Imagine Kim Kardashian kidnapped and threatened with beheading by ISIS terrorists in Syria… Already savvy in propaganda through social media, the terrorists create a mock “reality TV show” that they update everyday. They do not ask for ransom or behead her, for their captive is invaluable alive and on display.

Written in the present tense, from the first-person point of view, the narrator is not really Kim Kardashian, of course, but a quasi-celebrity model, who is just well-known enough to create a media firestorm around the world when videos of her, clad in a burqa, kneeling in a cage, begin to appear on the Internet.

As the drama unfolds, uncanny parallels with the 19th Century assassination in Geneva of Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary emerge — in what terrorists of that faraway time called “propaganda of the deed.”

From the narrator’s tiny cage somewhere in the Middle East, worlds collide: poor and rich, 100 years ago and now, west and east…. Beauty and terror, infidel and believer, materialism and spiritualism…. Decadent and ascetic…. Globalization and isolation.

Weaving these large and timely themes together is her own personal tale of agony, passion, and revenge set against an eerie evocation of the last days of Austro-Hungarian Empire a century earlier.

Palimpsest

To Make the World a Better Place

By Joy Saint James

I am an anarchist by conviction…. I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign, with object of giving an example…. It did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill…. It was not a woman I struck, but an Empress. — Luigi Lucheni, assassin of Austro-Hungarian Empress Elisabeth, explaining his “propaganda of the deed,” 1898.

@Salidin For our sisters enslaved by CRUSADERS, we #IslamicState now have one of their own! The world is but a bridge & wicked western woman now make Hijra. May Allah have his will with her. Contemplate tht fact carefully.— Twitter, 2015.

Chapter 1

“Justify yourself.”

His command is uttered so calmly, so matter-of-factly, so well annunciated (with a touch even of an old Etonian accent) that the sound of the words seem disconnects from their meaning. Perplexed, I don’t know what else to do but smile for the camera. I look into his eyes, tilt my head, and contract my zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles, as I always do for the camera. It’s called a Duchenne smile, I learned what now seems so long ago on one of my very first catalog shoots.

Unlike every other man I’ve ever met, however, he does not smile back. Instead, after the slightest of pauses, he repeats the words, with added emphasis on each syllable, slower, louder, so much louder, so much more forcefully, I can feel, and can’t control, my whole body beginning to quiver, to shake, to jerk.

“Justify yourself!” Then, again:

“Whore, justify yourself!” he screams this time so loudly I seem to be lifted off the plank stool where I’m sitting.

And as he screams, his fist slams the roughhewn table narrowly separating us — him seated on one side, me on the other — our faces eye-level, alone together in this cage-like, windowless room. Physically, he’s no bigger than I, maybe shorter (lots of men are), and probably about the same age, despite the manicured gravitas of his mustache-less black beard. His dark, deep-set eyes glower, steady, straight into mine. I blink first.

In the next moment, the next micro-second — however time is measured and divided here — when my eyelids lift, maybe he’ll be gone? And this won’t be happening? What’s not here, I suddenly realize, is any of my jewelry. Under the table my hands clasp and comfort one another, seeking reassurance, reaffirmation in my sense of touch; but what I feel is what’s not there. The presence of absence. My fingers, now clammy and twitching, are without their familiar bands and rings; missing, too, is the brand-new, diamonds-and-gold starburst bracelet on my right wrist, a special perk for me after my last David Yurman photo shoot at that funky studio in Brooklyn.

Make 2015 the year to express yourself with jewelry of unique artistry…intense, iconic, rock-and-roll perfection, a classic….

When I raise my head and open my eyes, my wish has not come true: the strange man is still there, glaring at me. So my eyes dart downward, averting his gaze, looking away, taking me away, as far from him as possible. Back to New York…London…Paris…Geneva…anywhere but here. The Beau Rivage, where my luggage, all my bags, Louis Vuitton, are sitting, still unpacked. Soon I’m weeping.

“Justify yourself!” Does he say it again, screaming this time, or am I imagining things, trying to understand things, predicting what will come next. My brain is racing, as if lubricated by tears. Is that where the word lachrymose comes from? Lachrymose lubrication. Am I going crazy? Lachrymose lubrication. Alliteration always calls too much attention to itself.

There’s a festive elegance to clothes that sparkle in the evening light but don’t outshine their wearer. Quiet Splendor. Donna Karan New York.

Weeping. Whimpering. Crying. Sobbing. Bawling. What is the best word, the most accurate self-depiction? What words will I use when reflecting, sipping a cappuccino back on the hotel terrace, sharing my experience? But now I can’t form coherent speech, only sobbing and shaking, softly sobbing, sobbing softly, blathering, trying to swallow my sobs. Are my thoughts any less chaotic? What is he thinking, the man across the table, the man making me cry, what’s he thinking? Theory of mind, I wonder.

“Just as I thought,” he smiles and scolds me. “You have no answer. You cannot justify yourself. You have no reason for being.”

Yes, my whimpering is exactly what he wants to witness: that I have no answer, and therefore no reason to live. Q.E.D. Whatever he and the others now do to me will thus be warranted. Quod erat demonstrandum. Moreover, scientists — testing with a double-bind control group whether tears act as a chemosignal — have confirmed that crying woman are a turnoff for men. Where did I read that?

“Yes, you have no value being alive,” he says as he stands up from the table. “Justice will be done. In šāʾ Allāh.”

He then falls silent, as if in prayer, as if this now eerily quiet, stark, whitewashed but dirty room — empty of all life except for the sound of my soft sobbing — is some kind of place of worship. #Disgustipating. That’s what I’d tweet if…if I still had my phone… if I could ever stop crying… if….

He turns his back and walks away, toward the room’s single door, its only exit. Even after he has left the room, his staring, judgmental eyes linger. Do I dare stand up and move away from the table. Where would I go?

…/… to be continued….