“​Dark Horse​” The room became the place of confession. He sat in the old wooden chair, uncomfortable, staring at the hand-written pages, or, the pages were staring at him, he thought. All the actions and mistakes had led up to this moment, peculiar indeed. He thought he was done with caring, those certain feelings of responding to other people's thoughts, heh, "not anymore," feeling bereft of emotions, but knowing, presently, that he was wrong: that sentiment cannot be erased, those memories ought to be maintained. “Can't do this,” throwing the pages around, jumping like a child, screams, temper tantrums, hitting himself against the wall covered in 1970s vintage wallpaper, his bald head bleeding, a small concussion of the brain where all the soul material is amassed like a hidden cache of spirit in that biological box of derangement. Medici, then reminisced. “The serpent colored ultra-pixels have dominated our Earth, for thousands of years, unbeknownst to us… for they reside deep within the Earth, where raging temperatures run ablaze in an Ophelian magnetic lunacy… where the certain individual known as The Count, dwells high in the skies, past broken mountains, high ravines where the sound echoes down to precipices and magical brooks… yes, taken out of a Nordic dream... in the throne room of Castle Mara! Hear me out Laszlo, this is the beginning of our story,” exclaimed Medici. Laszlo, comically seated, legs wide open, with Hawaiian shorts, a pattern of flowers which provoked in Medici some extravagant ambrosial thoughts, and countered, “I am beginning to think that the honorable Herr Medici, can be, indeed, considered some kind of psychological failed experiment,” tripped out through Marijuana cigarettes, feelings of hunger beginning to set in, but amour fou and brotherly love ever so present. “You fool! Must you always remind me of that? Just let it go.” Aloud in semi-rude tone but sensual and homoerotic enough, which reverberated in Laszlo’s depraved mind in more ways than one—it was their little game. These two old dopers from golden days of past exploits, love entrepreneurs, unfiltered debauchery, and the occasional precarious living standards and psychopathic nights in Italian beaches, Monte Argentario, Vasto in tristful Abruzzo where buried deep in peculiar reveries they looked toward an uncertain future; dreams of Guangzhou roamed the mind of Medici and patriarchal figures with dripping wet cunts through Laszlo's. Now, two girls of questionable age were lying on the sand right next to them showing their paradisiacal asses, the sun tanning the pale dermis, and among the back hills, southern winds and the heavy brushing of trees, this untouched land by man in the past, old architectural magnificence up in the distant Parnassus, and, in dreams of flying reconnaissance, an aerial view of cities and beaches like this one: Tropea Beach. The curvy babe to the left of Medici is Alina Cantarella, wearing a solid red Brazilian cut petal bikini bottom and black banded top with red coloring on the edges, chic sunglasses with a frame of acetate and gold-tone titanium across the towel next to an old used paperback of the classic novel “Ubiquitous Mind of the Unattainable Ecstasy,” glancing here and there at Medici, coquetting him to perhaps some free drinks and plenty of psychotropic delirium later on that night, and, if she was lucky, a certain marriage which would solve a certain financial dilemma.

Medici, clever and debonair, thought that by looking at her irises, he could see an innocent girl incorruptible (for now,) but later that night, sexual empiricism would prove him wrong, realizing that immatureness wasn’t one of her traits. That night he would also have an epiphany: the nature of Laszlo and the meaning of a certain comradeship which had been lost since the end of World War II, when Laszlo stormed the third floor of 24 Via Francesco Barone, where flexibilities were being tested in what it seemed like a maze of limbs between Medici and Alina, declaring: “Medici. We need to go. Like, now.” Pyretic, sweating, and with blood stains on his aloha shirt. “Heeey buddy… really? Look at me.” His legs in a position which made his cock seem bigger, Laszlo noticed, and thought for a second what kind of contortion would that be considered; then, he remembered the urgency of their escape. “Hmm, a holy triumvirate? Vieni qui…” uttered Alina with legs wide open in a downward dog position, looking at Laszlo with an inverted grin, her serenity scaring him to death. She noticed that, and pouted—cute. Meanwhile, a psychedelic bubblegum madness was coming from a two speaker system downstairs which turned out to be a Kero Kero Bonito song which Alina recognized as “Flamingo”—arguably their best song—being part of a playlist which was on repeat and, in effect, was the artistic fuel for Danilo “Fresita” Quintana, a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican hacker hammering away at his computer trying to penetrate the network of the ENEL (Ente Nazionale per L'energia Elettrica) for unknown purposes. Fresita came from an upper-class background (though he felt like he didn’t fit in) and was accused of stealing Mexican Government secrets—particularly documents detailing the connection between high-ranking government officials and the Sinaloa Cartel. He’d been granted asylum in Italy three years ago, in 2008, before the extradition treaty was signed in 2011 and after a long gridlock in his federal case against the Mexican government which made the ratio of dropped pounds to increased gray hairs considerably higher. Fresita claimed that the Mexican Government had planted said files in his computer by way of an electronic virus which remained dormant in his hard drive until a certain date and time. Starting from 21​st​ February, and every two and a half weeks, until 10​th August, the virus began constructing itself with its different parts which had been uploaded to Fresita’s laptop by a prostitute that he used to frequent who went by the name of “Avril Onil”—the old Femme Fatale strategy. Regardless, Avril had to undergo computer, hacking, and penetration courses dictated by CISEN (Centro de Investigacion y Seguridad Nacional) in close liaison with the CIA, where she became an expert in computer security and later, to the CIA’s distress, would be a founding member of the group who created the Debian-based Linux distro, Tails. Presently, Fresita was having trouble penetrating this system due to cheap and unreliable Wi-Fi, packet loss, and other sorts of tech problems. “Puta madre… este wifi de la verga.” Upstairs, in the third floor, Laszlo, in serious and distressing panic mode, tried to explain to Medici and Alina, the urgency of finding a quick exit. “Say what?” Medici bumfuzzled. Turns out that Laszlo had come from an underground club belonging to a clique of

ex-juvenile offenders who were obsessed with paraphernalia and whatnot of the 1980s. Laszlo was walking on afternoon Tropea, orange sunset in the incandescent sky, beach giggles, tourists babbling and searching for places, two male dogs humping each other at the back entrance of Hotel Rocca Nettuno and exactly every sixty seconds changing turns, several people with different destinations in life, an old teal colored 1962 Maserati 3500 GT Touring parked at a curbside with a small one-inch chip on the passenger’s door where a crying child held an empty jar in his right hand saying that his pet spider Enrico had ran away, and… a sweet little thing who was dressed in full costume as a Vestal Virgin, clear white linen tunic, ashen palla comfortably wrapped, a white wool suffibulum carefully bordered with a brick-red felt ribbon, elegantly closed with a plate fibula with a variety of precious stones, a brass censer with the sparks of the flame of Vesta, the infula made of strips of red and white wool wrapped around her head with the ends hanging on her shoulders, and white sandals. “Say, Madonna, care to teach me all about your religion?” said an over-confident Laszlo, sexually buoyancy aura all over him and one or two winks. The Virgin raised her head looking at Laszlo, at first with confusion, but her expression then turning into what seemed surprise and fear. She stood up and took Laszlo by the hand, and noticed that it was extremely warm. “Seguimi!” “Uh… Okay.” Laszlo and the Virgin walked for around ten minutes, south across summer hills through the Tropean nightfall, past a loop of road where a motorcycle gang was plotting an assassination, to which Laszlo mentioned, “Pasticcino, what do you say we turn back, go back to my apartment… and uh… introduce you to mein Kommandant Medici? Heh.” Francesca showed no sign of having heard Laszlo’s proposal and kept walking, now grabbing his hand with Virginal firmness, Laszlo grimacing and letting out an “Ouch!” to which the Virgin turned around, her blue-eyed gaze poking right through him and said “Sta 'zitto! Sei un finnochio? Piscialleto!” then proceeding to punch Laszlo in the face—the nerve on her. They reached an old and abandoned farmer’s cottage, past a hillside, and went right through the wooden door to find that there was nothing in sight, except for a scrim hanging at the backside right next to the painting of a cow with an enraptured expression on its face. “Is that cow smiling?” Laszlo cackling, when suddenly the Virgin kneeled down and started reciting a mantra in an unknown language, her voice reverberating throughout the room, and scared-shitless Laszlo began running toward the door when he heard a low-pitched moo from what it seemed a cow from hell, turning around to see that the smiling cow had come right out of the painting. “What the shit!” walking backwards while the Virgin laughed and fluorescent beams came out of her eyes, the cow now standing up on its back legs, Laszlo realizing that the cow had a tattoo of an ear Wax in full military attire complete with Waxean special forces carrying Heckler & Koch G36’s, green bowie knives, a Waxean flag in the back, multi-colored liquid coming out of the cow’s teats, when suddenly time and space halted in this interlude of madness.

The cow paused in smirk, and the Vesta Virgin disappeared and materialized right in front of Laszlo. That’s when he heard it: “Your friend Medici will kill a hero. You must stop him. Bring him here. I’ll be waiting.” Then everything went black. Few hours later Laszlo woke up in the underground 80s club to the tune of “Come on Eileen,” by the Dexys Midnight Runners, psychedelic lights around him, indoor fireworks, a few people with second degree burns, a Chihuahua pup with an aviator hat and vintage goggles riding in a pink tricycle, a weird inexplicable hardon… and say what? “I’m outta here,” running the fuck away from the club and thinking how he was going to explain this peculiar occurrence to Medici. “Listen buddy, by the looks of it, you only got two choices,” said Medici with matter-of-fact tone, “you either turn me in to this Madonna or… Alina can show you this taste-and-smell trick she knows…” Alina giggling, still in downward dog position. “Oh, what the fuck,” Laszlo irresponsibly taking out his clothes, still with the two-hour hardon, and about to discover a gargantuan new world of Italian flavor, bouquet, and perhaps stink. The next morning, Medici was whispering paphian slick syllables to Alina's left ear at carefully measured intervals, and licking the inside of her ear canal whenever she giggled, surprising himself—being the Wax connoisseur—to find vestiges of Italian ear wax which he thought, and in this weather, tasted particularly sweet. What Medici didn’t know, is that one of these ear waxes he just ate was the General of an Anti-Rebellion secessionist paramilitary group residing deep in Alina's young body, which advocated for the secession of every Ear Wax from the confinement of human physiology, having revolutionary theories which where propagandized with careful discretion, instilling secessionist sentiments in the lesser Ear Waxes, and making them believe that they were not meant to live inside humans. The famous slogan of “no hearing without representation!” becoming the popular hearsay in Alina's society of Ear Waxes, and being the cause of her recent dizziness and nausea which she attributed to unprotected sex she recently had at a drunken costume party at Hotel Tirreno, or was it at Il Poggio di Tropea? Second floor madness? She couldn’t remember well, though she recalled that she was dressed as a Caucasian Kim Kardashian which received protests from the party-goers when they realized that there was an average of one hundred pounds less of ass material missing from her behind. The Wax General, who had just waved “so long!” to this existence, Wasch Joompa, was born in the year 1994, in the old body of a German/Bulgarian pianist, Nadezdha Tkachev, now known as Hope, who lived alone in Flensburg, Germany, a small town in the North in an old house at Meisentrasse Street, a particular nice place, thought Hope, when she was considering options of house purchases, deciding at the last minute in this pre-WWII maisonette. In the mornings, after the common interpretation of two or three of Chopin's etudes, she would walk through the woods on the West side of the house, feeling the eastern wind blowing over the trees, looking at the birds cheeping, some in summer trees, others focusing their attention at the feeders someone had put up. In her lonely walks, Hope, sometimes reached the Kita Sol-Lie Kindergarten on the other side of the grove and watched the kids play hide and seek in the trees, while she remembered her own daughters who had defected to Vietnam following a persecution

by the Bulgarian Government of questionable motives toward Creationism and its followers. Preriya and Pasishte, Hope's twins, were high-ranking members of a Creationist group known to have gatherings in the Eastern beaches of Varna, right by the shores of the Black Sea. The group disguised themselves as common tourists in full attire, girls with Victoria Secret's bikinis, men sporting Lacoste polo shirts and tight bathing shorts accentuating their cocks, so as to make them seem as just a bunch of horny juvenile tourists while mingling among the real ones, drinking expensive strawberry daiquiris from the famous Makalali Beach Bar, guys flexing muscles, girls moving their pelvises to-and-fro, flirting with one another, some guys admitting that they would have homosexual sex if the girls then fucked each other senseless, etc. In truth, they were communicating with themselves through millimetric eyebrow movements which they had perfected throughout the years by watching online videos and practicing frame by frame until exhaustion; in part, because of loyalty to the cause, but also due to a certain clause of the membership contract that they had signed. The twins, now known in Bulgaria as “Bliznatsi PP!” or PP Twins, were now part of the “Cheren Spisuk,” or Blacklist, having then no choice but to seek asylum in Vietnam, where word had gotten out by a new type of dots and dashes communication system, reminiscent of Morse code (but heavily upgraded,) that a three-hundred-year-old Creationist lived in the waterside of Dak Bla river, by the outskirts of Kon Tum province, bordering the flat plateaus on the littoral of Gia Lai province. The twins were never heard from again, but Hope, deep inside her old heart, knew that they were gone because they were "supposed to," and that it was their destiny to become a Creationist legend, part of the mythos and folklore of a new form of neo-Creationism—a proud mother letting her babies go. Meanwhile, it was in Hope's right ear that the wax known as Wasch Joompa was born. Hope, having not bathed in one week: a consequence of having read a self-help-pseudo-philosophical book by Jonas Salvatierra, a Peruvian Quena virtuoso who had toured the world during the worst days of Sendero Luminoso's terrorist activities advocating for peace, some people calling him the reincarnation of John Lennon or “El John Lennon Marron,” and going to the extent of creating websites with fanfictions such as "Salvatierra y Lennon en el Espacio," and, "San Salvatierra acude al rescate de Don Dostoyevsky," the latter being quite popular because it showed Salvatierra as an Andean masked superhero who in the process of fighting against aliens from the planet Yachucalixtus, rescued a captured and wounded “Dusty.” Salvatierra was now mostly known for his song "Querido Abimael," an Andean song in 4/4 at a tempo of 110 beats per minute, with a typical electric bass playing the fundamental of each chord, accompanied by arpeggiated passages of classic guitar and the main melody being played by Salvatierra in his peculiar Quena, which he made with his father when he was five years old and living in the magical city of Cusco amongst ayahuasca dopers. The message of “Querido Abimael,” was intended as a sort of acceptance of apology toward Sendero Luminoso's leader Abimael Guzman, who never actually issued one, which in effect, tried to persuade Guzman to turn himself and issue the much-needed apology. Listen: the book Hope was reading, titled "Y Tu Que Vas a Hacer al Respecto?" took Salvatierra four and a half years to write and was intended for artists. In his book, Salvatierra argued that true artists were ones with low hygiene, and that these individuals tended to produce works of art more in tune with the meta-soul, as part of a greater theory which was a work in progress, which would years later be a sort of antithesis to Ayn Rand's Objectivism.

Salvatierra's thesis would be supported by dozens of pages with scientific research, data, graphs, and the endorsement of three renowned statisticians from Cuba, Papua New Guinea, and Peru. As part of his new book's teaser (and by recommendation of his agent) Salvatierra liked to say in T.V. interviews, "El camino esta servido, y pronto llegara el dia de la verdad," while people around the world trembled in excitement and salivated awaiting the release of his new book. In her early years, Hope, being an amateur pianist, had never learned how to play correctly—in her Gouldian definition of "correct"—Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, in the tone and tempo that she wanted. As a teenager, she would listen for hours to Glenn Gould's recordings of the Aria and unsuccessfully tried to imitate it. "I am not an artist. How pathetic am I? My fingers are just too fragile! Scheisse!" were some of the phrases heard by Hope's parents Lothar and Aletta Tietze, two German refuges who survived Hitler's madness and had migrated to Bulgaria by way of secret passages for Ashkenazi Jews created by a Chinese-German society known as, "猶太人生活", or Jews Live, ironically inspired by the Boxer Rebellion in China at the end of the 19th century. It was in Bulgaria that the Tietze's sensibly changed their last name to Tkachev, to be more in touch with their new home. In a way, they renounced their Judaism, and by omission, instilled feelings of denial to her young sixteen-year old daughter Nadia, now called Nadezdha, who was trying to fit in somewhere: A Jew? A musician? A Deutsche-Bulgarian? My identity? In one of her most visceral tantrums, Nadezdha created a hysterical scene after her father told her, "everything is going to be all right, mein kind," and Nadezdha, asking with glittering eyes full of hope, "really, Papa? You really mean it?" Lothar smiling back at her, but Aletta, in complete despair of not being able to help the broken child uttered the wrong words at the wrong time: "Nadia, maybe it is time to find another hobby?" sending Nadia into a visceral attack of emotions, to the extent that she stormed out of the two-story house screaming in a Bulgarian accent, "Judenfrei! Judenfrei!" and "Du hättest in Auschwitz sterben sollen!" (You should have died in Auschwitz) with tears in her eyes and an inconsolable face her parents were never to forget. Their neighbors, the Sokoloffs, Ashkenazi Jews themselves, heard everything, and in utter dismay, repulse, and shock, would never speak to the Tkachevs again. Years later, before going back to Germany, Hope—as she was called now—stood at the grave of her parents, and asked for forgiveness—influenced by Salvatierra's preaching—reciting sensible passages from the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran, as a way of mending old wounds in a holy trinity of religions, and in her now global mind, reconcile the irreconcilable. That same night, her ear gave birth to Wasch Joompa. Our Wax hero, General Wasch Joompa, witnessed the final six years of Hope's life—particularly her immersion with Salvatierra's work—creating in Wasch an incredible philosophical connection which he would never be able to break off from. Wasch would always consider himself to be a German, and more importantly, a proud Flensburgian German Wax. During the final years of Hope's life, she gained a considerable resurgence in popularity, thanks, in part, to the legend of the PP Twins, and also to her final recordings of Liszt Transcendental Etudes, which she recorded at the age of eighty-nine without showing any kind of weakness in her melodic and harmonic interpretation—a magnificent achievement indeed. It was in Flensburg, that the newly married couple Bonifacio and Porcupina Cantarella, Alina's parents, visited Hope. For years, they had been fans of her recordings and finally they had saved enough

money to visit her, but not before having written a beautiful letter with florid poetry reminiscent of Yeats, enamoring Hope and making her accept their visit. General Wasch, a pragmatist, really viewed this as his only opportunity for survival. Knowing that Hope was about to say her final auf wiedersehen, devised a plan with the lesser Waxes who lived in Hope's ear to secure his transfer to the body of any of the Cantarellas, thus guarantying his survival, but more importantly, the survival of the message. Here, during the staging process of the plan, he realized he was meant for great things, and tested his eloquence and leadership skills which he somehow knew he always had. On a humid Sunday morning after breakfast, the Cantarellas were laughing while thanking Hope for receiving them so kindly, throwing in some small talk, and here and there implying the final goodbye, which Hope took as a sign of politeness and would remember until her death. Unexpectedly, a nausea overcame Hope, her legs losing balance while a high pitched sound resonated in her brain—you clever bastard; Wasch was commandeering thousands of little Waxes through the giant cave of the ear canal, darkness in sight, but a certain invisible light which was the ear drum, almost tasting the new body; yet, deep inside, Wasch had a certain apprehension which couldn't be stopped, thinking, "Dear God, I hope the new Waxes receive me well!" and, "If I don't reach the other ear then it's all over…" the last phrase having said out loud. One of the lesser Waxes heard it and yelled in the middle of the whole commotion, "General! If you die, we will all throw ourselves to the ground!" at the same time, other Waxes began their declarations, not knowing what they really meant, a consequence of having heard too many movies throughout the years. "We're with you General!" "We'll do it together!" “Hello, gorgeous!” “Talk to me Goose!” "It's now or never!" "Plata o plomo!" “You can’t handle the truth!” “We’ll always have Paris!” "Hasta la victoria, siempre!" “You had me at hello!” Presently, they began singing: If Our General Dies (full band; common time; free tempo;broadway style) Oh! If ou-r General dies! And rises to the ski-es! We will follow! We will fo-llow! How? Proudly! (everyone) If our General dies! (No!) And we’re left with no respite! (No!) We will thro-w our-selves to our, what? Deaths! (everyone)

If our General dies! And there’s sadness in our eyes! We will follow! We will follow right behind! (everyone) And the magic and the spirit and the pa-ssion (rallentando) Of… our… ki-nd! (expectant) Will… just… Di—e! (climax) With new hope, Wasch began imitating an Apache scream he had heard in the 1993 movie "Geronimo: An American Legend," with Gene Hackman and Wes Studi. Suddenly, throughout Hope's ear canal, every single lesser Wax began screaming the Apache war cry, its sound resonating throughout her whole body, travelling at velocities higher than the speed of sound, and then they saw it: The Eardrum. The Apache war cry was growing louder and louder, everyone heading toward that magnificent delicate membrane, the promised land, it seemed to them. "I see it, General!" screamed one of the lesser Waxes. "Mein Gott!" yelled another one. “It’s so beautiful!” In the midst, something magically happened: by some unknown force, the Waxean Apache cry began resonating throughout, what it seemed, The Universe. Now, every single Wax in the world could hear the cry; they were brothers connected through a euphonic war cry; it was then, that every Wax understood what they had to do. All around the world—in what would later be known in Human History as, "The First Waxean Contact"—every Wax began screaming the Apache cry. In the thirty-two seconds—the time it took for Wasch and his comrades to reach the eardrum—the people of Earth screamed, vomited, fell to the ground, cars crashed, people were being run over by speeding ambulances, some went crazy, children hit their mothers, adolescents killed themselves by drinking bleach, grannies shat themselves, teenagers began doubting their sexuality and gender, animals pissed themselves: The Great Tragedy. When Wasch and his army of Waxes reached the eardrum, Hope began to fall to the left, toward the ground. At the same time, Porcupina also was falling to the left, but just right under Hope. It all happened so fast but seemingly in slow motion, yet, the Chaos from which it was conceived was sublime. Hope's left ear was then perfectly aligned horizontally with Porcupina's right ear. Then, the transfer happened. No one really knows how it happened but Wasch just remembered that as he reached Hope's eardrum, he was engulfed by a feeling of euphoria, and began hearing “Deum Verum,” a Gregorian chant from the 7​th​ century, and he just let go. Later, rumors were spread saying that Wasch had witnessed Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, and some Waxean theologians would merge their area of study with the disciplines of Philosophy and Physics, hypothesizing that Wasch had actually entered a black hole located beneath Hope’s eardrum, having travelled through time for centuries, becoming the ear wax of historical figures such as Alexander the Great, Qin Shi Huang, and the great Nur Jahan, and then returning back to the present.

"Everything was white… some kind of fluorescent Waxean orgasm… It just happened," he would later say in his last interview before transferring to Alina’s ear. The T.V. special was conducted by Hernia Wax, the star reporter of the WNN (Wax News Network) a powerful media conglomerate residing in Porcupina's right ear, which was owned by the WNG (Wax News Group), a subsidiary of the great WE (Wax Enterprises.) "It was meant to be… you are… our… hero…" said Hernia looking at the Camera, with visibly emotional cadence. Voices coming from backstage could be heard yelling, “Freedom! Freedom! Viva General Joompa!” "Yes Hernia, it was meant to be, and now, our destiny is to…" and like this, the Wax legend was born, witnessed by T.V. Waxean addicts, in their own little society, and somewhere in a Waxean house an angry mother said, “Oh! Will you turn that thing off? It’ll make you stupid!” “Yes, mother.”