Naturalist Portrait of Warmonger, 6:45 PM June 20, 1976 – Lucas Zhou

May 28, 2026

Three years before the Tehran sun rose over a lionless horizon in an Air France pilot’s shades and his hand squeezed Khomeini’s as they broke rank from the flock of dead men on the topmost airstair landing—a Plymouth Roadrunner veered across two southbound lanes and struck against the corrugated guardrail and a decelerating Allied Van Lines trailer and into the path of the ‘63 Thunderbird, tread and the brake lines smudging, sparkling, scuttling out from under the wounded engine block over headlight filament. Milina riding shotgun cried and he felt his lapel with the elephant pin roll, crease, force and jerk with the Bicentennial belt buckle on his hips, saw jade, chrome, chevroned orange and a jackknifing chassis smear, rush, pivot. The kid in a vectored Beetle had died instantly, the Roadrunner with a punctured lung. Twenty years later, after the ribbon and the bronze plaque and when the whole country turned to the godless sludge that was Engels and Marx and Clinton and his Milena in the Minnie Mouse bathrobe shuddered and stumbled backwards, red blooming in the pit of her chest and skull swirling in sulfuric—he would descend from a ivory-white gallery in orange nylon—pressing his cheeks against acrylic to peer towards the syringes and a hazard placard as the state coroner drummed his knuckles over a Styrofoam cup—but in the moment, holding court in split, quartered glass and her ruined mink sole, faux-silver and synthetic thread catching the smog and the incandescent wafting beyond the Potomac, the beavertail on a length of magnetic tape gliding under the heads and the empty feed drums—he wiggles a pinkie and chitters, gestures: any filibuster, any implosion of white phosphorus against a jungle or squat mud hut, anyplace, anywhere.