Vicious Aliens (continued)

Cycle 13

CYCLE 13

I met him one night in Toronto

At an old hotel with checkerboard floors

While the politician’s voice rang

With that distinctive Aryan twang

—NOVO Interrogation Interview (fragments)

We met at a five thousand dollar a plate fundraiser, somewhere between salmon tartare and beef tenderloin…

He was a well-known figure in literary and avant-garde circles, a complete roué, some combination of Nick Cave and Irving Layton. Good poetry built on bad behaviour. He had a reputation for being so depraved that the song “Sympathy For The Devil” might as well have been written about him…

I heard that he was accustomed to living on the edge, the edge of sanity or the edge of sobriety, I’m not sure. At least we had something in common. I was a political crony of the mayors’, a strategist for his re-election campaign…

I hadn’t read him but I was told that descriptions of his dissolute lifestyle were a prominent feature of his poetry. Lord knows, I had my share of bleary-eyed mornings, waking up in hotel rooms I didn’t recognize on trips to places like Ottawa or Mexico City, partying a little too hard on private jets or in VIP boxes…

It was one of my umpteenth political campaigns; federal, state or municipal, it didn’t matter any more. The USG had become much more of a top down behemoth; a central planner’s wet dream. The mayor was advocating for the establishment of a ‘Freiland,’ a special economic zone where Germany and the US could engage in unfettered trade and close co-operation between industries…

A new security apparatus would need to be established to govern the area, centred in the Port Authority district. Once the zone had been established, firms like AGL, AnthropoGenicLabs, would have a free hand to further their controversial experimentation on political prisoners or ‘volunteers’ as they were called, juicing profits and safeguarding shareholders at the expense of human rights…

His name was—redacted—but he playfully referred to himself as Benzo…