"La Fée Verte"

Dearest Leon,

Here you find me this rainy night on the outskirts of Istanbul. Among the dregs, castoffs, whores, and criminals in the back of a ramshackle, no-name dive bar. Here I sit wrapped in rags sipping absinthe, waiting my turn to draw a breath from the hookah. My eyes half closed muttering nonsense perhaps in a waking dream, or perhaps it's the opium speaking through me, using my body as a vessel, an oracle, to vocalize it’s foreboding secrets. You wouldn't recognize me. My hair has grown to uncivilized lengths and I now wear a beard whereas before my chin was bare and my neck clean. It has been almost six months since I defected from the battalion - a coward, or so labeled by His Majesty the King.

The last place on earth, my friend, you expected to find me was among this unsavory congregation of broken dreamers and cackling strangers stranger than fiction. In this dimly lit cesspool, a final refuge for the broken and pitiful. I sit between the twins, Ignorance and Want, “Les Enfants Terrible,” now fully grown. I’ve been told they prepare to travel. One will head north, to Germany, the other West, toward Italy. They follow the wind of change; heeding the trumpet of Fascism. The light is dim, a pathetic fire-pit and several candles cast more shadows and doubt, create more questions, then produce revelations. There is just enough light to reveal the unsavory events that perpetually transpire in this conclave of the absurd - this circus of nightmares. There is no sound save the feint, raspy coughs of the sick, and hushed moans as somewhere in a nearby room, three lonely souls seek temporary and fleeting bliss.

Your mission this night, my dearest friend, is to rescue me: to bring me home. Heh, home. You may ask what unfortunate series of events brought me to this dismal, shit-hole corner of the world that sits on the outer fringes of humanity and sanity? Well, the answer is obvious, if you don’t know already, as you were an unwilling participant in my fall from grace...