MORNINGSTAR 2: “HERE’S YOUR FUTURE”
*
It is 1960-something the year of someone’s lord on Earth-some-Earth, probably the only Earth. This is way back before hexidecimal prefixes and suffixes and antything-ixes. Town with a wall through it. City of Berlin cut in two, place clipped twain, and the people do the dance “papers please.” They contort and twist like barbed wire to flow around boxy checkpoints, cold concrete and jagged metal, like water finds its path through new channels. I’m saying the people find ways to live their lives here in this place/space under the immense weight of authority and the surveillance blanket. In this case-place space and time the people survive by performatively ignoring the thing everybody is so intently aware of: the all seeing STASI eye.
The surveillance machine sees their skinny ties and mod-suits–commie grey-scale and western techno-technicolor (and their interactions of course their interactions). A few hundred thousand pairs of eye-balls all-seeing in service of the Ministry of State Security, some hidden behind cameras, closed circuit and film. Photo and video. Antennae’s, don’t forget the antennae, for most of that great storied 20th century conflict called the Cold War was the tedium of hunting signals.
In an undisclosed location in the East where people’s clothes are grey and their souls allegedly austere and the uniforms put the drab in olive drab, there is a basement room with a sad bastard no-escape window too high and too small and a single dim bulb that can’t compete with all that brooding shadow. The smell of sweat and stale shit Soviet tobacco hang over everything. You would be forgiven for thinking the purpose of the place is torture. That’s the general vibe, but interrogations take place down the hall, far down the hall at this particular site and the STASI man responsible for manning this room rarely has to hear anything unpleasant.
STASI man. Surveillance man. His mother named him Hans. His mother was a gentle woman, a communist’s daughter. Her daddy died during the Weimar uprising when Rosa got got with all the other good communists. Then the shit communists that hid and lived turned their coats and went full fascist, and the girl spent World War 2 living with family, hardline regime loving Nazi trash family her dad had swore were “dead to him.” But her luck was shit and fate was cruel and dad died instead of the fash-family. Hans’ mom hid in plain sight from her fascist un-kin while the whole town hid from bombs and bombs and bombs. She spent the war-after doing the dance regret. Her son, Hans. He wears that “ugly uniform” that re-breaks his momma’s heart.
Hans doesn’t have a heart. He’s eyeballs and a brain that catalogue-collate all they perceive. The man lights a Laika, grunts. The East German grunts at the dead dog cig. Roughly translated, the grunt is a giggle. STASI men don’t laugh. Actually laugh? Never. There is no laughter in the basement doing its best Lubyanka impersonation, to be sure.
Even STASI men got needs, and that’s what Hans is, really and for true and at the core of his being: need and want incarnate. Hans, like his colleagues, is an id driving-driven-by a bored nervous system seeking anything less grey than East Berlin in his froze-moment. Hans has immense want and a thirst made permanent by his work, and for a time, a good long time the man satisfies those needs with his hand. Hans jacks it, quite often in the course of doing his job, in that dungeon room in building purposed for State Security somewhere undisclosed in East Berlin.
Reader, I don’t know if you know this but the Soviet Union (and friends) were not fond of pornography. The missile gap was an American saber-rattling myth. There was for-real-and-for-true an enormous smut gap between East and West, Commie and Capitalist sides of 20th century’s first Cold War–the Commies falling far behind. There was great thirst on the East side of the Iron Curtain. Immense thirst.
The facilitator of Hans’ voyeurism and the work-masturbation that flows from it is a Yankee. An American man honey pot banging his way through half of East Berlin. Hans gets to jerk off to the man at all because the American is a terrible spy. Oh, Hans and every STASI man up the chain (all of them tug-tuggin away to photo and video, audio and transcript) tell themselves they are tugging to the ladies (and gentlemen) the Yanqui subverts and handles with his magical dick.
The American’s tradecraft was terrible, he wasn’t meant for the work of spying. Clumsy. Inattentive. Sloppy in the realm of counter surveillance. The Yankee is a woolgathering motherfucker, a ‘head in the clouds’ type who went for walks to think. That’s a great habit for a person, a terrible one in that line of work. That’s what got him tagged by state security and followed back to the no-longer-safe house that’s CCTV tied to a STASI nest.
The only thing Hans and the boys at the Ministry of State Security can conclude is that the Yankee’s magical dick got him the job. For secrets, gripes, and internal party gossip, all kinds of little nuggets of privileged information and even a few dirty little secrets do pour out in great gouts to make pillow-talk puddles when the American works. Yankee Spy blows heavy, rich American tobacco smoke over the communist women and they bear their souls to him. Some even carry packages for him and do his bidding, small favors that set the stage (doubtless) for other operations that will reveal themselves in time. STASI perverts watch and listen, death-gripping ear pieces and antennae and their underwhelming dicks watching grainy black and white cams that prefigure the scramble porn and crystal clear surveillance vids their grandkids will jack it to.
Hans the STASI man watches graduate students and Party Stooge’s wives. Lonely bookish comrades of either sex and communist cougars. The Yankee slang dick with great vigor. God’s gift in bed, the heart of his operation and clearly why he got the job.
Tonight, he’s got a man and a woman in his flat, the Yankee with the unicorn horn. Hans has the great fortune of being the first to see the very special tryst. Hans also has a marijuana spliff confiscated off one of Yankee’s handles. He’s wedged the high basement window as open as its gonna be with a jackboot and a scratchy prison hair-shirt blanket is crammed under the door. It is that rich-delicious flavorful poison, damn fine tobacco from some points West-far-west of here, the cannabis is equally potent.
Elsewhere-and-surveilled, the boxy flat hosts a three way social game, the polite foreplay of drinks, verboten music, and herb smoked hastily out the window. Hans perv watching the black-and-white live feed on two telescreens that cover virtually every angle and ingress/egress.
The STASI man rolls with the sensory hallucination, as he is no teetotaler and knows tea from training and confiscate-consuming on-the-sly-gluttonously. Hans accepts his own mind’s narration, the hiss-whispers he must be conjuring, the breath-ethereal hot on his neck.
Next, the old vacuum-teevees manufactured to spit proper communist grey-scale (and nothing more) begin to sing in the key of technicolor while the room where the work of State Security and masturbation happen, that space fades to grey and black broadcast shadow, colorless.
Silent static, quiet lightning, and he hears the list of numbers alongside the voice that is want-need and aether. Hans the Stasi man starts cranking his jackin’ hand on what he’s got like a machine, the arm on automatic and guided by a second sure hand belonging to some other body–one growing in substance every stretched-second. By the time the American on-screen has buckles and belts and tops off, when he’s about to pull a trademark maneuver and make the other two kiss, Hans has to slow down, lest he finish too soon.
That’s the rhythm. A tongue flicks on the surveillance pervert’s neck. It’s a marathon. Not a sprint. Good boy. Hans’ hand wont quit working him, and he can’t pull his eyes from the screen. He tries, wrenches his neck painfully to move not-at-all, to wrench his eyes to the second telescreen on the table–the one not showing an emerging Yankee fuckpile.
There, in full living color, Hans sees himself jacking off. A man, a beautiful man with great black curls and cold eyes, holds Hans by the chin with one hand and helps him along with the other. Watch. “I don’t want…” Yes, you absolutely do want to watch, and you will watch. All of it.
Hans doesn’t stop jackin it, for the whole horrible what-comes-next. Hans can’t come, and won’t for some time. Not until it’s over, not until the man breathing down his neck let’s him (or perhaps commands him to).
That’s when the STASI man’s colleagues kick in the door to the little flat, the one where the Yankee spy listens to verboten music and blows gauge and fucks. Turns out Party Stooges don’t like it when you fuck their wives, handle them, and try to ‘handle’ them as intelligence assets. STASI officers like it less. And perhaps if Hans and the boys in the chain that allegedly commands had been more careful or thoughtful about what they were jacking off to, they might have kept the smut train going a while longer. The State Security men might have redacted the tape where the wife of one of their bosses has the night of her life at the little flat in East Berlin. In doing so, several men might’ve avoided being themselves ‘redacted.’
“No! No, no no.” Yes, yes, yes. Hans’ hand keeps cranking on Hans on painful-automatic, even when the Other in the room crams his face to the glass of the telescreen. In the flat, Yankee snaps to action as his kind are known for. You never want to be the first man through the door, and the goon clutching his crushed throat in a heap on the floor does object lesson cofirm-re-confirm that truism. The cop’s friends-who-aren’t-friends beat the Yankee and his guests harder for hurting one of theirs (not friends, for no friend will ever volunteer you to take point when hunting Americans or other dangerous animals).
The scene gets gruesome when the first goon through the door, the one with the crushed throat, chokes to death some minutes later. That further enrages the East German security personnel. They act out of character, engaging in brutality and activity that is usually reserved for basements with dim bulbs and certainly is never done on camera. Similarly out of character, Hans keeps cranking away at his underwhelming dick, unable to stop though he is now desperate to.
And when they finally beat that man to death, the skinny little pretty boy the American brought home to pump and pump for information. When Hans colleagues in securing the state, kill one of their own citizens to do so, that’s when Hans feels the vice-grip on his dick begin to pull.
STASI trains their boys to resist interrogation, but I don’t care who you are, get your dick harmed? You’re talking. Talk Hans does. Scream to babble to high-pitched wail. STASI man feels flesh stretch and sinew rend and connective tissue rip like paper and warm-wet, the warm-wet running down either leg that told him he will soon exsanguinate. Hans does rush to confess aloud every sin he’s ever committed in his whole wretched life.
That’s how his colleagues find him: cackling, head back and dick out, covered in piss and other body fluids (presumably his own). The funny thing about this little episode is that Hans might have survived it, career harmed but intact. He committed many sins in the eyes of the Ministry of State Security, but he did so in the dark where swift penitence is possible. The funny-not-funny thing is this, Hans committed one absolutely unforgiveable sin and was seen doing so. No, it’s not that he smoked a spliff and jacked off in service to the state. Hans laughed. He cackled like a fool or a madman or decadent Yankee, and that’s what guaranteed he’d get redacted (verb). That word is the very official and often secret cousin of disappeared (verb).
*
Outside, Lucifer lights a Laika. There’s no need for the reveal, you knew ages and pages ago right? The proud one. The rebel. The beautiful one.
Sad hawk eyes lit by the cherry. A face that’ll light up a space, burn it down, or drink light depending on the angle from which you appraise it (and whether or not his eyes appraise thee). He’s fucking beautiful in a rakish rags-hanging-on-whipcord way that run away from my words. Got an inherited uniform that look a little too Germanic for anyone’s tastes falling off him as we walks. Not a block away from the STASI cop shop and he tosses the hat in the street to an onlooker gasp.
Lucifer drops the State Security jacket on the side walk, only after littering the walk with all the epaulets and shiny shit and colored crap and useless kit pinned to it. The beautiful one turns a corner and vanishes as if he stayed in Berlin just long enough to litter and for one more cigarette.
In the beginning, this is how Lucifer waged his war–personally and intimately. The proud one. The Rebel. Watch carefully, and you’ll find Lucy walking out of walls or crawling out of the sewer at every when-where where authority takes of its mask of legitimacy–any place where “this is the way it’s going to be” is letter and spirit of the law, and beating people until they flatter power is power’s only purpose.