Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

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 Kropotkinhaus 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.

The ambassador of the K was a hairy nicotine-stinking motherfucker named Ferdi Albrecht. Man o’ his time is what because again back then it was all Carlos the Jackal and hijacked planes like all day every day. They called in Albrecht and said: “Okay Arschloch it is like this we have much shit that you will need like access to sewers and electrical power and free movement so you can attend your hairy-ass college classes and maybe one day some of you will get a fucking job but for now we will give you all these things in exchange for a trade treaty under which you pay an amount which will be mysteriously fucking identical to the rate of tax per capita calculated by an accurate statement of the population of your pocket utopia of Mary Jane and hand jobs. And since you wish to remain Swiss you will be a unique autonomous Gemeinde within the Swiss Federation but not within any specific canton because there is no canton, Bern included, that will sit still for your crap. There will be no border posts or any of that and you will not be part of the policing jurisdiction though you will absolutely call us in if someone is for example god forbid actually murdered but in exchange for this restraint we expect to get exactly no fucking backchat from any of you hippies and you will comport yourselves with the closest you can manage to dignity if you venture into our flowered capitalist streets. Does that work for you Ferdi Albrecht or shall we revisit the tank discussion?”

Albrecht was no dumbass and he took the deal, and the Kropotkinhaus has basically been a rolling criminal slumber party ever since.

—

Knock knock.

“Hau ab.”

That is to say get lost. I do not get lost.

Knock knock.

“Hau ab, Schlappschwanz.”

That is super-duper rude in Swiss. Do not mess around with saying it for a joke they will lock you the fuck up