by Aidan Truhen
* * *
—
Martin has a cot in a little wooden house. I’m pretty sure he built the house himself. It has initials carved into the wooden wall by the stove top and the first one is M. There’s another set alongside and I figure them for his wife’s and that is sad because there’s two dates right under.
Martin puts a towel on the bed and then puts me on the towel and says he’s going to do some things and not to move.
I tell Martin that I am really good at that right now.
And he laughs.
See Martin thinks I’m funny it’s just you assholes.
I go to sleep smelling woodsmoke and snow.
* * *
—
Did you ever do a thing knowing it was a bad idea but you did it anyway because you thought it was what you wanted and it was not and then you did it and wished you did not?
I have never done that.
I wanted this and now I have it and that is all.
But looking out of this window at a gray blizzard with your actual lightning somewhere out there I got to admit—and that lightning is like horizontally far away not vertically—I got to admit that this has not gone in the direction I totally foresaw.
This fucking house is made of wood is that good or bad? Like I mean they make airplanes out of metal so that the lightning goes straight through them because if you insulate them they just explode. Fuck me Martin you better not have just built this place knowing fuck all about the mountains you better not be some wannabe homesteading trader retired and jerking off to his long-held log-cabin motherfucker fantasy—
But yeah Martin does not smell of city poseur he has hands like unfinished pine like this table like this whole house.
Jesus I wonder if he built this house.
Jesus that is a lot of snow. Are we gonna get snowed in?
Jesus I hope there’s Internet.
If I had a phone I could check and see if I could use my phone.
I wonder if he has a password on his Wi-Fi.
Or maybe he just locks his pigeon loft.
Fuck.
I fucking hate Switzerland.
* * *
—
Pressed white linen and expensively neutral detergent. Crisp, mid-high thread count, soft as goose feathers. Large ugly Soviet peering down at me is not a plus also I am pretty sure I am imagining him because he has on a chef’s hat and an apron.
Unless I am about to be ham.
“Oh hey what time is it? Fuck that I’m getting up—”
(I do not get up. I sort of wiggle a bit. It is very tiring.)
“O for love of Stalin’s cock don’t be dipshit Price you lost maybe one and half pint you’re gonna feel like shit. Lie down stay in bed. I bring you Goulaschsuppe.”
“I do not like Goulaschsuppe.”
“You got no idea what it is.”
“That is true and that also is part of why I do not like it what is it?”
“Meat stew with paprika. Everything in this country is with paprika. Even the catsup is with paprika. Also curry for salad dressing. These people are insane.”
“I want a beer.”
“Goulaschsuppe.”
“Crazy Russian.”
“I am Ukrainian. Is different now don’t be in my minorities.”
“Everything is different now. What are you even doing here where the fuck am I?”
“Bed.”
“O fuck off and get the horrible soup.”
“Sure Price. I go, you stay. Was my whole point.”
“Hey buddy where you going?”
“I am going Price.”
“To get soup?”
“Sure.”
* * *
—
I sleep and then I open my eyes and Martin is coming through the door.
“Jack? I am home!”
“Hi Martin O Hai you brought a friend I am a little bit almost naked sorry hi.”
“Yes this is Hannah.”
“Hi Hannah.”
Hannah has her hands empty and loose by her sides. It’s where seriously dangerous people keep their hands when they don’t want you to think they are about to fuck you up. Officer Hannah or Sergeant Hannah or Ranger Hannah: she is five foot four and she has wide shoulders and strong arms like she would change a tire one-handed; swimmer’s muscle as if her momma was a dolphin. A sexy Aryan dolphin from maybe from an extremely inappropriate manga cartoon. Short hair like a motorcycle helmet and a wide rose mouth that smiles and she is—fuck she is the negative universe version of Doc. Doc is tall and witchy and you can see her mind in her eyes. She is so smart you are closer to a monkey than you are to what is going on in her head. Hannah is broad and mountain strong and not the same but the eyes are there like she is alive in her own head fully present and real.
Not cop Hannah not officer not sergeant.
Agent Hannah.
My leg hurts and as I look at Hannah I have a boner. I get a fear boner the way rabbits do shortly before they get eaten that is absolutely one hundred percent a thing that happens to rabbits.
O God she’s a fed. She’s a fed like some sort of appalling Swiss elixir of fedness the way Martin is just an old caretaker who can do field medicine and carry me unconscious up a flight of stairs at altitude. Just like that I know Hannah has competences and skills and ways and means.
O o o o—
O damn it all to fuck.
Hannah the Anti-Doc Hannah says: “Hello Jack I am Hannah Müller and I am here to place you in custody. You have committed offenses under Swiss law. Please keep your arms and legs inside your restraints at all times and do not put your head out of the car or it may be cut off.”
* * *
—
Holy shit that voice like Lauren Bacall she’s a smoker and a drinker of whisky after midnight that I do know. Learned English somewhere in North America I’m gonna say upstate New York. She’s still talking. Also what offenses? I do not know and she has not specified and for obvious reasons I don’t want to suggest some that would be counterproductive.
She’s still talking.
“Do not flee into the snow. We will catch you but if you escape you have the right to have your toes fall off. You have the right to die of exposure and Martin and his mountain rescue team will retrieve your corpse tomorrow and take photographs for the coroner.”
I look at Martin and he shrugs yes.
Hannah says: “Okay Jack we are going down the mountain together. I am certain you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time and this will all be sorted out. Are you going to give me any trouble? If you give me any trouble I will have to give it back. Which will make me sad Jack because you are my kind of trouble I’m QUITE sure.”
WINK.
Omigod she—that is SO inappropriate—she is doing a thing at me like hi I’ll be your arresting sexy-time secret agent today this is me working my anti-Doc on you and no of course you cannot touch this.
(Synth brass.)
Can’t touch this.
Anti-Doc.
Agent Hannah.
She puts my arms in the approved position and cuffs me with the real cuffs with the short metal rod between them which you cannot get out of. She just happened to fucking have these on her? Or she’s a fucking neighbor?
Someone has changed the bandage on my leg so Doc’s fingerprints are just on my skin Jesus I wonder if Doc’s actual fingerprints are anywhere and if they’ll think to check.
I have been working on a story I totally have an explanation for all this like you see where I was attacked in the street and bandaged up by a medical professional and then unfortunately I became I guess non-lucid and tore my stitches and wandered off before I could report the whole thing like a good citizen and I am you know the injured par
ty there is no reason to arrest me.
No doubt Agent Hannah will say that is fine but even so formalities you understand—
And then I will say perhaps if I might call a lawyer we could sort all this out—
And she will say I don’t need a lawyer because legal legal but then she will—
She will take off her clothes. And mine.
Swimmer’s muscle and wide curves. I can see them now. I know them. I know exactly and—
Agent Hannah lets her eyes slide up to my face and. she. grins. at me.
Oh SHIT now I am always a little bit going to want to be caught by her.
But on the other hand she is always a little bit going to want me to get away.
And neither of us is ever going to get what we want.
This woman is my fucking apocalypse. My kryptonite.
Can you lick kryptonite is that a thing that is allowed?
Doc has always been real specific that she will kill anyone I have sex with who is not her because Doc is territorial.
But this woman is the anti-Doc I could have sex with her and it would be fine because Doc is going to kill her so much anyway.
Omigod I can just see it now like electrical germ death versus dolphin commando death and they would crush me like—
Bunny fear boner.
Agent Hannah looks at my thigh and groinal area and then meets my eyes and absolutely does not smirk but I can feel the weight of satisfaction and all of the very much smirking she is not doing.
“Come on felon,” she says.
I am going to Swiss jail with a bunnyboner.
* * *
—
I sit in the snow cat all tied up and notably fucked and I look down into the valley. There’s plenty of moonlight on a clear night plenty of ghost-white light and there waaaay down there below there it is. Agent Hannah puts me in her giant machine and drives me down the mountain. She talks all the time so I think maybe she wants me to stay awake because even if she is arresting me for being some sort of a hoodlum who fled the scene of a shooting and la la la I am also a guy with a hole in his leg and such and she does not want me to go unconscious where she would have to stop and worry about my possible death. I am just thinking I could take advantage of that to escape when I look out of the window and see it.
It.
The mountain.
The whole damn reason we came.
From here it sticks up from the valley floor like a headstone, so dark it is hard to get a sense of scale until you see the spire of the church at the foot of the cliffs and it is a pin. Less than a pin like a fucking mote.
The Kircheisen Festung sees you and it is not impressed. You cannot rob this bank but thank you for your interest and have a nice go fuck yourself.
Yeah.
That kind of thing just invites a certain sort of attention.
* * *
—
Swiss jail looks like a pine guest house with electronic locks and high-durability airport carpet. By now I have sufficiently got my shit together to do some this is an outrage and some on what charge and Agent Hannah calls me
“Mr. Hecht”
and that is great news because that means I am arrested for the purpose of sorting things out and maybe because I was near where a Swiss lady was carjacked. I say very Teutonic that I am Olembert Hecht and I am respectable to the point of affluent and I must make calls and sue the shit out of Swiss jail and Agent Hannah says sure. That is fine but I have things to be doing and I cannot just hang around waiting for my team to come lawyer me out of here and getting their faces on the security cameras and such like. I make my one phone call to a number I just pulled out of my ass and get a blarp blarp signal that means some sort of nope and I tell everyone it is the busy signal. I ask Agent Hannah if there is something to read while I wait and there is a tourist magazine. I read about kite surfing on the lake of Thun. It looks lovely and we should all go.
The magazine is quite old and when I put it down a lot of the middle pages fall out and I say sorry. I futz around on the floor picking up pages and Agent Hannah leans down to pick up the one near her feet and while she does that I take the two metal staples from the middle of the magazine and twist them together around the pins of the two-prong 220-volt AC plug for the reading lamp and put it back in the socket.
The whole room screams like not the people literally all the wires and appliances scream and all the lights go out. Happily also although the office is super new and shiny it is retrofitted over a much older wiring layout and this layout does not shield the desktop computer very well from fluctuations and power surges so there is a popping sound and a thick nasty smoke goes everywhere and gosh I guess that sort of thing can be trouble for storage media so there’s a chance the security footage also is gone.
The smoke triggers the fail-safe on the main door so that we do not all get burned alive—which is again super civilized and responsible—but also the sprinkler system, which is unfortunate because electrical fires do not like that sort of thing. And something else goes bang and starts to spark. Agent Hannah grabs at me in the dark and I totally have to applaud her Jedi senses because she is right on target. I duck my head and feel her nose collide with the top of it and you know that hurts. That is going to bruise like raccoon bruise is what. I am sorry Agent that is my bad.
I go into the street and I can hear the fire trucks coming already and since everyone is running because smoke is pouring out of the police station I can run too, and I do. I run around the corner like I know where I’m going and then I walk like a commuter all the way to the train station but I do not get on a train I walk right through the station and get in a taxi, tell the driver I want to go to Bern.
Driver shrugs. “Take a couple hours,” he says and I say that’s fine. He’s wearing a three-piece and if he was my size I would probably have killed him already but he’s like eight inches shorter than I am and wide like a pool table. There’s no way that’ll fit me. Also I’m gonna guess he’s Swiss by way of Istanbul, which is not an uncommon thing, and you if you’re gonna pick a fight with a guy driving a car who also happens to maybe come from an ethnicity which has seen some local struggles for social recognition in a community not always noted for acceptance of outsiders you better bring a very big fucking stick and I do not have a stick. He might kill me back in a fair fight and if I bite his ear off, which you know works well for me, then I cannot wear the fucking suit so it is better we are friends. I sigh because both Switzerland and Turkey are cultures which admit of a certain amount of the Romantic spirit. This is ethnic stereotyping but some days you go with what you got especially if what you got is two case-hardened steel bangles plus a stolen soft-shell jacket exactly 311 Swiss francs and a hole in your thigh.
“Yeah my fiancée kicked me out of our hotel man. Turns out she was sleeping with my best man but for some reason I’m the one gotta leave.”
Driver pulls a face like: that is totally not okay. I can tell he’s judging me for not drawing a hard line.
“Yeah man but you know it turns out they’re in love. It’s not—I’m not happy about it. I’m all kinds of broken up and angry and of course my parents are coming next week for the wedding but—well I mean—it’s love ya know? What is she gonna do marry me anyway? Who’s that help?”
The driver shrugs and makes that Swiss noise. Yaaaaaawuh.
“You can’t fight love,” he says, and turns the key.
* * *
—
Car drops me at the river.
Keep the guy’s card because you never know when you might need a guy. Plus I might have to kill him later.
And go to the Black House. He wants to know where in Bern and when I tell him the Black House he laughs and says yeah of course.
* * *
—
The place is really called the Kropotki
nhaus but everyone just says Black House because like forever ago in the ’90s they painted it black. Black for the Black Flag of anarchism right like obviously. There are actually two anarchist settlements in Bern and one of them is kinda legit. This is the other one which has in it the kind of anarchists who long for the final conflict and in furtherance of that end will you know take a bunch of illegal drugs and get wasted and therefore are the kindsa people who will maybe get a fucking handcuff off you without calling the feds.
Way it is: the Kropotkinhaus declared itself the Free and Independent State of the K in 1979, which was totally not a ketamine reference at all, and the Swiss government did not send in the tanks because like both of them were being repainted plus also Swissness is liberty and you do not want to piss on that so they negotiated.
