Zaire makes good-natured promises to Lynch he also doesn’t keep. Together with former Kyiv Poster Acting CEO Anoyla Zombietska, a not-so-subtle mocking of D. Lynch begins
Moe Zaire, near-billionaire-at-large and former publisher of the Kyiv Poster, sits in the office of Chad Butterworth, the owner of All-Purpose International – Worldwide Insurers, for some reason headquartered in Kyiv, Ukraine.
“Here you go, Moe,” says Butterworth, as he pushes a briefcase filled with money – $2 million in American greenbacks, to be exact – 200 convenient and beautifully pliable bricks of 100 $100 bills each – toward Zaire.
“Of course,” he adds, that doesn’t quite cover your losses over the years against the Kyiv Poster, but, well, I took my share, and –”
“Oh, nonsense,” says an elated Zaire. “Don’t even mention your cut. It’s understood. That was part of the deal from the very beginning. At least we cut the losses short. I’m telling you, Chad, I may be a near-billionaire, but the thousands of dollars I was sinking into that lemon every month to subsidize it and cover its losses kept adding up and adding up, making me just a little poorer. Supporting that thing – for whose sake, I don’t know; as if I owed anything to the foreign community here to keep its only local English-language news source symbolically afloat. It’s over! No more Kyiv Poster; no more hokey bullshit freedom of speech Western-style brand. People will kvetch about it for a month or two, and then it’ll be forgotten. The only thing it became good for was as Bret Boner’s mouthpiece – which, like a big idiot, I kept financing! Sinking my money into that thing, into that tragedy, that disaster, was like betting on the Titanic making a successful trans-Atlantic voyage – AFTER it sunk! Every time I threw my money into it, it disappeared, and God knows toward what or where! Money followed money, and the thing just kept… just kept SUCKING IT IN!!! Like some kind of fucking black hole!!! If I had seen it all before it got so out of hand, I wouldn’t need to be going through this at all! I wouldn’t have needed to blow up the Kyiv Poster, and all those people would still be alive!!! How could I have been so stupid?!?”
“Okay, Moe,” says Butterworth, “you can calm down because it’s over now. Stop beating yourself up. Stop blaming yourself. It’s over, Moe, and you’re free.”
“Yeah,” Zaire replies. “I guess that’s the most important thing… It’s just that… shit… I don’t know, man… it’s like, it’s just funny, that’s all, I guess… how something like a lousy third-rate tabloid could end up being worth more to me dead than alive…”
“Yeah… well…” Chad Butterworth exhales.
Anoyla Zombietska, Zaire’s (now) former Acting CEO of the Kyiv Poster, who is also there for the $2 million payout ceremony, eyes the money in the case with worshipful wonder and disbelief. A chill runs visibly through her as an army of goose-bumps rises on her legs and arms, one limb each of which brushes accidently against Zaire.
The David Lynch-looking man sits at the desk drinking coffee, on the surface appearing unmoved and unperturbed by what he’s observing, but inwardly suffering a dull-throbbing envy and gnawing doubt over whether he’d ever managed to evoke the present scene’s level of irrational eeriness in any of his movies; whether his disturbing dramatic tropes were anywhere near as strong as the ones being played out here. He suffers inwardly because, being honest with himself, as he has to be in the final reckoning, he is forced to admit that the present scene, which he is witnessing firsthand, is actually better than anything he’d ever come up with in any one of his films.
Opposite him at the desk, the dwarf who calls himself David Lynch [and who, we at Kyiv Unedited have again come around to thinking, may very well BE David Lynch – Ed.] is fascinated by the surveillance video of the terrorists coming into the building with the bomb. The video is being used as part of the backup evidence for Moe Zaire’s insurance claim. The dwarf is silent. Transfixed, he plays the video over and over again.
“Woooooww, this is good…” he says, as if he were a true master of his craft. Then he asks Zaire:
“So you, so you say you know these two guys…”
“Yes,” Zaire patiently replies, yet again, “those are my two good friends, Nousseff and Alibaba.”
Zaire is in far too good of a mood to let the dwarf ruin it with his constant churlish pestering. Besides, a few more moments and Zaire will be rid of all these dwarfs and Lynches and whoever all these people are – hounding him and hounding him, day in, day out, for weeks now, about some real estate, about an appropriate space and location for… for… some stupid contemplation center or something of the kind…
“And you say, and you say that’s not what they look like…”
“Ho, ho, ho, no, of course not. Those two will never be caught. In the security video you are watching, they are dressed in hoodies, ankle-high All-Star Pro-Keds, torn, greasy jeans, pull-down winter wool hats and fake beards. However, in reality, they are clean-shaven businessmen of darker complexion in suits who are almost as successful as me…”
“Wow… And, and, and what’s that, what’s that the one guy sprays into the security guard’s face that knocks him out while the terrorists walk past him to take the elevator upstairs?”
“Oh, that was just plain water in an ordinary spray bottle with the nozzle set on ‘mist’. The night before I paid the guard with a bottle of Nemiroff and a hundred to take the fall.”
“A hundred, a hundred, eh, eh, eh, dollars?”
“No, a hundred hryvnias – ho, ho, ho…”
[At 25 UAH to the Dollar at today’s exchange rate, that would be $4 – Ed.]
“Woooooww… And, and, and they brought the bag with the bomb to your office, and, and…”
“Yes, that’s right, they brought it to my office, where we sat and drank coffee and chatted for a while, and then I merely casually went down one or two flights to the Kyiv Poster newsroom where I just as casually set it down on a desk in the middle of that newsroom, which you saw me do, got you out of there, and then locked everyone who was left, especially Bret Boner, inside with the bomb!”
Wow… Was The Ferret there?”
“No.”
“But how, but how did the terrorists get out?”
“Oh, ah, they jumped out the window…”
“Woooooww…”
“Yeah – they’re all right.”
The quiet unassuming man who looks astoundingly like David Lynch is sitting in the penthouse floor restaurant of the five-star InterContinental, perched atop Kyiv itself, across the table from Moe Zaire and Anoyla Zombietska. The trio brunches on hearty meat dishes with gusto, drinking it all down with bottles of red Argentine wine.
“These lamb chops are really good,” comments the Lynch-looking man, “and the wine is truly wonderful, superb.”
The other two look at each other and quickly smile.
“Hummfer,” says Zaire, chewing his food. A drop of bloody juice trickles out the corner of Zombietska’s blaring red mouth as she masticates a steak.
“I hope their coffee’s just as good…”
“Yes,” says Zaire, “and it’s also just as good that Anoyla here was only ‘Acting’ CEO of the Kyiv Poster – because she doesn’t have to act anymore!”
The man understands a joke of some sort has just been made, but while Zaire and Zombietska laugh uproariously, one sees the man’s discomfort as he smiles sheepishly, unable to fake the mirth of one who has fully gotten a joke or hide the fact that he hasn’t.
So he says, “As ‘Acting’ CEO, did you memorize your lines, or did you just ad lib?”
As the man now finally laughs himself, genuinely, the other two go quiet. They don’t understand. Was what the man said supposed to be funny? The joke had already been made. It was a very good joke, one that cannot be added to, to improve it. It’s impossible. Why did the man have to speak?
“Oh, ah,” Zaire starts explaining to Zombietska, “to ad lib is when you…”
But Zaire’s audible explanation disappears as he leans close to Zombietska and, looking at the man, whispers something into her ear and softly chuckles. She flicks her eyes up at the man and begins to laugh, too.
Meanwhile, the David Lynch dwarf [or David Lynch himself – Ed.] is downstairs, playing the main lobby’s grand piano.
He is going through a nostalgic repertoire of smoky after-hours cocktail-lounge songs filled with misty longing and heartbreak, and at this very moment, if we are not mistaken, he is singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”.
And if one looks closely, at the dwarf’s eye, at his cheek, one may even discern a tear.
Meanwhile, back upstairs…
“… and so, don’t worry, my friend,” Zaire says to the David Lynch man, “I’ve got plenty of real estate in this town, so there should be no problem finding an appropriate space for your… your, ah…”
“For my Transcontinental Meditation Center! Yes, oh, yes, that would be wonderful! And when could we –”
“Oh, don’t worry. Right after we’re done here, we can start.”
As the man is about to respond with the fully expected, ‘Oh, that’s great’, Zombietska leans toward Zaire and whispers something in his ear as a smile plays around her blaring red mouth and she looks at the man. She moves her lips from Zaire’s ear and they both laugh. Both look at the man and then at each other and laugh again.
As they walk outside, away from the hotel, Zaire and Zombietska, their arms inter-looped, somehow manage to get farther and farther ahead of the David Lynch man and he stops trying to keep up. He thought they were going to show him some real estate for his Transcontinental Meditation Center, but they are moving farther and faster away. Without breaking their stride, he sees Zombietska say something to Zaire and then look over her shoulder back at the man with a big red-lipped grin on her face, while Zaire throws his head back in what is obviously a fit of laughter.
The two continue moving farther and farther away.
‘Everyone who comes here seems to sink into a mist of ignominious anonymity, no matter who he is,’ the David Lynch-looking man reflects sadly.
The David Lynch man has completely forgotten about the dwarf, who has disappeared from the lobby of the hotel.
Filed by Jack Step, CTFSA, April 23, 2016