but sincere self-monogamous form. The closest interpersonal interaction I can liken to warm-bodied, meaningful connection with anyone, living or dead, in the last decade always comes courtesy of my D.C. editor, Preston Xiao.

Preston’s a salt-and-peppered, Bergdorfian former prosecutor in an insider’s booth ordering a hundred bucks of smoked gin with one hand and gesticulating on a private call with the other. He injects every morsel of conversation with lawyerly gravitas, even the inanest quips about overestimated American engagement during the Sino-Soviet border conflicts. So thankfully, he only texted me a superficially light, let’s chat tête-à-tête invite three hours after my return. I still loaded my papery Levi’s back pocket with a decent wad of cash the dawn of our meeting. As my mother used to advise when we were down to once-a-year drinks at Veritas circa 2013, it’s better to offer the handout than take it first when negotiating.

Preston and I met in the swampy Potomac mist on a not quite A-list sidewalk, good for judging uninfluential congress members as they lick salt from tax-deductible burgers at the Capital Grille. We strode an unusually paranoid distance apart for an uphill block. Finally, Preston waffled, shoved his hands in his bespoke trench, and plastered on a sinuous apology smile. I knew him enough to let him have the floor. He still nodded up the cobblestoned street to cajole me into asking what he wanted from me. His logic flowed as follows, so I assume: if I participated in my own misery somehow, then he could deliver any message sans guilt. I crossed my arms and shrugged. Our familiar routine was now in motion. His lips sagged into a downward parabola.

“Arlo just delivered the execution Slack. Bob said to cut your piece. It’s…too politicized. We’re getting hammered by the assistant junior defense press secretary. Who knew that was a cabinet job! But in any case, the cut was Bob’s note. Not mine. Or Arlo’s.” 

Thirdhand insult transmitted, Preston shrunk away from my silence to pop open a black watch umbrella as a distraction. My ears absorbed his words in queasy waves that dribbled like non-Newtonian mucus down my cochlea, the viral bits sliming the wrong cranial crevices. I made no offer of facial acknowledgement or cogent response.

Robert B. Longue II, by the way, is this comically effete octogenarian who inaugurated our foreign policy periodical from his West Point office and sold it to the dying father of mild-mannered New Statesman defector Arlo Hamburg for a few thousand and an editorial say. The check was signed in ’61, a month before Robert abandoned his first diplomatic post in Argentina over what he called minor differences of opinion. Nonetheless, I can’t definitively claim that Robert is a card-carrying adherent to any jus post bellum punishment theory. He’s just an underachieving two-star general who knew how to mobilize a cadre of insecure PHDs to make himself sound better informed than he’d ever need to be. While he’s neither a genteel beggar like Arlo nor a self-made scion like Preston, given his preferred currency is centrist-coded country club intellectualism, he’s doing all right for himself.

The more I mulled Robert’s checkmate over my pawn sacrifice, the more my brain spun conspiratorial explanations for his intent; my theories somehow always hinged on his being an incapacitated Manchurian ward of the current State. Meanwhile, Preston purposely fiddled with his umbrella (of course, before closing it in defeat) to escape my no-doubt overcalculated pupils. He sniffled for my attention. In return, I quelched an ego shriek bubbling up my asthmatic chest, passing off a genuine SOS cry as an innocent hiccup. 

The gal! Dead of dawn, and I was already foaming at the mouth with Red Bull backwash straining to splotch my only clean on-the-job polo. I had already nixed my sabbatical from writing and was fourth-drafting a decent, perhaps slightly partisan take on the evolving nature of Russian ideological aggression as symbolized by the uncoordinated Kursk Forest attack.

 But then, I thought, what is politicization nowadays when everything is inherently politicized, even spilt unpasteurized milk? Should it be oat? Dare I mention my personal, possibly toxic, distaste for soy? Sometimes, the idealist Jules in me wishes apolitical, ethical realism won’t turn out to be another bs, biblical lie. It would be nice if a hostile, unprovoked takeover of a sovereign state at the behest of a diminutive sadist could safely be called a bad thing without getting you cancelled as un-American.

Preston cut into my reverie with his brogue tap and Patek Phillipe glance maneuver. I succumbed and mustered up a gracious, “What the Hell was he expecting! He's prostrating like the DOJ—!" 

Preston fished his cellphone from a croc murse and angled it in front of his face. My tongue flicked over my caped incisors (the originals having been sawed to stubs on a saber shot in a Czech crypt bar). The following exchange, filtered through blue light and clenched jaws, ensued. 

“You’re lucky this isn’t the office!”

“Why. Do I need legal counsel?” I withdrew my cellphone from my suburban dad phone clip. I always bring a loaded draft on my note’s app to a verbal sparring match.

“We’re only taking pitches on domestic policy right now. You’d be angrier.”

“How about the rise of media bias reviews as an ICC violation! Or…is climate change a military-industrial construct? We can call it psychological subterfuge from those demonic Canadians!”

“Unfortunately, Bob’s grandmother was half- Québécois.” Preston really emphasized that last word, as if to imply the stated information was a statistically significant variable in the equation of Bob’s boundless self-worth.

“And look, I have a 9:30 brunch. I just wanted to personally let you know what’s happening.”

I deadpanned. “I meant the ones from Alberta. They look freakishly democratic!” 

Preston laughed, waved, and sauntered off. He always left my rantings unchecked because he knew he could without fear of my retribution. I’m the self-styled absurdist comedian who, one Heineken-induced black eye in, drops the grad school act and swings lower than Joe Rogan on the next punch. He knew I wasn’t going to forfeit my vaunted position for the sake of some delusion like absolute journalistic integrity. 

At the end of the day, I liked having a personal need, namely a plateauing 401K, to flee my residential address for an abandoned bunker near Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone or a bullet train skirting a hair too North of the DMZ, all expenses paid. I’ve always found comfort in being able to patch up the gaping dissatisfaction in my own boring existence by chronicling other peoples’ borrowed misery and oppression. 

After all, there is no six-sense experience comparable to escaping via pregnant donkey on a tear over bloodless ice sheets through a Siberian penal colony demarcated as an air raid zone. The same cryofrozen, omnipotent chill still floods my heart when I remember that I was the only live vesicle for delivering the unworldly evidence of grotesquery outside the electric, apocalyptic borders of what should be Hell. I can still reconjure the Promethean sensation of knowing that the vital warning cry for a savior’s conscience thrived or faded to propagandized cremains with my survival in a classified wasteland of slaughtered morality. For a blissful second, my precarious existence became something of necessity for all humankind, and therefore, something of value.