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Putin Plays Russian Roulette

They don’t call it Russian roulette for nothing.  Get a six-shooter, load it with a single bullet called Destiny, spin the chamber, point the barrel an inch above your ear, any ear – now wait or don’t wait – now squint or don’t squint – think or don’t think – now flashback or don’t – now weep or unweep now breathe or don’t breathe now laugh or don’t laugh so dammit – what the heck you waiting for?!  Pull the goddamn trigger!

‘Clink’.

Potluck, you’re still alive.

You lost five pounds of sweat in just under a minute.  But you’re alive.

Now it’s Putin’s turn.  Shootin’ hootin’ tootin Putin – it’s his turn.

You hand him the gun.  He takes it.  He looks down at you, even though he’s shorter than you.  How the hell does he do that, you wonder?

“Where I come from, we only play this excellent game after an excellent Russian lunch and a nice afternoon roll in the buff, if you know what I mean”, he tells you without blinking, and without a hint of romance in his voice.  You argue over whether you need nerves of steel or nerves of cloud to play Russian roulette.  Putin says you need neither.  “When there’s a gun to you head, the process of thinking is too slow – you must therefore act out of instant instinct.”  You argue some more about whether instinct is faster than thought – and again Putin wins that argument.  He feels sorry for you so he shares a few secrets with you, telling you that you must handle the bullet like you would a wild bull before you insert it into the gun’s chamber.  “You bully the bullet into submission and force it to forget that it has horns,” he adds.  “Right before you insert the bullet into the hole, you must instruct it to strictly sleep long and dream of gun-less worlds.  You must also tell yourself in no uncertain terms that you are the sole god of this bullet; that you control its direction and its final destination.”

Listening to him, all you can do is nod at his metaphoric deconstructionism.  He tells you that your will to live must be multiplied by infinity to win at Russian roulette.  You measure his words with utter care and quietly marvel at his Napoleonic guru-ism.  Yet still, there’s something about him that bothers you and you want to know what it is so you start another argument about mind-over-matter until you hit a massive self-made scatological wall.  He cracks a barely perceptible grin at your strained and smashed argument, all the while his blue lentil eyes are fixed on yours.

Nothing that you say can beat down Putin’s sobriety – nothing distracts his focus from your eyes and all his words to you come with a certificate, a calculator and a map.  You will see things his way whether you like it or not.  Because he has seen the shortest distance between two points while you were still scanning the horizon.

But will his mental powers serve him in your dual?  You’ve already pulled the trigger and you lived.  Defied death, despite being an amateur in the game of life.  Now it’s his turn – and he knows it.

You watch him with fiendish interest as he holds a single bullet in his palm.  “Never kiss a bullet before using it,” he says.  “Never romanticize death.  Elbow it.”

Swiftly, and with no further ceremonials, you watch him insert the pacified bullet into an empty gun chamber.  A perfect snug slide and a minor barrel hum issues.  You expect him to spin and close the chamber and point the gun above his ear, but he shocks you by pulling out four more bullets from his pocket.  He squeezes a firm fist around them and turns silent towards you, watching your mouth caught between dropping to the floor and gasping with horror as he rapidly places all four extra bullets inside the empty chamber pods, fast spinning the chamber with flare, spinning it close to his ear as if waiting for the right musical note to first hit before he expertly, precisely, stops the spinning.  Which he does in a heartbeat.

You watch him put the loaded gun to his head.

Now his lean finger is on the swooning trigger.

Now his eyes are looking at you—no—looking right through you to the great unfathomable beyond, possibly beckoning the empty gun chamber to harmoniously meet his architectural brain.  Possibly wedding his soul to nothingness.  Possibly folding the white handkerchief of time with his thoughts.

You look at him in devastated amazement as he stands there present yet not – stands there pointing gun at his own head and looking at you looking at his eyes and nothing but his eyes.  A fixated, narrowing close-up of his eyes.  With your brows tense and full of extreme foreboding, the bridge of your nose breaks into an oily sweat.  Aghast, you swear you just saw his blue iris fleetingly morph from circular to star-shaped.  You tell yourself you do not understand him.  His soul.  You are appalled by his acrobatic genes.  His powers of stillness and concentration unnerve your spleen.  Inside your rib cage, an anxious rattle escapes upwards and bolts out of your mouth as a spent, involuntarily girly groan.  Putin’s ear twitches once and lightly to hear your small, appalled noise.  Putin’s twitch explicitly commands you to look away from his eyes and at his finger on the trigger instead.  You obey Putin’s body language instantly and without question.  This suddenly stops your mentally strained condition, stops your brain blood from reaching boiling point.  Yet, your spine remains soft: tenderized by your perpetually gushing adrenal glands.  You identify your nerve-fueled experience as one of primordial fear.  Now you truly know what real fear is.  It is the sudden and involuntary petrification of your every living cell.  Paralysis and fragility together.  One feels that moving even the smallest of muscles would cause one’s whole body to instantly snap in two – snap like a frail pencil.  One is completely and utterly paralyzed from eyeballs to toes.  Utterly terrorized and motion-phobic.  Your fight-or-flight reflex completely shuts down when you’re in a state of primordial fear.  It dawns on you that Putin’s suspense has proliferated deep into your cellular existence.  Putin as catalyst for your darker self-knowledge.  You resent his yogic wizardry.  Your resentment of him thus multiplies darkly.  You now wish him great harm.  Yet, a very small part of you still wants to see him win at the deadly sport.

It’s a five-bullet Russian roulette game that only the exceptionally cultivated Merlin and Lao Tzu once dared play.  It’s the image of the five-pointed star of war that Putin is silently devouring.  Five bullets in a six-shooter – five tunnels stuffed with death and one vacant birthing canal.  Studying him, you can tell that working the five-to-one odds is not an oddity in Putin’s world.  This is not the first time he’s performed the five-bullet routine.  He is not showing you reckless bravado; he is showing you pure, unadulterated confidence.  Cold, quiet confidence.  Extremely comfortable confidence.

You experience time passing slow as your agonized eyes are glued to his finger on the trigger.  Your nerves are rattled and battered black and blue.  Putin’s suspended non-action simply devastates you.  You want to throw yourself at his feet and implore him to stop tormenting you with his perfect stillness.  He can see a terror in your eyes and he is disgusted by your weakness.  By your lack of faith in life; in human potentialism.  And just as your lips are about to open in pleading, stuttering speech, his finger suddenly pulls the trigger as his head simultaneously tilts and a whistling bullet goes speeding barely an inch over… the bridge of your own sweaty nose, disappearing silently into the empty distance…

Putin lives.

And not by fickle chance.

“There’s always a rogue bullet,” he calmly says to you as you stand there shaking in palpitating misery.  “Always account for the rat in the drainpipe,” he says, poker-faced.  You look at him and you hate his guts so much by now, and all you can do is start another argument with him about whether ducking is cowardice or intelligence, knowing very well that any second now, he will be winning yet another argument.

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