RECOVERED FRAGMENT FROM "THE BALLAD OF PETER THIEL,' c. 20XX

by Paul Alleluia

——ter hadn't ever been a total stranger to gay sex. When he was thirteen years old at the German-language school in Kroonberg, he'd shared handjobs with a black boy classmate of his. He'd never quite forgotten the rosy head of the boy's dark member as he peeled the foreskin back: like a red radish buried in the soil: fresh and crisp and easy on the tongue. He'd masturbated in circles of barefoot boys. He'd blown strangers in public toilets. He'd touched and been touched.

But it wasn't until he was a man, and he felt the power of another man—fucked and been fucked at the peak of his vitality—that he really understood himself—his values—his politics, really. True equality: two forces of nature engaged in ruthless mutual desecration culminating in the production of nothing but flat colorless pleasure.

Peter began to suspect that his father, too, had been a fag.

Ilya Becker was born in Berlin to parents named Yusupov(a) who'd fled Russia because they'd seen Lenin and his majority on the horizon, as it were, and figured it best to just gather up their gold and head west before the new St. Petersburg winter blew their proverbial hats off. Three days after Ilya was born, his father was run down in the street by one of the Benz children piloting an experimental automobile. The city covered it up and Ilya's mother never received a dime in recompense. They'd said her husband was drunk. What Becker family money that hadn't been spent on the move to Germany went to the Benz family for repair of the experimental automobile, as well as the transportation of young Yusupov patriarch's body back to St. Petersburg, in the process of which it was lost in transit somewhere amid the roiling eddies of new soviet states. Ilya's mother took up drinking and, finding herself incapable of traditional labor, took to stomping in the streets and dangling the baby Ilya in the faces of passersby and crying "Hilf ihm! Hilf ihm!" When helfen didn't come, mother and child could at least rely upon their arrest: jail brought meals and a bed. This sufficed for a few years. Until a local madman—a self-proclaimed anarcho-monarchist—grew sick of the mother's howls and, deeming the Russian-accented woman the first germ of Bolshevik madness arriving at his fatherland's shores, shot her dead. Little Ilya, hardened to the precarity of things, toddled over to the first policeman he saw and said "Gefängis, bitte."

He was——