Edgar J. Snowden, an American citizen, is stuck within the transit
zone of a Moscow airport.
We know this, that this is where he's stuck, grounded and becalmed,
his luck in neutral.
Transit turns to no-transit. The space curdles, wraps around
itself, becomes its opposite.
Matter gets bored with itself and comes up with anti-matter.
Even with the food.
Unsettling. Disturbing.
The Nyet-transit zone is not conducive to — not constructed
around the requisite Feng shui — for sleep.
When Snowden tries to sleep he sees a cloud — viral,
bacterial, chitinous, whatever. This is not surprising given that the immense
info cloud of surveillance has been his habitat, and that he has bled, reduced
it, as one does with sauces, to four disks, which he keeps nearby.
When the bad dream cloud subsides, it does so around the Pharaonic
visage of J. Edgar Hoover, Rushmore big.
J. Edgar becomes Di Caprio, somewhat more comforting.
There is no J. Edgar, nor Di Caprio — only a thousand minuscule
seemingly fission powered explosively inimical Assyrian deities.
J. Edgar. is not dead. These are J. Edgars.
Oh, the shark has
pretty teeth, dear
And he shows them
pearly white.
This dream is sufficiently on the nightmare spectrum for
Snowden to think it could not have come from his own mind.
He wakes in the Nyet-transit zone and considers Attorney
General Holder's promise not to torture him if he surrenders.
Cold comfort.
Not to be tortured.
When has an American government felt it necessary or useful
to proffer such a peculiar inducement?
He thinks of Bradley Manning, alone in his cell, without
clothes or visitors, for weeks.
He opens "Crime And Punishment".
"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young
man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as
though in hesitation, towards K. bridge."
That would be Raskolnivkov.
Life is stranger than fiction
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