One more thing before I log off for Friday night…
As readers know I’ve been slowly writing a sci-fi novel about zionism — about the world that created it and the world that it wants to create. I did a big edit of the first half the book and am now working on the second half. Radiance takes place in our world, but just slightly in the future. Seeing Israel’s attack on Iran — and seeing the Unites States support and encourage this attack — brings the story that I tell in the novel closer and closer to reality. My gut tells me that if anyone does it, it will be Israel that’ll start a nuclear war — a war that, given the type of weapon, will not be so easily contained. Sometimes novels have a way of not just predicting the future but of bringing it into existence. I hope my novel isn’t one of them. But on the flip side — maybe a novel can give a glimpse into how horrible our future will be if we do nothing to prevent it, and by doing so help stop it from coming true? Yeah, too optimistic with the way things are.
I want to share one chapter from the novel with you. I might have included an earlier version of it in something I sent out, but that was a long time ago and it’s better now. It fits with the today’s sense of coming doom…
Anyway, have a great weekend! (lol)
—Yasha
Another nightmare
I slept ten hours but woke up haggard. No sunlight. The natural rhythms are all fucked up with no sunlight. And it was only the third day.
Dreamed I was back in the temporary shelter again. Everyone was gone, just me in the underground parking garage, wandering around, going down level after level. They were all empty…and I wondered where everyone had gone. Then I woke up and lay in bed confused, not sure where or when I was. For a minute I thought I was still down there, sleeping in a corner of the garage. The faint smell of gasoline and motor oil lingered in my nostrils. The days I had spent down there were surreal, like out of dream. The windowless garage, surrounded by panicking strangers, sleeping on the floor, eating beans out of cans, not knowing what was going on with my daughter on the other side of the country, living in constant fear that radiation was seeping in, invisible and deadly…
Right after the nukes fell, like everyone else, I was amazed to discover that our government had no plans for this kind of situation. Despite all those decades of nuclear war threats — first with the Soviet Union then with Russia and Iran and North Korea and Iraq — there was no prep done. There were no radiation proof bunkers for the public, no real plan to help people survive. The top politicians and high net worth types all had their own places to go and hide, but the rest of us had to figure things out on our own. In my neighborhood people started seizing underground garages and cramming into them for at least some protection. I managed to get a spot in one that was five-levels deep under a condo building on Stanyan and Haight just a few blocks from my apartment. It was a grim setup. People dragged their bedding, mattresses, inflatable beds, meds, books, stuffed toys for their kids, camping tents, propane canisters, water jugs — and set up everything up in the parking spaces where the cars should have been. I had a sleeping bag, a suitcase with some clothes, a few cans of tuna and beans, a protein bar, some apples, and as much water as I could stuff in there. It wasn’t much. I’d figured I’d live on that a week — maybe two tops, if I starved myself. But then I really wasn’t planning on living very long. If the war was going to spread, I figured we were all dead anyway.
From the very first night underground it was clear that most people were either on the verge of a mental breakdown or were in the grips of one already. Kids were crying, arguments broke out over space and food. And of course the Jewish Question came up almost immediately, on the second day that we were down there. We all knew that a nuclear attack had wiped out most of the Middle East and took out parts of Europe and that Paris was mostly gone. What we didn’t know is if the war had spread beyond that — and everyone was sure that it would, that the missiles would start flying towards us. We had a radio tuned to the emergency FEMA frequency and it wasn’t reporting any new strikes. That was the good news. The bad was that a large radioactive dust cloud was being tracked — it had moved east of the Middle East, had dispersed widely over India and China, and was now over the Pacific Ocean, headed directly our way. The government advised people to stay indoors and to seal their windows with duct tape. People started losing it then. Parents were melting down and sobbing in front of their children, people started jammed themselves into the deepest recesses of the garage, as far away from the radioactive world as they could get. One man in particular had a bad episode. He started walking around, cursing, hitting walls, working his knuckles into bloody hamburger meat. One woman tried to comfort him, but he knocked her down and stood over her and started screaming about the Jews. “Hitler was right! If he done his job none of this would be happening. The fucking Jews! The fucking Jews! Those fucking kikes! Hitler was right! Hitler was right! Hitler was right!” He’d yell that over and over, walking up and down the levels of the parking garage in a big insane loop.