21st Century Bogatyr: In the Shadow of the Dome

"Cento di questi giorni.” (May you have a hundred of these days.) A toast.

This is the fourteenth part of a work of fiction in progress. Links to all of the other parts can be found at the bottom of this page.

by Zvi Baranoff

Long distance travel in North America is dominated by the hyperloop. It is very fast but not incredibly accurate or direct.

Trying to get from the District of Columbia to Philly via the hyperloop is pretty much a crap shoot. The hyperloop might toss you out closer to Pittsburgh or in the Poconos or near Albany or on the banks of Lake Champlain.

If you are going anywhere between Richmond and Boston - essentially a huge overlapping megalopolis - there are other choices. The region was made up of more obviously distinct cities at one time, but now the distinctions are less clearly defined. It is more akin to different neighborhoods perhaps than different cities as it was understood a century ago.

I hate everything about the hyperloop anyway, so I always choose to travel otherwise, if there are options. Rather than doubling backwards and jumping down the hyperloop to end up who knows where, I simply pointed my car north.

I traveled on ancient, though updated and modernized, routes. The new roads displaced the Interstate system which displaced the old US Route 1 which displaced the old Kings Highway which the British Colonialists built on the bones of the original trade routes of the true original people of the region.

If you look closely and listen carefully, underneath it all you can still perceive how it once was and know that it is the Great Turtle. Maybe. Something like that.

Anyway, I headed north via roads and bridges and tunnels and skyways significantly faster than folks traveled by horseback on the old Kings Highway and considerably faster than the days of the Interstate, yet slower and less disorienting than the hyperloop. I arrived in Philly a short time later without having my guts or brains scrambled by that beastly modern curse.

Arriving in Philly always feels like coming home, even after such a long time of living in other places and mostly on the opposite side of the continent.

The West Philly skyline is marked by the beautiful golden dome of the Great Philadelphia Mosque, which is, I believe, the twelfth largest mosque in the world. The Golden Dome is always a comforting sight. Within the shadow of that dome is my old stomping grounds and where I would mostly be, at least until I can cash out this haul.

Bob has been living in the same building, in the very same apartment, nearly forever. He was there before the Great Mosque was built. I have known him most of that time and we have worked and hustled together, off and on, for a very long time.

I parked in the apartment building's garage and hauled the rest of that contraband into the apartment. I let myself in through the combination of biometric and retinal recognition security locks that serve as the first defensive line for Bob's place.

I looked around the place a bit to gauge the situation before I started looking around for Bob. I checked for the telltale signs. The place was a helluva mess. I was relieved to find it that way.

Bob has always been naturally slothful and messy. Occasionally, he would feel inspired or compelled to straighten up. He would turn to methamphetamines to fuel the cleaning process. After two or three days of compulsive drug taking, the apartment would sparkle.

Then, he would do some more meth to celebrate. Then, he would perceive himself to be insightful and creative and he would begin an art project. Of course, that would require more stimulants.

Of course, after multiple days of powders up the nose and no sleep, Bob would be seeing multi-dimensional beings that no one else could perceive, speaking incessantly and incoherently to himself, anyone that he stumbled into and those other dimension creatures.

Bob would get increasingly weird and difficult until either he ran out of drugs or someone intervened. Then he would crash hard and be nearly comatose.

Eventually some equilibrium returned. Bob would be his own mellow and somewhat lazy self for three or four or even six months.

His normal messes would pile up. Bob would resume his natural slothfulness. When the place was a mess, Bob wasn't a mess. I was very glad to see the apartment in disarray and I went looking for my friend.

We cleared out part of the living room and began to spread the rest of the stock into relatively neat piles of books, somewhat separated by genre or topics or styles. As we did this, we each carefully went through all the product and gleaned what we each thought we might need personally for the next six months or so. This would be our only chance to get our fix before the dealers showed up.

After an hour or so, we were almost ready to open shop. Before the clampdown there were vibrant universities, huge libraries and dozens of bookstores just in this neighborhood. That's ancient history and shit ain't like that now.

Bob got on the horn and ran down the list. We had a tight network of book dealers that we have been working with and Bob needed to let them know that the load had arrived and now was the time to act.

It had been close to eight months since the last time I had been through here. Chances are that not everyone was still available, and that turned out to be the case. There were only a dozen or so that we got hold of on the last go around and it seems that every trip our numbers are whittled by fate and circumstances.

The operation really needed some fresh blood. There were too many alter kockers.

One more had died. Three had been busted. Two of those were now on house arrest with electronic monitoring. The third had been declared a career criminal beyond rehabilitation and had been sent to what we call Siberia and what the Government calls Montana. Another old fart had been stuffed into a Senior Citizen "Care" Center by his ungrateful children, so he was out of the game as well.

All told, Bob could only get hold of six or eight of the boys, but they were all glad to hear from him and were all quite anxious to get the first shot at the shipment. They were all on their way.

I stepped out to get my haircut by my regular barber and dinner at my favorite restaurant on that side of the continent.

I have been going to Frank's forever. When I lived in the neighborhood, and had enough hair to justify it, I would get a haircut every two or three weeks. Frank was an old man with a thick Italian accent. The place had three chairs.

Frank's brother, Anthony, owned a pizzeria nearby, called Tony's, of course. It was a big family and they made a big impression on that part of town. There were lots of kids and lots of yelling in Italian and there were icons of Mary in front of houses and a big Catholic church that was the glue that held the Italian community together.

Later, when I moved out of the area, I still made it into town every couple of months and I always went to the old barbershop. I was in often enough that Frank still assumed that I lived nearby.

By then, his son, whom most everyone called Junior, did most of the work. The old man was tired a lot and his eyesight wasn't what it used to be, but he was always in the shop, playing checkers or backgammon and talking with the other old men. He always cut my hair. I liked the old man. He would dispense mostly useless advice while he snapped his scissors above my mostly illusory hair.

The neighborhood had also begun to evolve. There was an influx of Ethiopian refugees into the area. A small grocery was opened by an Ethiopian family and an Ethiopian restaurant called the Red Sea opened on the corner across from Tony's place. An Ethiopian Orthodox Church stood catty corner from the Roman Catholic Church.

One day, while I was sitting in the chair, wrapped in a sheet, with Frank chatting and snapping his scissors, an elderly Ethiopian fellow entered the shop.

Junior addressed the Ethiopian in English, but the old Black man didn't seem to understand a word, or maybe he just chose to ignore the "kid" and preferred talking to another old man. Frank muttered something in Italian and the Ethiopian responded in kind, and while I sat in the barbershop chair the two old men conversed in fluent Italian.

So, the conversation was going on literally and figuratively over my head for a while. I don't understand much Italian and Frank continued to clip his scissors over my thinning, mostly illusory hair. I did pick up that the Ethiopian fellow's name was Aman Adunga and he was something of a patriarch in the neighborhood within the growing Ethiopian community.

At some point, Junior stepped in to finish me up and the two old men went off to discuss old times and compare their take on what was going on in the neighborhood.

The friendship between these two old men was the beginning of ties between the two distinct communities that were to turn into an unbreakable knot.

As time flowed and relationships flourished, the Italian and Ethiopian communities shared more and more in common. Their holidays and celebrations merged. They adopted aspects of each other's languages and cultures. The kids played in the streets together, ate at each other's homes and the adults all watched out for all the children and each other. The Ethiopian Orthodox and the Italian Catholic churches combined. Lovely blended children grew up turning Italian and Amharic and English into the very localized dialect that this new extended family spoke amongst themselves.

The Barber Pole still stood in front of Frank's Barber Shop and the antique chairs are still where they stood for over a century. Old men still gather there to play checkers and backgammon and discuss neighborhood matters. There is still a barber named Frank cutting hair.

I arrived just before closing time, which was how I planned it. The place was empty except for a young man named Frank Adunga. This young barber inherited the shop and ran it with all of the traditional flare of his predecessors.

He was glad to see me and welcomed me with all sorts of formalities, leaning heavily on the Amharic side of the local tongue, and then sliding into Italian before finally settling into a fairly understandable English for my benefit. He did all this while turning off the advertising lights and flipping the closed sign and pulling down the metal bullet-resistant security shades.

Frank gave the place a quick electronic sweep to assure that no bugs had been left in the shop. He set his defense drone in action to protect us from unwanted intruders. Then Frank "cut" my hair, which mostly was a theatrical performance of imitation snippets above my head. He worked much like his great grandfather. And we talked about the underground book trade.

We exited the barber shop via the back door and walked over to the much expanded eatery which is now called Tony's Red Sea Ethiopian/Italian Bar and Grill. We ate wat and injera with a side of spaghetti and meatballs and drank Dago Red wine. The staff refused payment and treated us like family, which included a lot of yelling and pinching.

We ate until we couldn't any longer. Then Frank and I wandered back to Bob's place together, arriving just moments before the rest of the "boys" showed up.