Witz

II

To live is to transgress, existence itself a species of violation; day passes through hours into days, into a lifetime spent in darkness under the sun that must shine always, as it has no will of its own. From the first seven to now, each day is a history, which we deny if we fail to live our lives in its observance, for its sanctification. As we go in and as we come out, as we rise up and as we lie down, carelessly, accomplished without conscience, we deny the tradition of each day — we live without a thought given to the eternal presence of the past in our present, which is already past, even though it may tarry. Other calendars live through our calendar, shine through in glimmers of the sacred, like the cloudlike moon as descried through the black of the clouds…wheels turn each other, turn through one another, bound to the heart, caged in the ribs — the soul and the body find refuge in the same nothingness, what we call mensch…

To interpret winter, it’s December, which in our generation dawns during the month known as Kislev, if only to those who might know no more. Much like the soul and body, they have nothing to do with one another, December and Kislev, save that they cleave to the same, which is nothing, each other. Wrapping, ribbons of bows, tissue, foam pellet packing — to tear at the box that is day, the present, to find inside the gift that is time. We might have mentioned, it’d been the holiday of the lights, Hanukah, each night a candle wicked down to dawn and its aureate smoke, meltings in the menorah her mother had left her, Hanna’s, Polish, it didn’t polish itself, you had to scour, replace it on its cabinet shelf, but this she’d leave to Wanda, upon the night after the last — the ninth, numbered as a plague of the opposite season — observed at the sink, its ritual of the goo and the rag.

As Kislev turns over, December remains, another notch, another tooth, a soul departed in part. After Kislev comes the month of Tevet, its first this year and in the opposite month a Friday, which is the beginning of the Sabbath, or Shabbos, the day a king of Judah was exiled from Jerusalem, along with the nobility and all of our interpreting Sages. However mournful, it merits no fast. That occurs, though, on the eighth of that month, when we go without in memory of the decree of Ptolemy of Egypt, a king, successor to Alexander of Macedonia, his order that the Law of the people, the Torah, be translated from the language of God into the language of gods, which is Greek: hoping to expose disputation and so falsehood in the Law, Ptolemy summoning the exiled Sages from eight days ago, dispersing their future into separate prisons each to a mensch and there ordering them each to translate the Law and each inspired, guided by God Who knows all languages and has all tongues in His hand, separately translating the Law entire identically, even when they, again always separately if unified in the purpose that is God that is known as survival, intentionally altered their translations to avoid offense to the king, if and when this or that passage might have been misunderstood by those lacking faith; these identical Laws being finished on the eighth of the fourth month, which is the tenth month if our year would be counted from spring, whose name of Tevet cannot itself be translated, as its meaning is unknown, or means nothing. And then there’s Shabbos, the next day, which now exhaustedly falls upon the ninth of the month of Tevet and might also have been a day of privation, of fast (if not for the fact of the Sabbath, which supersedes such), when we are so told to remember the deaths of a scribe and a prophet, specifically Ezra and Nechemiah they were, leaders of the people in their return from Babylonia’s exile, which would capture their souls. And finally, turning wheels, reversing events, chronology, causality, there’s the fast of the next day, if you’re prepared, which is the tenth, embodied in December but beyond it as well, infamously, upon which we have sworn to curse Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon’s king, and his siege of the holy Jerusalem that began on this date and lasted three years more until the walls of the city were finally breached upon the ninth day of the tenth month in the eleventh year of the reign of a king whose name it is forbidden to pronounce as it’s impossible and, anyway, manyvoweled; this siege ending, events unto events, wheels within wheels, bad breeding worse then bringing it up without a Father Who art, in the destruction of the Holy Temple — whose observance in memory of shall be as festivals upon the coming of the Messiah; which Temple whether fallen forever or still with the potential to rise we anyway rededicate year after year, with the festival of lights that illuminates the days to the pagan millennium about to arrive, with the end of the world and our water stockpiled, our flashlights and our guns and our rope, a rush on jars of honey, powdered milk.

And so verily we have been given three days of fasts, only to gorge ourselves on the Sabbath, which we know as Shabbos, the night of Friday or the morning of Saturday, whether the fifth, sixth, or seventh day of the week depending on how it’s observed or it’s not — made holy even without the sanctification offered in death, which is theirs, which is ours, and though observed, though made that very holy and sanctified, still a Sabbath like others, even a Shabbos like every other day of the week, any of them with the sun and moon and the stars that are three and above; which day the nations of the world this year know as Xmas, the eve of the holiday of the tree and the baby just born, of the fiery sales at department stores and how they’re malled much different from shops, and of their kings, too, who are also one and yet three, coupons for camels, the jollity of a fat skinny who in a hat; that and the day of His bris to be, His circumcision aborted: scheduled for tomorrow with the caterers, did you confirm, remember to pick up the bagels — and so you can clock it, understand, the sense of history at work here and of wheeling, of palpable past, of immense weight, fates visited down upon heads unsuspecting, covered, uncovered; why everything’s been so confused these past few days, insane out of sorts; why it’s been just a crazy week this week, Israel’s explaining what with her laid up, Hanna, what with the past, its preparations and ours, rendering due to the meaning and worth of each day to its month to its — and the expectation of it all, with Israel so late, almost too late this once though he’s remembered this time, thank God: the bought braided bread, the challah, two loaves, again she’d been unable to bake…

And how late they were late, themselves, the guests again, us, and darkness was upon the face of our mothers, tired and too much mascara, too; the soup was without form and void, if still soup, in need of a starch, mushroom, and the light, it was in from the fridge, as no one had shut it. The candle, the candles, a handful. A diaper was new, unbuttoned and pinned, the buttondowned shirts of His father, Him powdered, and topically salved; a sweater gotten, too, on which was writ in stitch the word Ben, which was also His name, Benjamin was, or the name Ima said by which He should know the wait, was to know the wait, is still waiting. As the sweater was too small, it was draped over a knee, which was bare. As for His Ima, He called her, her other names, which are as complex as dates, at least, as complicated and strange, were Hanna one room and Wanda the next. All got cold, freezing, which was why the knee’s sweater; then the kitchen froze, icicles up from the depths of the fridge, and so His mother opened the oven in which the chicken was becoming baked chicken and then — suddenly, through the oven, two-by-two and helping each other, stepping high and ducking so as not to hit their heads, again, so it’s been said, so we’ve been told, their glasses fogged and mouths stuffed with ties and necklaces against pain, sucking in their hunger and thirst, holding their loose suits and dresses so as not to get snagged on wireracks or stained with the pooled juice of the poultry baked in its blood is what’s been related to us, that suddenly, and again, into the kitchen, through the oven and its heat of nine hells, marched in their guests: how they might themselves have remembered it to their own kinder had they lived past that Sabbath, that Shabbos, whatever the difference, if difference there be. Hello, hug and kiss. Shut the oven after. Some offered to help prepare. Others noshed on ingredients left out. Wiped steam, saliva from their lorgnettes, with the linings of the pockets of their husbands, who were pockets themselves. And their pants, door-to-door and the rest, presumptuous enough help yourself, they sat down at the table: holding their irascible silver, tines frothing stock.

It was. One day, same night. Good or not, true or told. Israel said Kiddush, the prayer over the wine, the washing and blessing Hamotzi lechem min ha aretz it went and only then may the passing begin — the feeding of the baby, too, don’t forget who He’s big enough already to be sitting at table in a regular seat, and grown enough to be supping on anything served, even every distraction or so deft enough to take an unnippled sip at the wine of His eldest sister, Rubina; at the other head of the table opposite His father wrecked at the foot He’s soon slumped, piss and kaka, veingravy dazed, drunk on His sisters’ juicewatered wine and the guzzly blood of the beasts.

How He manages upstairs, who knows, how they manage to able Him up, tuck Him taut into sheets soiled, got me. He’s storied, prayed tight, then left for that further diaspora known as neither sleeping nor waking, that time of rolling around and of rocking, wriggling, snuggling, of flatus and lull, having laid under His pillow, with pillow under His knees, on His stomach with the edge of the pillow itched along His staff in the midst of a shed and the scratchy sacs that cower below, lying with His head on the pillow set around His ears as a mouthful, to swallow His dreams. Israel had left only an hour ago, turning lips to His, whispering into them name…Benjamin, and with unsettled gut sensing a matter unfinished, the amorphous undone and leftover, He frees Himself from His sheets and stands; sneaky feets quietly and nude save that diaper yet another of Israel’s old outfashion shirts sleeved around waist, He one foots then another then toes and then tips. He stands at the door as fat as an idol halffinished, marbled at the threshold of hall. An idol, with an animate appetite. It’s a need for the leftovers, physical, those of the Sabbath especially, and though there’s the suspicion that sneaky He will have to account for them dawn the morning, it’s overpowering, just the thought of it, that leftover fowl going to waste, is oppressive, it must be so tasty, so filling, there in the fridge and freezing in there with the dial on 9, it needs His warmth, it wants Him and His only, dead in its own juices for hours after hours and hours soaking up all the multitudinous goodnesses, yum in the tum, the only one who loves Him, this poultry, the only one who can, who’ll make Him happy, and if not, there’s always experience to invoke, mistakes to be made and to be made again and again but each making made better — chicken drizzled with sauce, dipped twice then twice more; meals take on whole new dimensions — of taste, scent, textural — when eaten twice, especially if the second’s eaten hours after the first, when there’s a separation, a break, a puttingbetween, so that everything’s had time to gel, to congeal, to breathe in its own steaming waft, to age, not even to go totally cold but just right, and who is He to say no, after all, He’s just an infant, how does He know from denial. He can barely talk, if He knew from saying no He might’ve never been born; Will Power, dunno, Will Power, never met him, was he related to Ima or…

He — Benjamin — doesn’t yet possess the weakness that is restraint in accordance with the growth of His flesh and intelligent soul, and as if to prove such to Himself (satisfying ego, in the service of other appetites), He has the thought to step slow, and precise, to avoid problem floorboards, stares at every door drafting the hallway to stairs, stares them shut, wills them asleep until morning. Then, stops, waits at the slightest settle of foundation. Empty, the stomach of floor. Rumbling plank. No snorting snore, no din of dream. Bereft of mucosal stertor, the gunk of Israel’s caffeinated cigar. He stops at the stairs, at their head, the progenitor of descent, if patrilineal then of His God.

Here, stopped at the top of infinite generations of steps, a straightened labyrinth, a ladder filledin, the bottom, if any, seems unattainable: every step as tall as He is, He’ll fall, the fear, paranoia except when He’s justified; with every step He takes another step’ll be added onto the bottom, He’ll descend forever; and then there’s the order of the stepping stairs, which might up and rearrange out of nowhere, reorder themselves in the dead of night: last step to switch itself with the first, twelfth with the second, they aren’t the same after all; to step forever if the order He descends isn’t the same He’d ascended hours ago with finger in palm, Israel dragged higher and higher up to the seat of the Godhead, the footstool and throne of the study adjoining the room of His parents, Aba’s office, keep shish; what if one of the stairing steps gives a noise underfoot it’d never given before, or doesn’t, what if, and all the care’s gone for nothing, needless heedless caution, can’t bear the waste. Benjamin enumerates them, necessary in this dark, one two three steps soft, an interpretation of stealth, always how many four five six then a landing, and then however many more and again, stairs, stops, at the landing, midstairs, to inquire of the photographs hung thereupon — ancestors of those photographed on the wall on the stairs down and up to the basement, which He’s never attempted, hasn’t yet dared. He asks them though in silence, and as if they’re sure to know as they’re native to such steps, and this landing — how many stairs, how many more or much longer — but His forefathers, unknown to Him except through these photographs and in them, as them, not looking too well, complexioned greenish gray, light-bruised, they’ve aged badly, they don’t answer, or can’t, as they’re images only, and so remain impassive, if fading, glassed detached, shoddily framed. Then, that last questioning step to the test of the foot, that’s the stair that’ll snare, the stumblingblock, the trip, has to be. He asks with the rungs of His lips the angels always invisibly ascending and descending for aid, though this isn’t a dream, He doesn’t think, He hopes it’ll turn out to be — trips and falls now, tumbling just short of silent, hauls Himself up with a palm on the newel, standing His knees scraped, winces as He turns to behold the kitchen in the light of the lights on timers outside.

As outside there’s the freeze of the snow to make necessary the shelter of house, in which it’s warm, with heat central, up from the ventings at baseboard; and as there’s a house to make necessary the refrigerator inside, which sustains that that might sustain our own lives, and is the house within the house upon which our world is presently founded (this is how Benjamin thinks when He’s hungry) — how far we have come from the garden! Better to banish the house, go out and greet exposure, scattering the perishables to keep out on the lawn. This refrigerator, the kitchen’s, a rectangular white monolith, set into the wall, doorsurfaced, is kept fresh of new food, right from the supermarket, taken right from the bag and unwrapped only then, to be cooked and consumed — this isn’t the refrigerator He needs. The refrigerator He needs is the downstairs refrigerator, the downstairs-downstairs, in the basement, partially unfinished, meaning wholly; it keeps the leftovers sealed for eternity in their containments of plastic, foiltopped bowls and the trademark of tupperware, the foods best forbidden for better than a moon after their initial cooking and partial consumption, the headless fowl, the frozen appetizers, minipatties and tiny weiners wrapped in pastry, the gallons of a pareve substance marketed as premium tofu dessert, suspected poison. And so choices and decisions; choices, decisions. He can either turn, grope toward the second stairwell, the ignorant steps leading downstairs-downstairs, and maybe further, maybe ever, tenebrously descending; to stalk a walk quietly, meticulously miraculous progress, down to where even Hanna had feared to tread, from the table through the kitchen then walking down the stairs and a right to the fridge of the hemieaten, partidigested foods sealed for storage — as if an offering to the underworld, its famished goddess Wanda, a famous other mother.

And then how she’d return, sacrifice made, with empty hands.

Or, to settle — for the new that is the fresh over the old though untold.

Here, this refrigerator, with its condiments and crisper, twoliter of seltzer lemonlime. Mustard, and syrup. Ingredients and not form.

Snacks sugared in the pantry to the left of the fridge, enough salt to make a decentsized pillar.

To reach for the fridge right here in front of Him, easy — to fingerprint its hum, stroke at its moist gurgle, in the dark to feel for its handle, to open, reveal, tugging with one hand while the other for leverage feels at the rubberized seam. And then there’d be light.

Morning’s night. To let the heated air in. Host of a bulb burning compulsion. Freshkept. And His glasses, too, their fog.

Benjamin stands, feet at the foot of the stairs, gazing from the refrigerator beyond to the steps below, intending thought though drowsy. To risk or not. To decide, it tires. Fate’s for the lazy, dessert as a meal for the toobored to choose. Then, to head the wrong way from everything, into the livingroom, the familyroom, who knows where He lies, atop the sofa of three pillows, as opposed to the two other sofas of four pillows each, then five, He spreads Himself out with the knife of a hand like a condiment, as if buttery marge, to rest His head in the spoon that is His other palm.

A mousy quiescence — and yet, He senses a stirring.

A preparation: thoughts of food digested to fear, an expectancy, and, finally, room for a real hunger — a pregnant yen.

O, to be as ravenous as a dove — craving even an olive of sunlight, a far branch of peace…

The goy up there knows from chimneys, does he ever, knows them like he knows his own throat, windpipes whether of brick or metal, he knows their flues and their fires, too, and the smoke in the eyes and lungs, had squeezed through them, all these years, too many now, immemorial, generations turned to smoke, their mouths smirching sky; how he’d shimmied through them and whatever had stuck them up: a fallen pigeon, a downed owl, summer neglect. His sleigh, a green cabriolet cutter hung with lit lanterns, he’s parked against the slope of the roof at its lowest scarp; racingstriped runners tearing up the shingling, his team of flying reindeer idling patiently, letting rest the awesome ripple of their legs: lashed trunks, ragged fundaments; giants of meat and raw, with eyes that are nothing if not oily mad, anything but jolly, more like violent in their majesty, lidded hoary and hardened; they’re scraping their hooves as if to herd forward, butt heads, to charge the chimney down which he dove; they give soft snorts from their nostrils, then quiet, to graze upon stars. On each of their antlers hangs a crown: tarnished gold for one, the others are rotted, wormtwisted wood. None have a red nose — they have snouts.

Him, he sucks it in, in his motheaten suit down he goes the dark throats of houses and into the warm of their guts.

One night only, year after year — the fullness of good little wellbehaved boys & goyls…

Most are expecting a stockinglike sack, though that’s so last season, roll the eyes, snigger: the sack molders up north, in the attic of his bungalow, yearround doneup in Millennial Terrific, though itself without chimney, only a Pole, kept topped with an ostentatious antenna, festooned with the flags of the world.

Tonight, it’s a can he carries, a metal battered can as if of paint; it’s a bucket, for the record — filled with the blood of the lamb, cut with that of goats when the Arctic slaughterhouse went short on a stray flock.

A chute through the chimney, no fire, lucky for him this fireplace is for appearances only, an arched validation of a mantel above upon which to display photographs, more of them, those of the immediate family, at home, on vacation, which was Florida, Mexico, anywhere always July, flushed at weddings, at graduations proudly awkward — and then, at the furthest gilded edge, the newest immortality, made in a gaudily mirrored frame: it’s Him — at the hospital, in the arms of His mother if no longer living then sleeping, still, upstairs-upstairs, have patience, have pity, have dreams. Benjamin’s head propped atop the pillows atop the sofa, Claus ducks in then prods aside the screen, steps soft gingerbread tread over the brickwork ledge then onto the carpet, proceeds into the kitchen and beyond, to the frontdoor trailing blobs of blood, to dearm the alarm, unlock the door from the inside; he dips his chin, a beard’s brush, a patch of stain flecked with soot and then, with tense shakes of a hackneyed head begins to mark the jamb, not even acknowledging Benjamin to spit a gift on Him.

A poor guest, we’ve known worse.

The problem with this tradition has always been once he’s gone down the chimney, how does he manage to get back up to the roof? If the devil Satan must fall, one might argue, then a saint like Santa must rise; once finished with his swathe and slather, he might lick clean the plate of warmed goodies, gargle the icy milk of mothers left behind — more time to think his way up and out, though this house would never provide. Maybe they have a fowl in the fridge, he thinks, and a little shot of schnapps, helps to hope.

And then, there’s always a ladder in garages like these.

This year, though, another task, each house its own — he doesn’t ascend, doesn’t rise to the roof, to fly off into the air, full reindeerpower ahead. Maybe later. Work to do. Not for nothing he’s the patron saint of our kinder.

To dry his hairs on the Rag, which drawer he knows.

And where the laundryroom, too.

He and with a silence that seems to twinkle returns to the den, if den it is, takes Benjamin by the hand. He’s a body come to life from the photographs on the stairwell. He’s the father of His father, whose father he might otherwise be. To take him slow, and as gently as you’d expect, naked fist in mitten fringed in tinsely poms, to lead Him to the stairs then up them, three at a time, and down the hall of shutdead doors to His room above the garage and its angelic ladder expected — forget it, you might as well stay a while, won’t you, make yourself comfortable, my house is yours, there’ll soon be beds empty enough; the two of them, Santa and son almost of equal size, stepping high, huge, and damn sleep loud into His room — and then Santa, holding a forefinger through the loose skein of yarn worn to his lips, slams the door bang behind them, though there’s no one left alive to awake.

At the corner of Deaf & Mute, known to most as the intersection of Eastern Parkway & Kingston Avenue, Brooklyn, in sunglasses at night, Mel Chisedic — not blind, but that’s how he makes rent out of season; habits are often stoned into Laws — loiters in front of a display window shattered open to winter, screening the madness as presented on networks owned by the dead. Eleven months out of the year his profession’s the panhandle, begging, predicated on this blindness, which wasn’t as much blindness as it’s more exactly the use of sunglasses, though occasionally there appeared an opening in Retard, an abandoned corner or curb, which estate, retardation, though more difficult to fake was for that very fact all the more lucrative, but this season as for the past decade or two of Xmases, ever since being released from the far from paradisiacal prison island known as Rikers and so reintroduced into the general population of the inexcusably unemployed, he was one of the legions of the Great White, a Santa, though less Santa or even a scrambly Satan as he often laughed than a lush, fat middleaged, more desperate than jolly, more wanty and needy than giving; his lap aching from the sits of adorable, panracial kinder with their marketable talents and astronomical intelligence quotients; his left ear — its ruby shard of earring out inseason — aching from their whispered wishes: for ponies ribboned, wrapped so shinily well they’d asphyxiate, for Mommy and Daddy to not get divorced, to love each other and me all over again, to buy like this new mansion for us to live in together high upon the fluff of an exurbiated cloud, hovering above the beach, Miami, maybe, then for me the sweetest ride, pimped to the maximum military surplus, with marzipan turret and gelatin treads; for this Xmas, all I want is for this scary acute lymphocytic leukemia to go away — is that too much to ask, Santy? Jesus.

Rummy cup of coffee in hand, dopey sack of a hat on his head, those wraparound mirrored sunglasses greasing down the slope of his nose, Mel stands offduty, riveted to the proceedings on the screens displayed as peaceful, orderly looting goes on around him: smashed plate glass, panes from windows and doors, splinters and scrap; hulking goyim of every color and class loading all sorts of kitsch into their idling cars, gaping trucks, highpiled grocerycarts, trashcans not aflame. A vast ziggurat department store specializing in just about every need of a number of minorities lately in the majority, those who hadn’t made the lottery to light out for Siburbia just yet (which designations would apply to Mel, too, whose Santa suit was as oppressive as his poverty and skin), Laz-R-Us is ten bags of stale popcorn away from being declared entirely out of stock, shelves laid bare, then the shelves taken themselves. Though slim pickings after the rush of last weeks, enough merchandise’s gone to worry the CEO of any insuring firm into investing a tenth or so of his own salary into stock in an overseas manufacturer of indigestion pills. The leftover lawn-front nativities they took, the plywood mangers and glittery tangles of hay, the remaindered miniature camels humped in velveteen and those swaddled plasticine babes, factoryseconds without mouths, and voluminous gallons of water, batteries and cannedgoods, everything save the kernels, popping on their own in the fires the looting’s left raging; though all had miraculously left the screens stacked in the window smashed open, amid the glass and glassy tinsel and the signs and the wonders, the pyramids tottering of empty boxes and the decapitated remains of mannequined amputees as if veterans of discount wars and riotous sales — but the screens: not only to leave them but to leave them on as if in the seasonal spirit, a public service, to inform, and to warn; it’s civics, but mute.

A wet street steeped in wind. Champagne bubbles burst by the rain, snow, then a hailstorming of corks. Sirens split the freeze. Mel clangs his cowbell as if it’s enough to disperse them: the medics, fire, police; then unzips his fly, pisses into the sewer. An emergency artery of the highest importance, the way of first response, Eastern Parkway’s packed with observers, the curious and condemned both, in their new, newly looted clothes, in hats and wigs and jackets marked down, layawayed no longer with ten pairs of used women’s shoes in each pocket. And then into this disaster comes more, it attracts — comes his wife, or his ex, who can be sure: hundreds of them, a thousand or more drunk Misses Clauses, blind Mel’s never seen so many raw and soused wives of Ole Saint Nick in his life, never even conceived of such opportunity, missed, the squandering of sexual promise; grayhaired and tipsy, grannydresses dragging end of shift limp in muddied snow, they stagger forward in a heaving pack, talcumteeming, seething steam, a defeated army of gingerbread women gone hardened in the bitterest cold, the memory of plump, dashed hope of rosy, bonnets on their wigs on their perms, oversized purses in hand, nearing his standing gape reeking of toilet gin, peppermint, cloves, desperation. Mel elastics his fake beard down under his chin, tries to understand just from the lips of the reporter, the old Santa shtick when the beard’s on too tight you can’t hear: a bland man in a black suit and mourning tie, he’s saying something about death, the thrust of his petroleum tongue, death, licking the undersides of his front teeth, death, capped and burning, corpses and burnings…preemption of seasonal specials, the cancellation of the parades and the Passions, the manic animation of news without censor, unapproved; President Shade addressing the nation…desk, suit, flag and face; on a screen facing him, the prompter’s scrolling, snows of speech; he squints, face full with air fills up the screen, the screens, a balloon of condolence, its stem a thorn, as if to smash out the glass of the screens themselves, as if to smash out the eye; to fill the den, our mouths; our prayers are with you, he mouths…and across the nation lips are pursed to indicate gravity, quiet; volumes are raised unto the roof; shock; sofas are sat upon, chairs are brought back from the brink of recline — you really should have asked us first to sit down…from somewhere, from nowhere, a telephone rings, millions of them, Apocalypse holds the line; then, the newscaster along with his feminine clone, a doppelgänger blond and trying her best not to smile; half the stations cut to a location the other half will cut to in a moment…sixpointed star graphic: two triangles, superimposed, singeing, tattooing themselves on his pupils, Mel’s — fades, into evermore scenes of distress, then through a handful of more rapid cuts, loops of disaster, cut, cuts, scissoring fingers sliced across neck; kill it, we’re going unscripted and live onlocation…dizzying, reeling tickers, bars and charts; different stations with the same footage, different stations with different footage, grained real though all without sound, without the break of commercial. As he stands and stares, the Misseses approach; their nearing warmth sickening him, their menopaused steam and their smell. Mel reaches into the display amid a pile of those amputated, desecrated limbs, legs without feet, arms without hands, torsos without navels or nipples, and with a ragged nail he takes the screens off their mute, a flick, a flickering, raises their volumes to the sky, the very dial of the tuning moon; their blasts a coverage like light, weathernoise eruptive, as jagged and as sharp as the glass that once kept their peace, now emptying into the air, they’re sanctifying the sirens, purifying the street.

They’re dead.

AAAAAAAAAthisisnotatesthisnotatest!

Today marks the end of a glorious multimillennial history, and perhaps the richest tradition known to — is there no hope for the West — this is E.E. Tone, for A Voice in the Wilderness, reporting live, from Jerusalem — Pan — Mister Chancellor, your reactions, please — demonium — will it recover — can it even survive — over to you, in the studio — a lot of people are wondering — what does this mean for the rest of us, John—19—and for that, we turn to — mass death and rioting in the north of—39—has yet to comment — at present we have no official count — numbering toll — however experts estimate Midnight Eastern Standard Time, TOD (Time Of Death)—triage carnage age age age — a most sorrowful Xmas, indeed, Deborah—Misses Clauses in a fierce stumble, the oldest and ugliest of them leading the seething pack…they’re in pursuit, as you can hear small arms fire from just behind me, and what appears to be, yes, it’s a—I imagine the weather isn’t helping any, Helen — no, I imagine it’s not, John—Misses Clauses, all of them they’re massing into one giant Misses Claus, a grannywhite monster; they’re separate, individuated though nearidentical, and also one total woman, a great grayed grannywhite lumbering mutant with a full million eyes behind a hundred thousand pairs of glasses of every prescription, in orthopedic shoes and an apron giganticized out of their frocks that obliterates the horizon smeared in blood and in chocolate, their pearls’ strands whipping a weapon in the gusts against which it surges, past Utica toward Rockaway Avenue further, they surge forth, their din does, everywhere: Boro Park, the thorny crowns and heights of Crown Heights, Midwood and Brighton Beach down to Seagate north to Williamsburg then straight through to the borough of Queens and on to bury Long Island, the furthest Rockaway, through Hewlett and Woodmere and Lawrence, down south then, through the bedroom communities and all the commuters beached down in Ventnor and Margate and Longport in Joysey, all the way out west in Los Angeles and even more south now to Miami and the Beaches of Miami and Palm and Mexico and Panama and Rio on the water then over it to Golders Green, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin, then Amsterdam and Paris, its perfumed bodies stacked along Rue Captain Dreyfus, further east to Berlin, Karl Marx Allee a disaster, the Empire’s Vienna, better Buda than Pest then Prague, onto Kraków and Warsaw and Russia even and Shanghai and Sydney and Johannesburg, too — and even in Eden, which is now known as Iraq, with its wadis and palms and its explosives and madness, unto Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Herself, from the German Colony unto Mattersdorf, O the onehundred gates, the gushes from Gush, Bnai Brak with no one to fix…emptied of them, emptied of us, every city and Siburb and village and town made a cemetery, a house of mourning roofed by the sky for the sitting of shiva for seven days and seven nights accompanied by no one and nothing save this very noise, its surge: all the gossip, the telephone, the radio, the shrieks of the screen. How to — Any word describe on the feelings survivors here today — No What survivors we can — Authorities make out at this are of course distance on the scene — This and attempting seems to me to be — An even the most of profound — Reports global significance from Russia are in — Our and statistics — Let’s go to show the — Do we map have any idea — An act as to what or who we’re of unparalleled dealing with Terrorism scope on an international The scale President is scheduled to address the nation tonight at ten from the White House and of course Stay tuned we’ll be bringing it to you for further developments You’re live We apologize for This technical is difficulties watching — How is It’s much this possible too? early Let’s for not anything be too hasty except in our judgment I’d hesitate speculation to say No comment://dot.comment—

One of these Misses Clauses fellating a candy cane, another fellating the other end of the treat, they’re sucking away to kiss sweet at the middle without stripe, dripping drool sugary thick.

And yet another one, this their leader it would appear from the rear, the fat and old and the ugly, her face a rash of makeup, scars herpetic and of acne, too, black luck and its blue mutilation, she’s asking Mel…what you got in that sack of yours, you gimme a gift?

Just looted dog food, a can of beer, root root root another pair of shades.

One with a particularly heaving bosom leans up against Mel, grabs hands, presses them to the fuming insides of her thighs.

Busy tonight, Santy?

Any time for a lonely old Miss?

Twenty for a halfhour, thirty for the hour, I’ll ride your North Pole.

It’s a seasonal thing — a fire sale, don’t you know, feel how hot I am down there…my sleigh or yours?

Mel suddenly defects his hands from the granny’s panties, punches her in the mouth, loosening teeth whether they’re dentures or real to gnaw among his knuckles like miniature graves, without name. Blood splurts onto the premature white of his faking beard as Misses Claus goes down and out, and her sisters go chasing Mel down the street; dodging formations of troops, winding around stalled and honking jams of military jeeps, trucks and tanks, armored snowcats, huskies and convoys of bison, Mel’s cowbell clanging his escape with the slip of his stride in the deepening snow, south into an unlit quarter of the world known as Canarsie; the Misseses wielding their hoarded purses weighted with dimes swindled from shoppers in the good name of the poor, swinging them around to hurl at him as they clutch at their florid hems through the piling hoar.

Our sun rises as promised the next morning, Xmas — a covenant’s a covenant, and what’s death to annul it; though this rise occurs maybe spiteful, halting, reluctant, as if unsure of itself, the sun embarrassed by what’s happened in the hour it’s forbidden to light. At the horizon, gray; clouds assemble to breathe down flaming flakes. Medics, police, fire, National Guard goyim, US Army, Every Acronym (EA), Neighborhood Watch even and volunteers both organized and irregular, all the lineaments of uniformed disaster they’ve been mobilized, equipped then assembled with an amazing degree of expedition, and efficient professionalism given the hurry, though there’s just nothing for them to do except inhale, exhale into the freeze as if that’ll help any, but if it makes them feel better, then — as through the jammed caravan of patrol cars, miscellaneous emergency management personnel, and the triage that is local press with ambition, three survivors arrive at the Gatekeeper’s hut. One of them’s a shvartze, too, and though he’s the one driving this suggests not a few concerns, begging the profile — it’s standard policy to ask, I’m sure you understand, of all people…

Might be a delivery, maybe a poolboychick, a worker but what crew; he’s not a gardener, no exterminator, perhaps another species of hand hired but by whom and for what, none he’s ever known, the Gatekeeper going on ten years, and so a suspicion to report — that is, if there’s anyone left to report to. One of the three, not the shvartze, the one in the passenger seat in the hood and robe, with the staff that’s just the bough of a cedar fallen by lightning, he gets himself out of the metallic puke Lexus, a rental, keeps his door open and walks around the hood to the slit in the window, yells hoarse above the sirens and wails.

We’re looking for One Thousand Cedars, the Development, of course — tries to keep it light.

We’re catering the bris, though we seem to have lost our passes — it’s tragic, forgive.

What bris? the Gatekeeper wants to know, wiping at the rime of his eyelid, a tear.

A bris, a circumcision, the face under the hood gives a smile, you know: down go the pants, snip goes the tip…

I’ve been working here nearly a decade, says the Keeper, there’s no need to tell me what’s a bris, nu — what I’m asking is what circumcision, whose, who’s circumcising who around here? I’m saying, if anyone’s doing any circumcising, it’s me of you — get my drift?

Above, planes plummet, and police helicopters descend, metalplated locusts, upon the Development’s baseball diamond, the roof of the Rec Center’s pool, onto great rolling lawns: rotors flaying shingles and swingsets; the air, a mass of noise and flashes, microphones held up to megaphones, the violent frolic of doppler, you know him; corpses are stacked on the sidewalk one by one then laid one atop another when there’s no more space, later becoming laidout feet to feet along streets, their toes tagged with ID, their heads propped against the curb, mouths left hanging open; in shock, postmortem disbelief — it’s as if they’d be revived by the snow.

No, I haven’t heard of any circumcisions, Mister Bris, now disaster I’ve heard of, plague…

It’s registered, he’s oblivious or doing wonders for faking: we’d submitted the application eight days ago, as per your requirements, did the whole background check, got together our recommendations; God, we’ve followed every single one of your guidelines — I can’t believe you don’t have us on file.

Mister Simon Weizmann, plus two…check again, I’ll believe you.

Weizmann, I don’t know any Weizmann…

And the longer we wait, he’s not finished just yet…the more everything spoils.

Hard for anything to spoil more than it already has, he taps his scratched plastic pane to alert, and no, it’s not registered, understand — nothing’s registered, not anymore.

The Israelien family should’ve notified you in advance, made their wishes known — they only had Him a week ago, what’s to expect? Would it help to mention I’m a good friend of Alana Milfhaus? We did weddings together. She was in flowers.

You have any identification?

He hesitates. I seem to have left my license at the office. Anyway, it’s a little outdated. I’ve since lost the weight.

Maybe you want to talk with my supervisor. He’s dead. You want his number? Or maybe you’ll rabbi this out on your own?

It’s a party at Hanna and Israel Israelien’s, 333 Apple; it’s for Benjamin, their newborn — a boy, would you believe? Now how would I know that if I weren’t here with the lox and the spread?

The Keeper shrugs, reaches under his desk to throw the emergency switch, then realizes all the armed response he’ll ever need’s already here, and has enough emergency as it is.

We’ve reached our quota today, no more admissions; especially not for looters, fortunehunters…anyway, where’d you get that funny getup? he’s stalling, those robes? what’s with that?

Also rentals, you like? and he twirls the hood’s gold tassels.

Give me a moment, will you? the Keeper grunts, gulps at any medication then tosses its unlabeled jar to his desk, hobbles out of the hut and makes his way to stand before the robed tasseled figure and the rental Lexus, near to the face obscured by the hood. God save me for going offmessage, he says to himself and his whisper aches through last night’s two packs of smokes then the liquor redeemed from area cabinets and basements, stumbling on the numb of his tongue he says, they’re dead, then pauses to regain his face, its mouth, lips no longer trembling, you getting me, friend? he beats the breast of the robe immobilized in front of him, the visitor leaning up against the shine of the just washed, likenew sedan, and says again, they’re gone, all of them, as of last night, kaput, it’s over and done with, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but they seem to be out all over the place; he begins crying, a tear rips through his throat and he almost falls, Misses Herring, my supervisor, the Israeliens, too, a tragedy — what about me, I’ll be out of a job, I’ll be old and unemployed, uninsured, without a wife and…Mister Bris, there’ll be no circumcisions for anyone today, I don’t think, never again.

But Benjamin. He’s still alive, pleadingly, isn’t He? Jesus, muttering Mary, we’ve received assurances, what about all those omens, those portents and signs (he’s stalling himself, trying to think what those were, might’ve been) — we’ve made all this food, two crates of wine; we haven’t even been paid.

Don’t get wise with me, says the Keeper, suddenly suspicious when the talk gets to money.

Weizmann begins to cry, too.

Enough, the Keeper resists an urge to hug, rams his hands into the pockets of his uniform pants.

If you want, I’ll let you in to talk to Security. Or the insurance people, the claims adjusters — if you want to file against the estate.

Of course, I’ll have to take a peek in the trunk. That is, if you don’t mind. It’s standard procedure.

And so Weizmann, weeping to wet his robe’s gilded frill, opens the driver-side door, pops the trunk into a storm: it’s fullup with oversized, overstuffed green trashbags holed and holding they appear to be weeds, acting as padding for plasticpacked frankincense, ziplocked myrrh its freshness sealed in; the stench hits the Keeper in the gut, he goes reeling, gags, recovers, pinches his nose, lifts the trashbags and roots around with his other hand amid wrapped and greasy platters of fish, white and herrings smoked and sturgeon, nova and kippered salmon and sable, alongside enormously risen loaves of pumpernickel and rye both with seeds, without; underneath, a shimmering: uncovered, it’s a glowing golden bundt cake, which illuminates his confusion, is pareve; the Keeper retreats a step, stares at the shvartze driving as if it’s all his fault and so the shvartze kills the engine, gets out, leaves the door open and beeping, proceeds somberly to the trunk, which he shuts as the similarly robed caterer in the backseat gets out, too, stands immediately behind the Keeper with his hands on the Keeper’s neck as if to assuage him by choking.

They’re presents, he says dejectedly, for Him and the parents. His partners weep against the windows. And a bundt cake, consider it yours…the Weizmenn smacking palms against their heads and the Lexus, which is due back by noon.

Standing together, soon holding each other, a huggy group weeping, as an ambulance registered to the Hospital Under the Sign of Everything, Long Island’s premium facility at which no insurance is ever sufficient, goes wailing down the lane, past them and their Lexus pulled to the shoulder, past the hut without a nod let alone a stop or even slowing, no appropriate decal affixed to the windshield of the vehicle, no licenseplate to put through the system, this is an emergency here, we have lives to save, or if not lives then at least our reputation for response time. We’re on the clock, better get out unwell or scram. Doctor Tweiss rides shotgun, the plasticsurgeon twin, we should hope (the other’s a psychoanalyst) — in suit, tie errant in the wind with his window aired down, he’s smoking despite the snow, the weathering gray, a monogrammed DT bag of tools on his lap open and bulging, the glint of stainless steel that blinds the eyes of the crying Keeper leaning up against the shut trunk as they pass: the guardrail’s up, had been up ever since this disaster began, with the cops in their flagrant, almost recreational careening into One Thousand a moment just after midnight’s cold stroke; the shrink who’s daylighting as the ambulance’s driver refusing to yield, driving his fraternal physician in gleeful violation of the speedlimit reduced to twentyfive inDevelopment; Doctor Tweiss attempting to steady his nerves and hands, with one holds onto the forked tail of his tie as if intent on hanging himself from the antenna above. He’s to snip the foreskin from the flesh of a newborn today, they call it a bris, they called it, this circumcision, an operation he’d never executed before but that, since last night’s phonecall in the middle of the president’s latenite address, he’d been thinking about, mentally occupying himself with, without sleep. His other hand smoking as its nails stroke at his nose as if it were the organ to be sliced and not an anatomy more hidden or intimate. With these people, he’s understood, it’d been the same as in the hospital, there were just a few blessings additional, which he’d been assured were unnecessary to the success of the procedure, its validity. Blessed art Thou. Blessed Thou art. Then a little of the woundsucking, that and the schnapps, which he’d had the ambulance stop for, and bought, then stuffed it into his bag with the steel — he’d kept the receipt, he’d be reimbursed.

Though the entire operation’s unnecessary — as they’d discover upon arrival at the house at the address he’d memorized. Apple. Threethreethree. Though that’d never stopped him before, the lack of necessity of a paying procedure — why they’d hired him, whoever They ever were. Hello, speaking, no, that’d be my brother, yes, who’s calling, fine. Hanna and Israel’d asked their rabbi, also a dear family friend, Rabbi Sternstern his name was, who was dead, his own family, too, his wife and their eight kinder or nine who could keep count and his name, those and the wives and husbands of those kinder of his who were married as well, then their kinder those who’d had them along with everyone else, just last night: in dark socks sausagestuffed, with foothair and varicose veins, Rabbi Sternstern collapsed cold at the edge of his bed packing his bag for the morning, promising himself and his wife who was in bed herself though asleep that this’d be his last bris, the last circumcision he’d ever attempt and after retiring and not working as a circumciser, a mohel, for an entire year due to his nerves and an almost anesthetical fogging (instead outsourcing all the work in his synagogue to a young mohel imported from Teaneck who’d had a family young and large to support and old med school loans to pay down), but that he had to do this last operation himself, with his own two liveredly shaky, deliriously wrinkled hands because of the family, because of Hanna and Israel especially whom he’d converted himself, Israel, and their girls the twelve of them he’d studied with and the mazel that after all those prayers in his office and with the consultation of the doctor his brother-inlaw he’d recommended the parents had finally birthed a thirteenth, a son; how he’d said he’d live to officiate at the boy’s barmitzvah, too, a wedding, why not a funeral; how he died in a fall to the floor grasping and tugging the sheets and the bed’s blanket with him and so turning his wife over in her sleep and her death to fall herself off the edge of the bed, over her side, what’d been her side forever since ineligible, unmarriageable girlhood, to lie atop his body as if in embrace. Terrible, in that he would’ve done it for free, would’ve refused Israel inevitably attempting to pay him an envelope and its personal check or with cash and how Israel would’ve insisted, then he would insist himself and again and again no and then yes, then they’d drink to the health and prosperity of everyone gathered who were to be gathered together now only in death, which is the circumcision by angels of the essence that is divine in us all — like the pluck of a harp, the bris of the winged and glowing foreskin known as the soul.

Doctor Tweiss, however, they paid, they whoever they ever are having arrived and too punctually too early that morning at the failing Tweiss Group off the Long Island Expressway at Utopia Parkway, their limousine out front parked across three handicapped spaces as if to make an impression — that luxury knows no boundaries, that wealth respects no borders; them whoever they are passing the arriving receptionist without nod, pass, grope, or even the most mere insinuation, two grim stooped giants and their wiry boss, smoothshaven, with those eruptive ears and the upturned eyebrows and plasticbags under his squinty eyes that held only contempt, who’d handed the doctors a suitcase packed full with money as if explosive (they were afraid to open it, their fear’d advised them to trust), then another of their party arriving professionally late in a livery of his own, apparently their new lawyer who had him and his brother Tweiss sign a disclaim of deutero forms before he let them go with the two and their employer, whom one called Das, another Der, and the lawyer Die, and whom the two of them Tweiss called nothing at all in their confusion, to the hospital to take possession of an ambulance that’d been gassed and reserved while the lawyer remained behind at their offices ostensibly to go through their files, he’d said, which meant they suspected riffling through the most secret drawer of their receptionist whose breasts the lawyer kept describing in the air with his hands in unreliable gestures as the brothers gathered their matching coats up and left. An ambulance being driven by the psychoanalyst Tweiss costumed in the disguise provided by his closet and the approval of that receptionist’s purse, snappy cap, aviator shades — a goy who despite any pretension to the contrary doesn’t know his way around stick, now pulling up on a ruined transmission to the house huge and hugely vacant, screeching at the intersection of Main & Apple to stop short at the address at the furthest nest of the looparound, the twins thrown to the dash, smoke from the ambulance’s tires imbuing the air with the notion of burning corpses they’ve had to swerve to avoid. An expedition that’s to prove unnecessary, however, as not a soul’s at home, at least the door isn’t answered to their ringing, then their knocking of a brass ring distended from the lip of a decapitated lion — though they realize, now, that a newborn solely surviving couldn’t be expected to open the door on His own and admit visitation, put out the coffee and cake, and so they open the door with the copied key they’d been provided, let themselves in to search a stoop for a baby up and down all the floors: here baby, here boy, but find none and so without thinking much about why or what next, they lay waste to the refrigerator for brunch, sating themselves upon any leftovers leftover, then fall asleep atop the furniture to wait as instructed for further command.

And like a visiting relative, an unwelcome guest, that Xmas just refused to leave: it never packedup its bags, bulging with snow to melt in the flee of the sun, never put on its cap and went out unafraid to greet the cold that was its own, its true home; it was endless, unbearable…what? It just sat around the house, turned to a puddle to profane the floor, having forgotten its own toothbrush and towel, it had to borrow, it clawed up the couch, stuck its snout into everything, became fattened on what was fed it, which was all we had then the furniture and lastly ourselves, and soon began to warm, to reek with putrefaction.

It was Xmastime forever, for seasons at a time, at first deep into a month once known as January, a duplicitous, twofaced month named after that ancient Roman deity Janus, King of Latium, the God of beginnings, the God of endings, of gates like those to Developments and of doors like those set with knockers and bells, buzzers and intercoms and etched glass to a house since fallen, the patron of the bridge between the primitive and the civilized, between youth and maturity, too — a God whom no one thinks to worship anymore, a forsaken, spurned God, omnipotent and yet abandoned, omniscient and yet ignored; allpowerful, all alone: without Him no one knows which way to face, whether to the past or the future, or else just to stand forever upon the threshold searching this way and that, to waste an only life waiting for their very own end, however it would arrive and never too soon. It was anxious, depressing, it was Xmas into some say the next year, God, has it been that long, as the sun became split into suns, the freeze giving way to the humid and heat, the ice given notice, evicted, absorbed, poisoned with soot, snow melted to smog, though others hold it was Xmas deep into the year after that — who would swear to it, we all know how reliable the authorities can be, how much they’re to be trusted, how honest they are — the days’ debts to the world ingathering fatal interest, with no hope of paying memory off, and so the banks all went bankrupt then the market crashed and burned, valueadding no appreciable warmth to the scorch of the day; the looted metropolises leveled by bulldozers whose shovels had been emblazoned with the faces of fathers set sharp with the flaming teeth of their fathers before them…the world entire that was Siburbia razed to its very foundations of basement whether finished or maybe or not, which were cinderblock and brick and their cinders themselves leveled with palms become clammy with greed, demolished, reduced to vacancies of the earth, emptied lots marked for nothing, inhabited only by that that was no longer human: as no one worked anymore, as work had become life, had become mere survival. Kestenbaums roasting on an open fire…dairy products expiring, turned, were sold way past useby; cars became metal; teevees screened only snow in the unseasonable heat; shoes went thin then holed and then earth; clothes turned to rags then air and so everyone went naked at night, sweltering under the glare of an oleo moon. If you wanted to tell the difference between men and women and why would you; after all, they’re all goyim: the men were the ones with the nails of sharpened flint, who’d kill the other men with their nails of flint less sharpened against the curbs and the rust of the cars and the smash of the glass and the knife of the heat; they’d relieve themselves at the edges of ruined properties poorer of fence (impaled on the posts, their victims laidout across hedges grown wild); they’d attempt to sate themselves slovenly on what substances nosed out, snouted, raw or salted, and then, never full, never being able to differentiate appetites they’d smash in the strength that’s occasioned by rage the faces of others flat with the scuff of their hooves that they’d grown only to slip and slide to four legs on upon the asphalt and the glass and the metal; flatfaced women with the cancer cankering the puffs of their navels would whore themselves out for anything not so raw and not so salted, and when they were raped, and they were raped hard and raped often, and so had nothing at all to eat or drink whether it be raw or salted or anything else, they would sustain themselves by licking the stains of smoke from stray scraps of trash, glittery, littery wrappingpaper — that is, when they weren’t attempting survival through the suckling of shvitz from the hairs of their distended lips, though women raped into becoming mothers would occasionally maintain themselves, too, on their own offspring, pickled sweet in twindeckered sandwiches stacked high atop wonder white with the crusts cut, spread thick with lard, lashes of butter, fat dollops of mayonnaise without brand, snacking on their kin drooling saliva to shine their mammæ, which were headlights, twelvenippled, barebulbed. Their brilliantly pleasureless clitorides were shaped like the Popes…

Offspring who’d escaped their mothers through matricide, which was the only way to escape them with the exception of killing themselves then each other stayed out, orphaned and unable to sleep just roaming the festive streets until late, occupying themselves by stringing up ornaments of testicles and skulls that they would glowingly impregnate with tapers rendered from the fat of abortions with lengths of hair for wicks and strands of hair and esophagi and intestine to hang glorious gore over the joyous proceedings, the sidewalks decked in pisspuddle, ornamented with the vomit and turd of perpetual holiday, the frayed and loosed ends of these umbilical strands tiedoff to garlands of desiccated dingleberries from the most diseased boughs and moldering branches of dying dingleberry trees topped with angelic roaches and other mutatudinously gigantic insects stripped of their wings and pointless stars, then wound around lampposts that’d wilted from the passion of their exertions, flaccid attempts on the sky, their jealousy of even the sun — decorations if they could be called such in appearance less like enormous rosaries than they seemed oversized adult products intended expressly for the stimulation of the anus. On allfours these offspring would promenade under these garlands proclaiming the worship of beauty, cheer and its happy cult, on spines of tar smashed open and meltingly gooey at base they’d often mistake potholes for wounds of potable sewer, slurping petroleum goop, they’d slip ’n’ fall to make easy prey for their relations and strangers alike, denizens of the streets and their lowering gutters strewn, too, with these tanned torsos these millions of them left amputated to gangrenous stumps ever grasping, heads still attached, nothing else: an eerie species of GrecoRomance, this dying admonition to pluck out your eyes if eyes they had anymore and not just slits, or holes, or rough ethers, at this sight of once full and whole people who’d had their limbs hacked from them or gnawed, their arms leaking at the shoulders, legs dripping at the kneel of their knees — they were sodomized in any available orifice with their own severed limbs, flinty sharpened hooves first then smacked about the face with the limply sopping appendage, sliced with metal, slit with glass, left to rock and rot, to occupy as entertaining spectacle their attackers whom they couldn’t even curse because despite the left heads, their mouths and tongues they weren’t able to even talk anymore, needless to say, that none of them were, that they were left languageless, rendered without speech, that they at the most generous only gestured and grunted at random, voiceless and languorously lolling like mute tongues themselves amid the humidity and heat and the damp stick of morning, the hour they’d traditionally air their sleek, ribworn flanks, deep into the long afternoons of dry scorch.

It was that the next evolution of those who were unmarked rendered them unto animals, partiformed creatures, mutagen beasts, who were once inarguably Men & Women mutated then mutilated by their fellow mutants and by the mutilation, too, that is the passage of unsanctified time, therianthropes to the Gods who had forsaken them as the Gods had once been forsaken themselves; how they were burdened beasts without conscience, asses without soul and that this — with the covenant sundered and the death of the chosen and their rainbow choked by the pollutant clouds and the stars of the sky burnt out and the sands of the sea winded up and away to dust the furthest reaches of the primeval void — this was, it’s been said, only the possible, a small allowance or potentiality, just one way of the many infinite ways in which the world might’ve evolved, essentially hidden, Apocryphal; in the end, which was only yesterday, little more than a misnomer misnamed.

Because this is what Was…how the world would create God as God had created the world, and then how humanity would create itself anew in the image of God in which it was originally created on the sixth day of In the beginning, upon which — now that it’s returned to us forever in the heart of the seventh — the nascent late sun would never dare set for fear of desecrating such Sabbath:

A world in which menschs, as if the season of spring lived within them, sprouted willowy sidelocks, and affixed knobby knotted strands to the fringes of their garments and covered their heads to assert modesty between their thoughts and the heavens that judge; their womenfolk went modestly garbed in dark raiment at the lengths of the ankle and elbow, and they, too, covered their heads and hair but in kerchiefs and wigs, which would tempt without revealing, which would promise without the flirt that fulfills. And maybe — a few scholars argue — this modesty’s to be attributed to the cut of the cold, yet another mode of insulation, remove, as the snow’d begun falling everywhere from Siberia where the snow had always fallen to the unprepared shorelines of what was then the Sodom of Florida, all along the Atlantic littoral from Newport’s Touro to Tampa piling up to the knee, to the waist then the neck depending on which blessing or prayer, whether one was bowing or kneeling, and even in parts known up to the seat of the head, which was covered in hats over yarmulkes above caftans below that would gust like dark ghosts in the wind. Eastern Parkway arose out of the skyline of Brooklyn as a ray of lighted ice, and everywhere had become if not the Pale of Settlement then only a slowbeaten fare away on the subway, which had gone out of service.

Though it wasn’t just the outside of our world that would become changed, not only the apparent, our world of appearances profane and profaning — we were to be changed from the insides, too, our stomachs, our hearts and minds, to be healed from our innards on out. All ate everything on their laden tables and in great measure and with an abundance of lust that left them warmed and wasted at the end of the day, with downy moustaches of oil and fingers that left on the finest of linen a script of interpretive grease. All ate everything, that is, save that that had become forbidden, which substance was shellfish, including the bearded oyster, the hoofed clam, and pork, which is the son of the pig, in addition to any meat whether red or white if ever served with milk or any dairy, and other sundry recipes of nature and woman they would memorize only in order to avoid and so avert the wrath of their intestines and God, Who to have been the image in which mensch was created must have Himself intestines, too, as our clouds are the black of His waste. Treyf products went out of stock, their manufacturers quietly disappeared, went underground, out of business, their bills got forwarded to dummy addresses and lockless P.O. Boxes, held at the office, general delivery, poste restante, then the foods themselves disappeared, were shamed, eventually starved themselves out to their deaths: their internal processes sped up, they wasted away, into nothingness shrinkwrapped, entire refrigerators with magnetized photos floating atop the surface of the deep and slipping, sliding around the moist face of the freezer, also, that judges above or alongside the model depending, sucked themselves into rot; appliances that’d been defiled even while under warranty withered and shrunk, then disappeared into the corners of the ceiling of the kitchen and became nothing more than mere stains on the rug in the den. And then their kinder, O their kinder — they sat at these laden tables of theirs and studied in the mornings then in the afternoons they attended yeshiva at which they were quick with an answer, even quicker with a question…like, Rabbi, what to study again at home and at table set unto the glimmering dawn of evening with the time of its prayer? which they prayed alongside their fathers with fervor and an understanding surpassed only by knowledge, such ardor of souls, then exhausted from their efforts how they’d bring with them the succor of their prayer into bed at night as if a gift of light to the moon, going to sleep as they were told to, when they were told to, without protest or fuss, to dream dreams that were actually themselves prayers that prayed for the sanctification of eternal tomorrows. Sanctiloquently. And everywhere was like this except the state known as Palestein, the firstborn nation of the world, conceived on the night before the first night of creation in the love between God and His bride, Who was God. Lo it was to be a resort state, yea an Eden of decadence, verily a garden of splurge — Paradise Herself for those who would gnash for a weekend or so at the plastic, inflatable tree of the secular and its many hundreds of neonnippled, fructified breasts; sustaining retirees, sunworshippers, and the anonymizing excess of tourists ingathered from repression the world over, who would number in the millions like the stars amid an atmosphere of darkening gloss: as there snow was unacknowledged if not outright forbidden by decree of the skies, and each of its thousands of luxury hotels hosting their millions of deluxe hotelrooms, all suites kitchensinked with jacuzzi, were kept tidy and well lit and ventilated, too, and were daily turned down with a sweet left at the head of the pillow fluffed for the delectation of our sunstruck, sleepsensual pilgrims returned from their days at the sea and its shore whose sand was as pale as the dead though the water, much warmer.

For them, the highest attainment lower than God Himself was culture, the practice of art, its appreciation, its love, which is inspiration, the life of the mind. And so prayers were thought with the hands then written down with the tongue and were bound up into piles known to us even now as books, which are heaps of words of letters of the unknown, which were widely read and even more enthusiastically discussed by all regardless of any condition save death, as twice every week and a third time upon the Sabbath they would flock not like dark sheep but like sheepish wolves to the marketplace, the synagogue, the risen Temple that is the perfected, sanctified, if also wholly metaphorical space that even if infinite can never contain the impulse of prayer, and there would read to each other aloud the words and the Word, too, in every language they understood and in any of them about God’s deeds, about each other and their deeds, and verily people would come to bind their wisdom between these two covers of parchment, between two of them like life and death, like air and like sea, the waters above and those below as stripped from the flesh of animals who are known to be the sworn enemies of art, then how they’d bring these books of theirs in vast teeming pilgrimages to the proverbial center of the world, only to pile them again in loose heaps every night arranged into the order most newly revealing by angels in glasses known to the assembled as Rose, Pearl, and Miss Sandy Glassman, Librarian; then, to erect a roof over this pile that was to be known as the sky and walls that were to be felt as the wind, and that within this enormity they had heaped atop the stone of the foundation of the earth, which is a petrified word, unutterable, rocky upon the tongue the last name of God that silences verb, they could all come and go as they pleased, and not just three days taxed a week or just on the Sabbath but whenever convenient, and there they could find out, they could know and even avail themselves of the opportunity to approach understanding. And in the annex of this universe known as America a mensch had arisen who was also named Benjamin, who had brought down to us the secret of glasses and that of the electricity that courses as blood through our veins — and verily he had once called such an institution a Library, and so it was and was so very good that walls of marble had to be erected within the wind, and then a roof, too, had to be set as firm as marble, there under the fundament of sky because so many people had wanted in and all of them at once needing their knowledge that it had become impossible to accommodate all.

And so the select — amid the dew and fog to mingle with the steam of the sewer, they arrive at the steps, state occasion somber in their gray leathered liveries, modest limousines impounded from the recently passed: moguls, CEOs, CFOs, directors and producers; stopping short at the tombstone of the Library, at the grave of the Avenue numbered Fifth, their passengers emerging to step the flights to the entrance under umbrellas held by attendants who are moonlighting police officers deployed in uniforms of a laughable contingency falling down the stairs and shimmying down the railings that edge the stairs as these experts keep arriving and arriving without rest from earliest morning. Age holding hands with wisdom, they shuffle out and up with the posture of questionmarks, confused, even scared, not knowing why they’ve been summoned, why they’ve been forced here and on turbulent, securitysick flights and in those dingy, secondhand limos, with classes cancelled and lectures postponed, having received little information, almost no hints, and being scholars who can countenance rumor — to gather in the lobby of the Library, then once identified, fingerprinted, to sign a number of papers attesting to silence with alien pens. They’re escorted in an order even they in their wisdom, insight, and rare instances of genius are unable to understand, not by age, certainly not by the tenure of wisdom, down a wide hall, chandelierdomed and marble, into the reading room, an expanse of extenuating proportions even in the dim of this wintry month and at an hour at which even God is rarely to be found awake to our prayers: a room lined on all surfaces except ceiling and floor with trees split into shelves then spined neatly in books, which are only trees disemboweled, against which lay the rickety trunks of ladders, intermittently runged, boughs bowed under the weight of inspiration and its desperate if meaningful reach, the mating mute of grains stained with stone, the ceiling elaborately high above the gallery, a democracy of wood tempered with kingly gold, the floor below flooded with tables bobbing in the puddles of melt brought in from outside on the bottoms of shoes and the cuffed drag of pants; tables, you should have such tables, such tables as you could write a book on, a Bible, wood wide and wrinkled, topped by coppered lamps that reflect the perilous hang of those chandeliers, hung with light.

A past near the far door giving into the lobby, its steps and the street, its perpetual arrivals, with our tomorrows, if any we have, floating loftily over the gallery by the great bays of windows above, promised behind glass mullioned in steel, beyond which the sun’s just beginning its slow, glorious rise up to noon. Nakedly white, the scalp of the morning, waxed into perfection never to wane — it’s a head, a head nude, the head of the goy or maybe it’s said mensch rumored to be known only as Das, shining over the assembled, presiding over the floor. They’re occupied settling themselves, with greeting each other, shaking hands, arching brows, colleagues long lost, old students, mentors, department heads and deans, friends they hadn’t had the pleasure of in years, and suddenly — the sun comes to rest through the windows, a breath of light across the tables to flicker the lamps, and they stop, find silence, turn heads, which are all also bald, globes of their own reflecting greater light, to gaze at the figure of Das, whose stance alone on the gallery leaning against its rail and whose height augmented by thick, heavily elevated boots render him an astronomy unto himself, his medals, badges, and citations dazzling amid the heavens of woodwork and glass — they become blinded, are burnt, then just as suddenly the figure turns from their faces, whips up his uniform in his hands and resounds his steps out the door.

At his departure, silence remains with its light…though gradually, impatience manifests, and they return to their rumors again, they gossip, grumble, slap at their foreheads, who understands; these are scholars, minds, thinkers, digressers, debaters pointed of bones drycleaned, their minds if not their appearances always buttoned and cuffed, who knows to prophet from power and from profit, reward — and then, yet another question, Is this on? one of them has taken the lectern at the other end of the room; he taps the microphone, then introduces himself as Doctor Abuya; his reputation precedes, nothing. The goy to his left’s the Nachmachen, and as that name, too, means little to anyone here, all becomes clear: illuminated, in that the eye of the sun falls even on the obscure; these days — of lack, such loss — perhaps especially so. Usurpers usurp; these two, always one speaking, always one with the nodding, explain; they take turns — one always broad, patriotically stirring; the other specific, all business.

As it’s soon understood, these scholars have been assembled to settle a dispute quote of global importance, of, quote, international scope: theirs a question that seeks not one answer but millions — eighteen million to be precise, the famed Octadecamega as the pollsters would pundit at the very margin of error; it’s to answer with facts, identities, with names, and current mailing addresses and telephone numbers, who to scape now, now that rapture and our redemption and yadda’s out of the question, which question is ours and not theirs, it’s explained; it’s that the people, in conversion and not in their death (though death is perhaps a species of conversion, not one would later suggest), had been essential to redemption, endtimes salvation, and now that that seemed gone all to hell or to heaven and which, what’s next, any ideas — when do we break, where’s the toilet?

This revivified Sanhedrin has been convened to choose a new chosen, to conduct a new selection — to identify a People, according to their missionstatement: to be selected through the will of God, or through those whom that Deity selects…a directive already drafted and ratified by the usual Washington interlopers and upstartists, as if anything they legislated would be signedover in fire by God, the nibbed forefinger of, that willed and willing Deity party and without the hindrance of dissenting votes, as President Shade — assisted by the Mayor of New York, newly named Meir Meyer, here little more than a functionary — takes the lectern to announce, and with no mean modicum of humility, God’s selection of himself and his subsequently deific selection of this Das (apparently, a former advisor, chief of staff to a predecessor better forgotten, a cabinet member, past secretary of the Treasury a few have to remember, a shadow owed much and by many), invested with autonomy as full as it gets, promised no interference, no accountability expected and, anyway, who has the time; this deicidical Das who in turn has ostensibly selected those assembled below, foremost intellectuals, policy wonks, thinktank wizards, and the odd factotums of fictional government to infiltrate, make report, ensure what we once knew as due process — this in an operation financed by the holding escrow of the assets of the dead: to peruse assorted arcana, pursue genealogies, wills and testaments of every ilk and ink in the hopes of ascertaining the representatives of our impending redemption. Or else distraction, popular ruse. And as an assemblage without a mission is as a mensch without a head, the body of choice is already accounted: there’s policy, protocol, they might even have an insignia, a motto (though none knows what those are; each is urged to bring not only pencil or pen, but their own stationary, too), everything except an idea of what anything means. Still, in the following season the scholars are ordered to apply themselves as diligently as desecration can be, and sooner than they’d ever imagine they’re firing off memoranda and missives discreet, regarding the suitability of proposed scapes to colleagues sitting, sleeping, slumped just to their left, to their right, across tables, down halls; a deluge of notes, reports, inscrutable forests of papered waste: hemicovers of books slam closed, cause enormous clouds, dust to eclipse the above, to obscure the silent morning visits of, among others, the dubiously redubbed Mayor, accompanying the President, Das in his General uniform twostarred one day, threestarred plus purplehearted the next, flanked by his innumerable minyans of minions, plainclothed as decalogues, in suits pieced together of drab tablets.

Assistants interrupt the reverie, defile the idyll, at every hour hauling in more hulking tomes more and more esoteric, forever falling apart, to be perused with fingers laden with shvitz, with their toes and their eyes even through the glasses of the nose and the hands that mate and serve together to magnify, pages smudged with excited froth, with nicotinal saliva, with languages like the irretrievable People, dead and gone: some scholars sleeping already, others holding their tomes upsidedown, unsure how to right an alphabet, turn the page, turn the page, turn the, answer’s to be found on the page after the last; more and more books by the crateful daily delivered, old things mostly, out of prints, limited runs regressed from private libraries and archives, flownover from attics, excavated from basements and the least accessible stacks of permanent collections; they’re turning pages pulverulent, impairing visibility, aggravating with malicious intent the nose and throat; sifting through leaves, unslit of the unreadable unread for some idea, any, of how to begin — only to end, it’s been said, with the identification of those popularly referred to as the Nus, or Neues, depending on who you talked to and on what day. They the assembled would select a people, and only those people, whose souls would redeem the world — with no messy conversion, no choice on the part of the chosen allowed; this to be a wholesale redacting, remaking, revision, preferable, it’s been suggested, to any proposed wandering around the world, a process expensive, forever long, in search of someone to blame, anyone futzed enough in the head, willing to be scaped and so, martyred — a hook for their wilting felt hats, their slickers drenched through; though the sun’s out, winter wounds the glass in raging lashes.

For a moon, all that can be seen in the Library — since shut to the edification of the general public, who anyway might’ve long forgotten where it is and when it once had been opened — are these improbably tiny noses peeking out over extensive volumes bound in leather as the scholars are bound to their chairs: becoming merged to their chairs, fixedly fused, gaseously suctioned to seats, forcing them to a restriction of motion, their movement accomplished only by the manipulation of the hands placed under the seat of the seat; wanting to leave for a moment of air or peace, for light when the sun darkened down they’d thrust themselves forward at the ache of their wrists, heave from the hurl of their spindly arms soon distended, and so the scholars they’d eventually push paper and themselves from their palms upon the floor’s splintered tiles, letting loose the occasional screeched, creakcracking fall, sneeze, cough cough cough as if only to assure themselves and their others that they’re, sad to say, still alive.

Sequestered in this Library, remanded to what’s become by January’s close an impossible task, having been less asked than ordered to find the solution most final to a question that can’t even be asked: not to confab, or to approach the presence of truth by consensus, but to vote, or to find, to determine, to order — to vet all potentials, nominees for salvation, then to ensure a future by publicly naming such resurrected embodiments of the cold, the dead, and their past, to identify inheritors, immediate kin. How to do this is work, is research, is falsity, lies — a salvation itself, if lesser, more personal, adrift amid earthly time: spending days as vast as the sky poring over pages and charts, diagrams, lineages and the annals of annals, parchments and hides, every species of document that had ever occurred to the most human fear of being forgotten, the ambition that is immortality to be discerned amid memorized numbers and memorious dates that live lives independent of us, to be retrieved from between our flesh and bone covers that are, themselves, oblivious. In the end, though, it’s perfect, a total success — in that it’s worthless; as every hint leads to a prophecy that foretells a clue, yet another falsity to be followed through to its conclusion, which is only real insomuch as it’s nothing and nowhere.

East of our maps, Hic sunt serpentes…Here There Be Serpents coiled into currents, baring fangs of wake, venomous rips whirling around the throat of our Island, to skirring, to choke. Here’s a small island just off the coast of another small island that itself is just off the coast of an enormous country known as America — situated in space as in time just opposite the enormous green goddess with that torch of hers and that book, too, from whose pages our maps have been ripped. Manhattan’s a mammoth compared with this neighboring clod, this island we call it though it’s barely an isle, more like a breathless speck split nearly in two by a sip of water, into tablets, with a sullied tongue pronouncing profaned names, forked baybrackish, sundered churning, churlish. A slip, it once had accommodated the docking of vessels, ships like the Vaterland, the mighty Leviathan, the stalwart Amsterdam, and the Westerland, the Gellert, the Thingvalla, the Mohawk, the entire Moravia fleet out of Hamburg, the Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Kronzprinz Friedrich Wilhelm, the SS Whatever on down the wavylined, watermarked Manifest of Manifests, all of them descendants of the colonizing Saint Catherine (patroness saint of libraries), which steamed in the very first stock: immigrants who’d intended only to arrive, up top; down below, emigrants who’d intended only to leave; up top, immigrants who’d thought only of the future; down below, emigrants who’d thought only of the past…immigrants who’d honored opportunity, emigrants who’d prayed their lives away to the historical failure of gods ever older and dumber — arriving all day and through the night, too, in these ships and impromptu brigs and barques, their steerage made democratic meat, shipments if only for the slaughter that is the new, always, the lavish luxurious quarantine that is this particular exile. An enfranchised garage, a Cadillac parked deep in the crotch. Judge not lest, though — after all, they knew their mythologies, their archetypes, the windy symbols and the manifold, though onesunned, doldrums of fate: having crossed the river that is the ocean to die here, they’d lacked only the coins to blind their eyes, which would undoubtedly be earned in due time — found on a sidewalk, in a sewer, under the tongue of a wifemouth, in the pocket of her professional “father.”

A slip iced, frozen into a field, landscaped with salt and sand into a neat square that separates the Great Hall from the squat ruinous barracks beyond — now housing the surviving firstborns, all of them male, menschs ingathered from all the world over to attain the protection of this primal estate: the Hospital rustjointed, the Commissary burntover; the tumuli of outlying buildings intended in their conversion for the forgiveness of staff, the insensibility of freight, crammed atop this fill like centuries of graves of centuries, necropolis rocks atop stones atop trash cramped atop the swell of this speckle, an isle sliced down the middle as if gutted for hidden treasure, which is what — only water, frozen below the lives stilled, the shocked hearts and minds of those latest arrivals still being received for the processing. Huddled hassles burning to earn free, tempesttossed Lazaruses, poor, not for long, tired, they’re always, regime export whored over to this teeming shore for a purgatory of examinations, questions, questions, sessioning questions, exams, What’s your name, your date and place of birth, have you been promised a job here, have you been promised a husband here, what do you do, are you an anarchist? these days, how can you not be; do you happen to believe in a God…followed up by a host of hearings, appeals, held in the presence of interpreters American now for maybe a week, directing their pleas at the Officers who seemed themselves gods but not to be believed in only to fear, stationed chalkfingered, busily moustachioed at the door — which is not golden gleaming but whitewashed; its shine, it’s said, comes off with blood.

A rumor was, you enter America through the mouth of the Green Eve — the exit for New York is through her, you know where.

It’d been said that Columbus, the first of their kind ever to schlep to these shores, had been buried in her pedestal, which is the shul upon which Liberty stands.

The first thing these indigenes did was change coin, barbaric practice — conversion, to redeem their souls from the shadow of their passage, to give salvation another name, yet another number and face. Money in a pouch worn around the neck, a talisman: be careful, suspicious, trust no one, know not even yourself…your left hand a stranger to your right long may it be lost; brothers, cousins, a plumber in Brownsville who sponsored your visa, he happened to’ve been given the same last name as yours, no relation save that he was the only one of ten Buchalters to answer your letters sent out as blind as you’ll be soon enough: into the wide and unknown and unknowable, unreadable, just keep your mouth shut and they won’t know your language, your cries, that of a baby just arrived to meet its father remarried, refathered, and with a roomful of new daughters of sons (kitchencornered like a roach, like a rat, toilet closeted down the hall), an uncle of late only a series of letters himself, but in the wrong ink, in the wrong hand and unsigned, Dearest Yossele without love, with demands, or just silence, rejection, better to be left alone conjugating the following verbs: To conjugate, To deport, b’shalom…to be sent ashore, dashed, sundered, washed up, your money in a pouch worn round the neck, nametag which day of the week, meet me at the port in winter at the pier, I’ll be the one in the hat — to flee from the very face of their interrogating oppressors, whose faces were theirs even then and still are, clutching what they can from their klatsch, a few rags you’d never call clothes, quilt of feathers, a rye whiskey, a necklace of sausages, money in a pouch worn round the neck, the fee for their freedom and not for their life, which if we’re talking money is frankly a waste, all these dollars a head, the littlest son traveling hidden pouchswaddled, wounded round the neck; their documents in hand held out over land as bridges of bone, of skin and hair, in wagons, in carriage and britzka, cart and droshky, laundaus hauled by horses lamed and of relations, on sonback, on brotherback, and on foot, to go among swindlers, smugglers, robbers and thieves, evils both amateur and official, travel bureaus, shipping company representatives, I want a new globe…midnight flights from burning houses cool of hearth, border crossings only a matter of stepping high over an obstructing stump; swim through the fog, piss out the flame, make no more smoke than do they.

Furtively they trek overland to the ports, to the pier, money father’s money our money mine it’s all mine in a pouch wound round the neck to choke I can’t breathe it’s the air, it’s suddenly fresh! bribes and fares, trains and hay, pump trolleys, basket and blanket hides and ruses, tradetricks and secret signs and shibboli, Uwaga! Pocig, Achtung! Zug, ! , signs such signs, inns with a highest window open just enough for that to be a sign, too, lofts, luck and prayer, which if answered is luck, the prayer that is sickness and the luck that is unremitting disease: trachoma, a disease of the eye that’s treated with silver nitrate, the same compound of chemicals used to treat photographs, to develop ourselves in their image, favus, tinea favosa, a scalp infection that results in the making brittle of hair, eventually in jaundiced balding, and can only be treated with carbolic oil, which had often been tinctured into a syringe, then injected into our hearts to kill quickly, overwhelming with pain; the survivors live on lice that themselves have lice, atop cots in ship’s bowels amid the knots of intestinal hammocks, the menschs here the womenfolk there, separation by bulwark, holy freight, sacred stock, the sanctuary of an overturned lifeboat, a boat within a boat stacked atop a ship that goes somewhere upon which one can go nowhere, lolling depression in swells, seasick and hungry and thirsty with water all around — the ocean an eye tearing in salt; to drink from an eye is abominable, as your throat might be slaked but your tongue will be blinded — and then again, that enormous and rusted metal idol standing atop a pediment tiered in the excrement of tired gulls, grasping a torch and a book, which is this book and all other books, too, neither burnt, nor yet burning.

Yet another flight, a stampede, a rumpus, a regular old Kessel Garten, you know it? First and Second Classes disembarking themselves orderly first and second, thirdly the steerage last, ruddering columns buttressing cots in the bowels of the ship without limb, the sway of unsettled stomach rigged of hame, of hammock emptily swaying under the weight of unregistered ghosts, phantoms released on no one’s recognizance, specters without papers made of ashed papers, to float over the gangplank the bone of a Cossack, his horse, the hamate, the hanging halyard, the Gibbet, fallen masts a pier, the gangway to barge, the pier, walk, scuffle, drag deathmarch, todes babycrawl, the threshold, door, stairwell, into the Great Hall’s receiving, this the last station left in which to smooth out your skirts, to tuck in your shirt if shirt you have, if not your flesh, fluff your breasts, pinch your cheeks rosy; these bars and barbs, this wire, these pens, gates and their kept doctors, interpretercousins, guardbrothers, inspectors; the language of languages…take a deep breath, hold it in, let it out; you’re dead, there’s no second opinion; look at this eye chart, read the last line aloud, S Z C Z E D R Z Y K; do you know what it says, asks the doctor, know it, the immigrant says, he’s my uncle! Lipschitz, don’t give me lip, bei mir bist du sheyn fergessen, Welcome to America, Maran Hagaon Harav Avraham Halevi Moylvintldik…Shalom, Murray Gone; Hello, My Name is (Race Suicide), this naming death that’s named itself only after weeks, over months, after maybe even seasons of wait without name, not just unknown, inexistent, suffered and suffering just to enter, to be: many only to be turned away, and without their identities redeemed, sent back, RETURN TO — Isaac, or maybe Jacob — SENDER, reverted back to themselves, those unlucky few without name or a prayer, cast deep down into the real again, stowed home, lost to the generations to come; the map’s dot a speck of lint, a mote of dust, blown away, becomes a ruin, a coordinate fallen to time, desolate, wrecked, left for the waste upon which it rests. From south elevation, the Great Hall’s a mess, a mumble of lines, a jumble of Babel none too towering, instead laid vertical, fallen in every dialect’s design: Austro-Hungarian railroad shed, Ottoman slit, Russian Orthodox thrust, Parisian frill. Death by Renaissance in brick without hearth, as if tumbled from sky and only then, suntinted, threealarm red though fireproofed, the stucco façade mottled, jaundiced, its foundational limestone pissstained, its portico that limb distended from socket, wicked, a hand outstretched, to point away, to dismiss, to order, accuse…or else, arrival depending, to greet, to welcome, Shalom; to clasp warmly, give us a shake; below four massive turrets risen as lesser towers, the last survivors of the sprawl fallen below; their flags: tainted in blue, white, and red; the knives that pierce them wound, too, the mist, which is the breath of the ocean, guarding the Registry, the Island entire, from the gray occupation of clouds.

And it’s the same with every foaled load, whether it be boat of sea or boat of land, which is train, or even plane at the aeroport beyond, far out amid the majestic land known as Queens; whatever substance arrived upon, whether it be land, sea, or air, it’s cleaved — they come between. Our island lies halfway between the city, also an island, and Liberty’s woman: she’d been a gift that was also a sacrifice, as if Odysseus’ famed token to Troy, a huge hollowed naked apparition, Rhodessa’s her name, standing out there on the furthest, as if to demarcate our world, upon the first island they pass, no matter their mode of arrival; out so far in the ocean and free as to be almost Joysey — perched just off its banks and barges, its splintered docks, ramshackle warehouses of tumbling store. Between her reach and the spires of the city, our island stands guard, keeps the watery gate, the defense of a pomp once ruined, modest in its glory renewed — at least, no longer sinking; an occasional Atlantis disappearing at hightide, a breathing chest, a pound of flesh, now shored up from the drownless delectation of the parasites it once hosted with dirt dug from under the earth and out from under the ocean surrounding, from the tunnels that would accommodate the traffic of great steel snakes, girded with trash then the flesh of the dead. Their gravestone this Great Hall, a hunk of officialdom made angelic with the addition of two wings, one to each side of the main expanse: a body sprawled, a cruciform corpse, two flightless wings terminating in the talons of those four towers; three porticos top the middle plinth, the head — doubtless, a touch of significance is always involved, a meaning lost on all but the mute and the dead — three porticos of three vaulting windows, Beauxbrilliant, deco’s imposing, and then around that, nothing, emptiness, voided only by trees, scrubby and yet undaunted, survivors themselves, upward growths of salted grasp, weathered whitegray, deepgrained, dustthick: poplar, oak, evergreen firs, they’re all one tree as much as the arrivals can think of them to care; trees nothing but Tree to them in the Platonic ignorance of languages busied being forgotten already — all trees, that is, with the exception of the apple, red and rounding Eden’s, symbolic of their imaginary sin, spitefully generous in its polar fruit, freezerotten hardpitted product their kinder try to bite, lose a tooth on, in anger bombing the orbs at each other’s heads; their bodies to be laidout cold atop iced sprawls intersected with coils of barb, spurs of galvanized iron, scrapped tin, loosened slabs of rafter like ribs, the quarters of the surgeon, the enginehouse thistle, electric and steamplant, furnaces beyond toward the baths to be stoked with stacked wood, bagged coal, mountains high of excess brick, leftovers baked in the cloudless sun, fallen stones and shoring rocks, pallets of glass, plasticwrapped and tarped, readied for an installation forever postponed, reconstruction stalled, put off until the end of time, an overhaul overhauled, a maintenance neglected, forgotten worksite in wasted daylight, bereft by bureaucracy, beset by neglect and trash; grisly verdigris, caltrops of cable and wire, gaping shafts and moaning ducts, hoistways left open to dizzying tumbles, uncovered sewers to fall into and smash a last leg, guttergraves…

Inside it’s unlit, peeling plaster as if the rind of the walls, chairs broken without back or legs and so not really chairs but stools or just mushrooms wrought of wood and barnacled metal, crumbling drapes, shattered glass. Dorm beds, column after column of them, line the floor; the air above infused with the exhaust of their springs; bumcold radiators sheltering mice, shadowing their secretions, turdpellets like bedbugs crushed. Dreams, being the annulment of slights incurred by day, make for the rubble of rumbling night: the bedding stained in blood and cum, mosquito leech and that of unseasonal greenheads, pinched ticks and lice, piss and fecs, mucus, vomit; loneliness given the ceiling lies so high as to be sky, the walls tubercularly white, offbronchial, pearls in the lungs, breath, breathe, at least try to.

Then, a light suffuses, is sustained, fluorescence, the flicker of bulbs just as the sun begins its weary rise: slightness and slowness and torpor, the rise fall rise of respiration, guts, weight they’ll lose then die of their loss, igniting, illuminating the space amid snoozing sounds, cicadan snore, cricket stridulation as if in the summoning of smoke: this barracks room one massed breath, an industrial maw, opening, opened, its teeth leaning columns, bent and bowed columns, its gasps steaming stains on the walls bitter with humours and mold; bed after bed, ten-by-ten in ranks, ten-by-ten again, rows, of what are really upgraded cots, iron sag, rusted to give under slumber, green creak for the horny. And then, in the cots — they’re forms; in appearance only bedclothes stuffed with flesh, bledclothes, though with noses that peek above trims, mussed sheets, fake feather pillows, comforters of imitation down in the shape of people, cast in the shape of beds, concrete slabs they feel, immobile, corpsed dead as cement. An exhausted form twitches its feet, its toes, one two three, slowly, then three four five, individually one two three four five to prove he’s alive — to whom; that he’s separately willed, even special, as if singled from among this mass, leans toward the form directly to the left, the mensch, if we might judge by the bulge from under his sheets, his drunk and tented lust, the sexual clump, grapeleaved in fitted, flat. He grunts, then as if to say hello, to introduce himself he farts, a poof, a toot, is answered by that mensch neighboring, a response given upon permission, shameless, with another fart, this rip huge, Rrrrrrrip! an enormous sortie wet and thick, which tears a hole right out of his uniform pajamas, this sound echoed six beds down then maybe two over with another, is dueted with, a ffrrip, and yet another, pow, pow, — and — pow from opposite sides of the barracks, a barrage of miniexplosions, from cot to cot echoing against the corroded collapsing wet walls, stacked booms rocking the lower bunks, bucking the uppers, bombs from the rafters to incise there their own dark graffiti, signing a scatology’s name. How all this seems almost coordinated, prearranged, if you’re that species of paranoid, how couldn’t they be: Affiliated, neurotic, too; though if you’ve been strangely calm here, confident from the first or already resigned, then now appalled’s being contracted into the bargain, disgusted, given the very randomness of this rearending assault, such lack of control, this chaos — a cacophony of bursts and bops, of salvos percussive, sallies of bangs and syncopated, syncopating bings, in their fading sound, the foggy fade of their echoes, giving way to a host of hissy almost silent farts, some snakelike, others barking or crazily purring; flatulisms serving to both make a haze and, also, to pierce it, stifling even the smoke with its maker, the flame. Then, a rapid sweep coming down the aisles, boom boom baboom, the strafing of morning, machinegunned repeatrepeat, ratatat of fire that even if friendly seems no less dangerous or revolting: farts raising sheets, fitted, rising sheets, flat, bubbling covers, burbling blankets, in gastrointestinal whumps, lower tract lumps, milky eruptions, redeyed evacuations, pyloric blockages, buildups and then, explosion! p-pow! the glorified dorm reverberating in a rousing finale, rolled bodies corpsed on the floor, from forms picked clear up and off beds, shot spumed into air then slumped back down to bounce thud and sag, launches and falls selfpropelled, the trajectory of methane released, ricocheting ping and pop, cracks and snaps in a confusion, offtime, out of time, a dense swirl of emission, the barracks a hellish, burning pit, and then, as suddenly as all began, and cutting clarion through din and fog, there’s a siren, alarm…Reveille! — wake up! Boker both tov and or, rise and shine and give God more than your gases. Time to toss and turn, to rub, sit and stand, time to wake for those left alive, time to remember their dead: to live their wake in the mourning of mothers and fathers, of their sisters and brothers and cousins, first, second, third, aunts and uncles and who knows more removed, how half and inlaw, whoever that was, I’m not sure…survivors to noose themselves up to the rafters with linings of quilt and collar and cuff. Then, to stand upon the freezing floor of their barracks, to stand on their own two feet for a moment and imagine they’re not animals — to undress of pajamas, only to hide their nakednesses in the underwear and socks they’ve been supplied, too. Even as their family’s laid to rest on the floor of the ocean surrounding, submerged deep amid the numberless drops that star that lower sky, dead, diffuse — every single one and engaged one of them, each affianced and married one, each one widowed, widowered, twiceseparated and thrice-divorced, dead; all of them, that is, except these very menschs, those who were firstborn and still are, those of the inheritance, which is this and this only — this Island, this life; lining their ways, two-by-two, out to the baths, to stand under the showers and wash away their guilt and their dreams, which have been found guilty themselves.

What follows is unsure, from the shock, a reasoned excuse, the mourning, another — as scattered as shards of the gallon’s vessel shattered with the fullness of morning’s milky light that was God and still is, God Who is the vessel, too, though He be plastic and unshatterable, as He is everything and is full of everything, even Himself; glosses scribbled across history’s whitest holiday tablecloth, handwritten writ to be read aloud upon Mondays and Thursdays that are the Law’s second and fifth days of the week, to be debated offhand on the days between that will become as will they all the perpetual Sabbath, in arguments, also, at the table of Paradise, over a brunch of the crow that will be savored as sweet upon the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of tongues. One source holds thusly. Other sources withhold. This is what’s known. Upon that Shabbos morning, early, Wanda upstairs and so absenting herself from the Underground’s emergency meeting goes, instead, to the kitchen to telephone every number of every person ever represented in what Hanna once called her Other Bible, which is to say her addressbook, overstuffed more than even the most obliging of vessels — delimited but dangerously, contained with clips, and with rubberbands wristed; at hand, the receiver, the phone’s mouthing ear.

It’s an emergency, Saturday desecrated only with the greatest respect. Book on the counter, it counters, how to begin. An immense tome, a testament to the availability of everyone that she, Hanna, had ever met, near met, was who knows how related to, sketchily, pencil under pen revising the margin, Hanna could’ve explained, during her relatively short span of whatever this was: marriage, daughters, son and then, death. Preparations. A volume painstakingly annotated, amended, addended, updated every lie of insomnia, every sit of amenorrhea, revised every turn atop the mattress from one side to the other with the both of them pregnant, with flux of residence, marriage/separation/divorce information (including info for the lawyers of each party, that of the lawyers of the lawyers, too, psychologists PhD, the shrinks of the shrinks, all their mothers and rabbis and yadda), work and offspring notations, appended with birthday, anniversarial, and other dates important to remember if impossible to and so the scrawl here, frenzied scratches made with the weak hand, maniacal blots and crossings, fades, it’s not the pen that remembers, it’s the ink, which is without form but voids, then goes as dry as a mouth open for sleep with her just scratching at the paper as if a knife into stone, looseleafed tablet inscribed with a wound; xreferenced and by memo reminded, additionally notated with every possible system, and any possible means, of getting in touch without truly touching, which is noted impure, many of them decades obsolete, many years. Too intensely large for any of the drawers of the unit countered by the frontdoor, it’s kept if unlocked in a safe, fireproofed, in the closet by that door and obscured by coats for the season, winter or summer depending.

Wanda’s managed to heft the mass atop the formica, to unbound it then open its pages to drift to the floor, which is wet from her rushing, above, Underground — where they’ve been plotting for hours before invisible dawn — filthy from ash and the butts of her cigarettes she now smokes inside with no one to ask her please don’t. Intending to ransack the A’s, to begin with the Adamses, whom Israel’d met at the Bar, at a function of the Inns of Court maybe, or, Hanna would’ve known: there’s probably an indicative abbreviation addressing that quandary herein — and then to work on south through the J’s and K’s to the Z’s, down at the end of the alphabet, where it’s warmer and the sun always shines, phoning everyone that strikes her as halfway Unaffiliated, and so none of those bergs and blatts, these steins or zweigs disconnected, out of service when, finally about to lift the receiver, manicured in the red of distress poised for the dial, the touching of tones, a low thrum zeroes through, a call incoming, and she who wouldn’t even begin to screen picks up, to answer it at pitch.

Hello, you have reached zee Izraelienz!

Alive whoever you are, call me back, will you? I hear the dead get good rates on longdistance.

Wanda dials the number as it appears on the screen for ID, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s PopPop, estranged father of Israel, resident of a world that came into being when God said Miami, it was.

Unlike his wife, who died years ago of some strain of neglect, he’s Affiliated, firstborn and so, a survivor.

Hello, you have reached, she says again when he says, About time!

No call for such snarl, she’s just exorcising instructions — Wanda with the cord coiled around her arm, a snake’s helix hissing its orders from beyond the grave that is silence.

Who, a boy, when was He born, He’s survived, how, no one else did, hymn, who am I, who are you…what’s the name, beautiful, Benjamin…nu, no problem, no problem whatsoever, I’m glad to, send Him on down, fine, that sounds great…make sure you lock everything up…do you know if they’ve left a will…guess I’ll have to find a new lawyer…Christ, just give me a call when you get here — then, we’ll talk about severance. Despite that he hadn’t known until presently of his SonSon’s existence, PopPop’s more than willing to assume responsibility, legal if not especially otherwise, for Him whose bris, which though never needed would never happen, PopPop wasn’t invited to, though he would’ve loved to attend or to’ve sent regrets only, an opportunity to stiff the parents on a gift, a check paid to the order of the happily bouncy, as he’d estranged himself from the family, or them from him: the flamboyant, wristflaunted homosexuality not as much the issue as an unwillingness to appreciate, or even respect, an observant life for his son — now Israel then John, according to some accounts, though others hold Jim, which was James. Affiliated’s one thing, nothing too aberrant about that, we don’t have a say in the matter, I am that I am, but observant, God…and then to think he’s presently dead, John Israel my boy, that he’d died for it, of it and me, what a messy martyrdom, from the rebirth that is conversion, who would’ve thought, that one’s blood could be changed by just a prayer, a bath of the glands and a — why’d he have to go get himself switched?

I myself had that surgery, but…

After they brunch on all that’s left in the basement fridge, leftovers intended last night — even suckling the sponges used to wipedown, then leaving the dishes, utensils, and plasticware stacked in the sink for either Adela or nobody, or else herself upon a successful return — Wanda piles Him into the landrover, Hanna’s: meaty black, chromed, and with the power of hundreds of machined horses, its loin of trunk slash backseat packed to obstruct the windows and mirrors with three changes of clothing in a garmentbag (Israel’s clothes, which Benjamin could only hope to ooze into, even if elasticized, Him, them or both, leave the bottommost button undone), and one outsized piece of luggage Ima & Aba had only ever taken with them once, to Palestein, early in the marriage, monogrammed HI and filled with assorted mementos mori nestled alongside a thermos of the juice of the grape. Photographs, birthcertificate, a fountainpen stuffed in a stocking. Wanda horseshoes out of the drive, onto the street, toward the risen sun then south, toward the Gatekeeper’s not yet beset with the blare of sirens (sweeps had begun in the cities, Developments would deal with their own until reserves could get themselves mobilized). As they approach the hut, Wanda begs an indulgence with a smile betraying, her nerve, nerves, her lips and caffeinatedly browned fallen teeth, the heart of the withered Keeper, too, who as if inspired by miracle or only listless, secularly depressed, raises the guardrail and lets her pass with Him hidingly pushed down to the floor of the landrover, to tongue at the mats, for crumbs of loose change.

Many hold this landroving a violation of the Sabbath and if so, what of it: mass death leaving only one infant survivor must satisfy the minimum requirement of an emergency. A situation, most rabbis would rule, to be immensely forgiven. The two of them sealed in together with climate heat Hi, radio locked on the frequency of the news with the volume knobbed way up past conversation, a hand gloves the wheel, the other grips a beverageless beverage holder as if to stay grounded. Out of Joysey, Turnpike south to I-95—the moment they hit the Florida stateline, smash, a dent past the weeping sign, Welcome To — The Sunshine State — No-Fault Divorce—it’s all weather…a snowflake, the ineffable first that falls that night into morning — Sunday, the day after the day that was Xmas — the first that’d fallen in Florida in the lifespan of anyone’s memory, stars their windshield, melts, trickles away into speed. As tradition, as unique and as fragile.

Mortal Beach (say it like you mean it, you know the accent), PopPop Israelien’s retirement facility: a skyscraping tower flanked by two low and white wings that host pools both indoor and out; hedging, wellkempt; the ocean teems just outside. They pull up the lazy drive ranked in palms rubbed together for warmth, then idle. An elderly, unseasonably polyester apparition stoops under a canopy sagging with snow. Him, he’s out of shaped, as if a genital cut into covenant — hung flaccidly, flagging like the form of the state they’re in, dysfunction. Wanda unlocks, helps Benjamin out, approaches with caution, with nothing to say, burdens the luggage about His shoulders and arms with no help from His grandfather, if that’s who he is, who must be when he takes from the pocket of his polyester the rent he’d shylocked last week, a jealous wad, rips from it what feels less than half, best I can do then presses its stack into the palm of the woman to mingle their shvitz: Wanda who refuses at first, as she’d been conditioned, but then, he pushes, understanding the ritual yet hoping for a final refusal, and now and as if a denial or two too early and quickly, Wanda accepts, stuffs the mess down into her dress to lump her another breast between the two that are already abundant, kisses Benjamin distractedly, with only one lip on the fat lip of His forehead, withdraws, hauls herself back into the idling rover, out and through the lot then down the lower drive; slowly going so as to avoid the bodies arrayed, stacked by numbers, floor then unit, corpses asphalted and ready for pickup, under the circling and perch of harbinger birds.

Polaks, PopPop sighs, waving a fist in her wake.

And then, turning to consider Benjamin, raising his voice — don’t slouch, stand straight, chins up, don’t forget to breathe; as the lesser of our prophets advise, enjoy it while it lasts.

A week’s vacation begins with a game, chess, the rules PopPop’s, those of the house, the loser to pay for the delivery they’re expecting, any moment. Miso pepperoni. A large pie topped with anchovy sushi. Carbohydrate with extra cheese. Languorous lo mein. And so he goes easy on Him, slow but not too: there’s no blitz, no other nefarious gambit with three moves to check, four to mate; PopPop relaxing, even offering Him to play white.

In this life, the rules are so seldom explained.

Here, the hope’s to safeguard the King, to protect him no matter the price, even that of the Queen whose room He has, MomMom’s — always and early: pieces are introduced, sent out to allow in the air, pawns like the princes in fairytales He’s never been told, set out into the world in which to find for us their fortunes; then the King, He should shuffle inside, Castling, slamming the heavy door to every heart along the hallway, narrowly longing: needing His solitude, such majestic room or space, crown removed, tarnished, flaking leaf to the ore, only to be cornered in a cloaking nightshirt, gnawing at His nails—thou shalt not removeth thy hand from thy piece…

In Miami, everything exists for Him, even PopPop, who calls Benjamin accordingly: King, the address if he’s angry; more usually he’ll go with your Majesty, in a mocking, patronizing lisp: as in, would your Majesty like to eat now or in an hour, then a smirk, it’s time for your Majesty’s shower or bath, has your Majesty finished His chores, cleaning, sweeping, rag and sponge, time for linner your Majesty, time for your dunch, has your Majesty yet scrubbed His teeth, flossed with the mouthwash, did you forget, it’s your Majesty’s bedtime — or, hours past, which means they’re still playing, the only activity allowing Him to know late, the midnight quirks of the fridge, the toilet tank gurgitation, what bulbs’ve gone out that PopPop’s never replaced because, don’t worry, he’ll tell you, your move.

What PopPop wants to move against: the way Benjamin dawdles a pawn between thumb and forefinger, padding it around, rolling as if snot, pickypaddyrolly, juvenile habits with His tush poorly wiped, though PopPop’s replaced the toilet tissue after each meal already, and there’ve been many; He’ll pottytrain on His own, don’t expect an old mensch who needs changing himself to change Him. The stick, though, isn’t from the tush, or the incontinent nose, rather from the mouth, muncharrheac, His uninhibited snacking during play, eating from the endtable opposite the table of beginnings, of openings, feints, the defense of offense, laden with all sorts of treats, goodies left untouched for maybe three decades, through no less than six moves in residence, sweet-meats, even those sorry kisses they’ve got infused with liqueur, all trayed there treyf probably and only once in an early spontaneous fit of the domestic by PopPop’s late wife, His MomMom: white piece fructified with wishniak candied brilliant, schmeared in nutty fudge, Shoreside saltwater taffy, glopped with grease mandelbrot macaroon; Him swallowing between thoughts as they PopPop says, Kibitz, kvell, kvetch, and schmooze through their game giving way to games, midmove accusations, recants, recounts, and recriminations, though as if suddenly scrupled PopPop throughout avoids talk of His parents, reserving that, thoughtfully, for the breaks between.

When I first met your MomMom, it was only two weeks before her own father would pass—could’ve been Affiliated for what I knew of him, never met him, I wouldn’t have wanted to, even she’d said it was her meeting me and wanting to marry me that killed him…MomMom Israelien, then, as Unaffiliated as it gets, ScotsIrish Assembly of God trash come down with a bad case of the Christ, infected with the Ozark gene, milked on the water of the Arkansas River, had herself died last year on the first night of Hanukah, of cancer of the heart, angiosarcoma and from there, Israel’s concern — not that any of this saddened PopPop, even mattered to him who’d only married her for her to marry not only him but his hidden self, too, as a front for his true sexual orient, which was that he liked people like him (he would’ve married himself or his mirror were that legal, if that would’ve taxwise made sense); and her, she’d married him only because no one else would, or so she had thought, marry her, what with her hunch and the scrunch of her nose and the balding head and the crows that nested under her eyes that loosed their turds to her tongue, which always hung from her mouth, and panted and reeked. Her, she’d never done chess with him, couldn’t, was too dumb or just said she was, thought the pawns just other sampler yummies in attractive presentation, noshables she’d forgotten she’d put out when and for whom, and so this, so enjoyed — the first game PopPop Israelien’s played against anyone other than himself since the advent of his marriage, not even Arschstrong.

Here, Miami of all places, a revelation upon receded land, tribal Miami that’d emerged from the backwater at this nowhere that’s been called Okeydokey, or maybe Suckywayoungy (something or other surely unpronounceable, how do those feathervoiced natives do it?) — with the true indigenous of this city, of this country entire, vomited up from that river only later named for a saint who’d been the husband of the virgin that she gave birth in the manger; each having to cling to a frond of a palmtree to keep from drowning at the dawn of their time — here, the wine thinned out, came watered down, the beard grew back into the face, the nose was absorbed, the foreskin grew out from the shaft. Prior to the tragedy that’d occurred on the anniversary of the day that that virgin gave birth, many had thought that intermarriage, which is the marrying between different peoples, races, religions, would destroy the Affiliated, diluting the blood with another bodily fluid. But, as our scholars remind us, since the blood of the dead has always been transmitted through the mother, at least according to the Law theirs and ours, it’s in truth impossible to sex us out of our birthright, no longer chosen. Though PopPop, being a firstborn, and so a survivor, had been born Affiliated, he’d married later in life Unaffiliated, and so though their son, His father, Israel, was not born Affiliated, was not even born Israel, it’s said, he’d become converted, perhaps unnecessarily though unforced and so — it’s your move, PopPop says, yours; his paternal grandfather, he cheated often, had bishops up his sleeve, you had to watch him, keep him talking, you took your hand off the piece. His MomMom, PopPop’s wife native to a mother whose preacher’s preacher’s preacher had been exiled out to mission her hometown of Lamed, Kansas — or so hold other scholars among us — she’d never thought why to switch sides; PopPop’d never asked, never wanted to ask or wanted her to, in truth he liked her Unaffiliated, held his own Affiliation over her, that dumb, ignorant, uglyilliterate bitch, I loved her, I didn’t, why should she have converted, even if he’d asked her to, it made him feel more who he was, which felt good, even after their son, their only though he wasn’t born Affiliated and so couldn’t survive as firstborn once converted in at least half his blood, had married out, or married in, and which was it exactly — a topic, Is’ decision, not entirely out in the open with his mother, His MomMom, who’d been disappointed, though she wouldn’t complain when they talked, which was never; anyway, His grandfather didn’t like to remember her, alright, and Whose bed am I sleeping in? Did you ever sleep with her in it? and If you did, did the two of you ever pillowtalk about my father? aren’t questions you ask a mensch as old as PopPop, especially if he’s your only living relative, angry, and naked except for a pink robe, ever loosening, with a sash blue & white trimmed in a bloom of lace thorns. Better to keep quiet, sit straight at the board, chins up and take in your surroundings before you’re beaten, and delivery has to be paid for: PopPop’s unit a shvitzshop with its shades down, the heat turned all the way up against the exterior nip; who knew from winterized, that the heating ever worked here. Interiorly, the carpeting covered with samples of other carpet in clashing colors, walls yellowed with pipesmoke except white in the shape where a crucifix hung until the death of His MomMom, the pale patch seeming like the complexion of a clothed, unexposed body, basking out on the wide holy beach just outside. An uncountenanced emptiness hanging over the table on which they match their play to stalemate. Then, the bell rings, and they ignore it as it might only be their deliveryboychick, returning after his shift for the tip they’d purposefully forgotten.

PopPop takes out his teeth, spits on them, rubs them shined on a sleeve of his robe, shuffles to the kitchen then returns with an alternative, puddings, a delicacy of the Mixed Kitchen, the specialty of an alien house; a neutral foodstuff this linnerless or undunched option, the favorite dish of the Unaffiliated and those, too, with dentures of any persuasion: pareved without ethnicity as it’s become, institutionally, the chosen sustenance of the elderly, the geriatric without mind or the stomach with which to digest implications of nationality, race, or religion. PopPop favored pudding, the more jiggling the better, and concocted it well, its recipe no miraculous secret, you just have to ask, though its vital ingredient you wouldn’t expect.

They’re Nest Eggs; white ellipticals washing up on the shoreline since last-last-Xmas — at least, that’s when they first were noticed, or initially reported, three years ago now — amazingly white rounds, almost geological, waved in to rest upon gently sloping, surely endangered dunes: seeming, too, like supersized disembodied teeth, artificially whitened, set in sunken gums of sand, for a while the phenomenon was suspected a savvy advertising scheme on the part of a statewide dentistry franchise, which suspicion has since been allayed as the owners of said franchise died, this Xmas Eve, and the ovoids kept washing up, apparently innocent of ploy; a handful of local Injuns had been spreading rumors of them as ominous if hackneyed omens, cryptoSeminoles casting them mailorder to the interior for an old doublesawbuck, shipping also overseas at a profit not insignificant; select restaurants and participating retail outlets throughout panhandle and Gulfside Florida had begun accepting them in lieu of cash, credit, paper, or plastic; and many began to worship these odd ova, which emanated a strangely cinematic, lowbudgeted luminescence under sufficient strength of overhead fluorescence: enough to tan, not enough to make accompanying toast; they became ensconced on dashboards, as hood ornaments; largebreasted, thicknecked women wore them in silver settings around their necks; the athletically inclined jogged with one in each hand to enhance the effects of their morning workouts; meanwhile, environmentalists were out scooping them up, gathering them in deep, widemeshed nets; every once in a while a volunteer occupied untangling seaweed from a net would break one underfoot, to a flow viscous, noisome — they seemed to be a species of allyolk egg, which subsequent laboratory tests inconclusively confirmed, identifying them as Nest Eggs, after some janitor in a hot labcoat came up with the name; and one, which as the circumferentially biggest yet found had been taken to University of Miami Medical for experimentation, after a period of tepid incubation hatched a previously unknown species of snowbird, which was immediately determined nonkosher, slaughtered then barbecued to refresh a faculty banquet. Three Nest Eggs, stacked in a glass, cracked on its rim, then poured out into another glass, the preferred nightcaps of PopPop Israelien: he drank them before bed, ate them in omelets in the morning — with diverse species of mushrooms, onions, peppers, as equal opportunity cheeses as his lower tract could allow — fried them for a snack, hardboiled them, sliced, diced, then mixed them into an undressed salad in the afternoon, poached them for a snack, scrambled, or sunnysided them up in the evening, used Nest Eggs in eggnog, too, this being the season, and of course in the omnicourse dessert he serves himself, the pudding. Monday through Saturday, this was his sustenance, but every Sunday since he and his wife had retired here, the days of her death and Benjamin’s arrival included, PopPop brunched in a buffet, alone, the Restaurant Under the Sign of the Imperfectly Toned Pectorals its name, liningup always at nine sharp and waving a vellum swath resplendent with Habsburgian seals, shrieking indignant theft at the expectant waitstaff.

His weekly dispute, you understand, was over the sun, parching premeditated arson over the openair diningarea. PopPop Israelien owned the sun, if you’re following, he tells Benjamin between pudding mouthfuls, having purchased it from its former owner — a local greyhound breeder with whom he’d often shared a card of onehanded B — I — N — G — O — with goddamn near his entire savings, having signed the papers a day after his retirement (MomMom had almost died upon receiving the news: from that day, her cancer, Israel’d thought, the slow sunning to Malignantville, FL, Cemetery County, the dead’s exurbanized plot), the sun the only property in his portfolio, his sole investment, and due to the ever over and over again difficulties as explained to the manager — who was apparently not deaf, despite the impudent buzzing of his cochlear implant — the impractical exigencies of keeping track of just who exactly uses the sun, for what purpose, with what intensity, beginning when and for how long during what season because rates always change, PopPop explaining to Him now, he’d decided to extort payment from here and here only, having been successful only this past week, and what a stunner, though what with the late weather who knows how long it’ll last.

I’m telling you for the last time, PopPop’s telling him the Manager for the last time that Sunday, you need to get out from under my sun; you’re stealing my light, my heat, and I’ve asked of you virtually nothing, zip, nada, I was willing to go as low as what, $10 a month, ten dollars, know what it set me back, much more than that, I’ll tell you, listen, my son…

Please, Mister Israelien, the Manager’s shivering under the property in dispute, we all know your son’s a lawyer, we’ve discussed this matter with him on a number of occasions; now, allow me to apologize for any inconvenience.

We’ve just recently agreed with him to rent your sun for the sum of $8/month, we think this fair, overcast or not, eclipses we’ll deal, and we hope you’ll agree; we’re prepared to pay today for January, and will pay for every month within a week of its first. In return, we’ll have unlimited usage; no rays attached, if you will; you’ll not hassle us anymore, do we have an understanding? and PopPop adds up the figures tattooed on the mensch’s arm, asks him let’s shake.

I’ll need a month’s security deposit, and two months up front…

The manager shuts eyes, grinds lids, says, you’re very fair, Mister Israelien, then shakes his cuff as PopPop’s a bissel too afraid of the germs, and this with a Health Inspection last Monday, then leaves him for the kitchen to telephone the son, Israel, to finalize the terms of his payment, to be remitted in full to the restaurant midmonth ($18), payment — eight dollars, ten to the restaurant for its trouble — to be transferred to the account of the son’s estranged father a week later; please, the manager’s asking the lawyer who just last year cleared himself a competent million, I’d prefer a bank check, you understand. And though Israel’d thought about taking a percentage for himself, Hanna she, forget it.

Limply limbed through the buffetline, PopPop rests his tray at his regular table, outside though shaded and even in this winter they’re having, to partake with a slow deliberation that would be laudable if it wasn’t excruciating, not manners but their vigilant, overdone caricature: he remains erect, firm, silent, disciplined. He esses like the Kaiser must’ve, perfectly, a fressing annoying in the extremity of its decorum, its stateliness and the force of its grace, his posture as if he isn’t indulging with a spoon but is rather sitting on one, and deep, jutting up his gape and into him to scoop out all the inside nervousness, impatience, Weltschmerz and its American stress, the disapproving pain of its stick and the bowl of his bowel perhaps actually enabling the outer serenity, the set face under which his napkin remains immaculate throughout, unto even the postprandial, tucked meticulously under chin and over collar, further protected by the fork and knife he’s using and though recently unmatched plastic at this establishment he’s so enthused with his rental he almost doesn’t notice, just remembers to tip less, and ignores, too, the interior decorating just beyond, the chintz on the cheap with the mirrors, the lights and the Polynesian thatch, the tiki torches and hula luau lei, preferring instead the gustatory setting of his own increasingly senile mind: stags’ heads, alpine appointments, huntinglodge surroundings, fluted stemware, bone china. Wrapped in reverie as if for mental takeout, he’s handling his whitely tined pretensions to silver, slicing and scooping away as if to pristinate plate, as pure as his conscience and cold, a disc plastic itself, and probably inadequately washed, then attempting in the interest of kinder starving in nations darker, unsunned, even the garnishes slit into flowers that bloom like malicious vaginas, magically metamorphosed sexbidextrous swans, prior to reclining — though only after a final faint swipe of his lips — then lighting up an imported cigar banded in gold to lip rings of smoke to the least heaven of umbrella, whose shadow has been sponsored, apparently, by a maker of popular water.

PopPop’s Pop had inadvertently immigrated Here while on a research trip organized at the request of an Archduke Tungteufel, to study the skulls of famed jazz musicians up in Harlem, New York, to determine the phrenological similarities amongst shvartzes of various nationalities, to account for any effect on interpretation, and swing: I spent all my time up there on 125th Straße, hanging around the Apollonian Temple, he’d reminisce to no one, handing nothing down from Pop to PopPop, God! you wouldn’t believe how they bopped! Alternative sexuality seemingly in the family, PopPop the Elder, PopPop’s Pop, would become infatuated with a saxophonist with a pate as smooth as his altissimo: one verse/two choruses later, instead of following him west for three onenighters and a recording date, he had an epiphany of guilt as PopPop describes it, left the shvartze at the train station, went back to his own ghetto that was Manhattan’s Downtown and began to court an Affiliatedess, the daughter of an innovative insurance salesmensch who kept office on the first floor of the tenement in which he would room.

Long story short is that this here insurance salesmensch, PopPop’s Pop’s possible, potential father-inlaw, was “one of those people”—Affiliated; one of their prototypical genii as stereotyped in a variety of media you’ll one day become beholden to, PopPop says to Benjamin, such typecast perpetuated through the ever efficient agencies of history, most notable of which a lasting disposition toward oppression of the race, or religion, which has proved to seed only greater generations, and yadda. According to PopPop talking over His head to the wall hung with samplers and framed photographs of himself and his wife with his face scissored out and hers facialhaired with marker, this mensch sold insurance of all kinds: conception insurance, circumcision insurance, spiltmilk insurance, walking insurance, talking insurance, O how that mensch could talk! untied shoelace insurance, cowlick insurance, friendlessness insurance, virginity insurance, spousal insurance, anticonception insurance, mortgage insurance, unemployment insurance, alcohol insurance, sobriety insurance, child insurance, second child insurance, loss of faith in major religion insurance, undercooked linner/dunch insurance, breastcancer insurance, breastcancer remission insurance, secondmortgage insurance, impotence insurance, migraine insurance, ingrowntoenail insurance, grandson insurance, second grandson insurance, forgotten anniversary insurance, un-flattering shade of hairdye insurance (if purchased at selected retailers, as it’s disclaimed), weightgain insurance, weight then heightloss insurance, hairloss insurance, livercancer insurance, kidneyfailure insurance, rabbi’s (inappropriate) eulogy insurance, inexistent afterlife insurance, and don’t forget his most popular — insurance against insurance; making himself a sizable fortune off the weekend Apocalyptics, hypochondriacs, obsessive/compulsives, neurotics, and undifferentiated spastics known even then to inhabit the New York metropolitan area.

But getting back to what I was getting at earlier: PopPop says his Pop had been this insurance salesmensch’s first customer — I’m not just a prospective inlaw, I’m a client…though as such a trifle of the failure, too, as it wasn’t originally for any coverage he’d come. He’d flopped in fishily wet from the peddling, cartconcerned street in the first minute of the first hour of their third grand opening — an easy occasion for bunting, a common scheme of the desperate proprietor — and asked the insurance salesmensch’s wife mensching the register (her husband out selling marital insurance to his sister-in-law), maybe you have a room available, upstairs…to that effect and then, recognizing what he thought was a fellow grant whether immi or emi, asked along the lines of, how long have you been here for, you, I mean, Here? a question that could only perplex PopPop’s Pop’s maybe, could’ve been, mother-inlaw, as the Affiliated of her line had been Here for so very long that they weren’t able to recollect when, exactly, they’d first arrived on these shores, from where and how, forget why: were they Mayflower stowaways? a cabin of Columbus’ Marranos? and how he then, blah blah blah asked her daughter whichever one of them to marry him and they both asked him what did he do, translation: how much money he made, then spit in his eye — she, the first Affiliated he’d tried to be with, the last; he went and bought sexual orientation insurance off the obliging father returned, then a week later met an orphaned I think Sicilian with a suggestive gap in his teeth, he wasn’t so into resistance…

Emigrate, PopPop says, you emigrate if you love it Here.

Immigrate, he says again, you immigrate if you hate it There.

You have to admit, it’s not so bad.

PopPop asks, Who would rather go back? And then you realize, he’s talking about New York.

It’s this. PopPop’s the worst kind of retiree, without kindness: he was of the type who felt they’d earned their retirement, who didn’t have the respect to die just yet, with dignity, without; who didn’t understand that you worked your entire life for this death, not to do nothing, to retire, recede, give up, which you should’ve done to begin with; one of those who felt entitled to something, anything, though they weren’t quite sure what, the world owing him a living, him owing the world nothing much anymore; the author of interminable letters to the editors of major metropolitan newspapers, he’d labor meticulously over petitions, product failure screeds, signing everything Spinoza; filled days in with the regions of service assessment surveys, answered any and all questions invariably nightly and in agonizing detail in telemarketing interviews — that, and Benjamin never knew what to believe: according to PopPop himself, an academic formerly associated with a halfway respectable (small, private, northeastern) university that should remain nameless if we don’t want to get sued, though later little more than an adjunct, a lowly untenured professor, the Administration even refusing him the sanctuary of a department — and that’s only what he told people, especially when they didn’t ask. A mensch of no degree save the Third, he’d purportedly taught a semester of Practical Eugenics (its prerequisite being Sterilization & You 101), and one elective (Antfarming for Fun & Profit), before the deans realized he wasn’t accredited for any of these responsibilities, summarily redirected him to the dept. of Nostalgia, or so one colleague had named the shadow faculty that nonetheless maintained offices on a bench way offcampus. Which was why he’d had to get the artificial toes he’d remove each night after pudding dessert, as one evening up north, locked out of a meeting, locked out of every university building, he’d slept on that bench, then contracted frostbite — that’s what you get for signing a pizza box, without showing it first to a lawyer — the next day his toes had to be amputated; still, he wore his sandals religiously, out of an abject phobia of having his shoelaces tied together: his toeplug of vulcanized rubber, fitted snugly to that pedestrian void, would lie each evening on the nightstand, alongside his dentures in their effervescence, to be scrubbed both immaculately by a spare toothbrush next morning and so, yes, hahafutzingha, and he finds it very funny himself, when he remembers, that he would often get mixed up, senior mistakes, the onset of dementia, mind mumblingly numb — he’d often put his foot in his mouth, but not as much as he’d put his mouth in his foot, chewing Benjamin’s tush for just about everything.

A pleasant disciplinarian, PopPop, disposed to random fits of overbearing affection verging on emotional abuse.

In your Majesty’s room, though, He’s safe: MomMom’s old preserve (her and PopPop’d slept separately ever since Arschstrong took the eastern corner of the floor just below), filled to its trim of oceana green with novelties exclusively MomMom, kitsch like thimbles hewn from pewter, porcelain owls with fake emeralds glittery for eyes, fortunes from Oriental restaurants tacked to emery in any order of desirability — a schedule for the fulfillment of dreams. This is home if only for a week, one rotation of the wheel PopPop’s nailed to the door to the room, which flimsy paper would rotate according to the day of the week to one of seven vectors of its circle, each adumbrating responsibilities expected fulfilled at His leisure, chores to complete: clear table, clean sink’s toilet, broom and mop the floors, your Majesty; declutter gutters and weed the mail; anytime prior to bed, which is now.

Here only long enough for this barely to’ve become ritual: Benjamin tucked in with PopPop sitting at bed’s edge for their dedicated hour of skullshaping (His uppermost still as soft as PopPop’s own low head is hard) — an ordeal erotic, leaving Him distraught, dizzied audience for the story PopPop would tell, followed by the silence of the nightly Shema, noticeably unwhispered. Then, PopPop to retire a limp off to his room, offlimits, to pack his dead wife’s personals; only now, a year later, moved out from her room to make room for Him: girlishly untouched saddleshoes, bobbysocks, poodling skirts, even her weddingdress that she’d sewn herself from a magazined pattern, then mothballed and tied in necklaces faux pearl and gold, lying all the other jewelry fake out atop pillows, a flaky substance passing for diamond, costumed cubic zirconia, moissanite, not so sterling silver, pseudoSwarowski and Tiffany imitations, being charitable donations, and verily, PopPop understands, elated further, it’s all taxdeductible.

A longing twilight, with relations sundered, together only in that they’re alone — after the tempered happiness, the disapproval of day, an unblinking moon, arched eyebrows of cloud…this, a memory of that ceremonial strangeness, the ritual off, which would almost ruin such promise, their vows, put a damper on incipient bliss, its bounty eternal: the bride carried in, the door shut after its holding uniform’s tipped in splurging style, lavishly absurd in its shame; this tasteless as tastefully underlit room as expensive as happiness always is, this milk and honeymooning who could afford, and who couldn’t? Benjamin had had enough of this side of the family, Israel’s people and their Affiliated menschs, their slumming marriages, their goyishe lusts, His PopPop having married out of the tribe, His MomMom’s mother and her mothers, their mothers before them and blah, all having married an alien kind: how they loved stuff like this, they lived for it, demanded to be spent on, and their menschs were spent, paying topdollar for luxury, bankrupting themselves to be pampered, degraded by class.

His mother’s people, Hanna’s, they were that whole different story, the dialectical spiel; He never knew them, they died too long ago before they would’ve died for all time; it was cancer, too, of the wallet, of the pocket, it had to’ve been, whichever was cheaper to die of…

It’d been a mania for intermarriage that’d afflicted untold generations of Benjamin’s family: Benjamin on His mother’s side simply the product of untold generations of Affiliated women who without fail had married the Unaffiliated, and had verily reproduced with them, and so, in terms of the Law, their offspring would be Affiliated, would’ve been, though not many households were as monogamously observant — religionwise, and especially leaning to the wife’s Affiliation — as was Benjamin’s and would be still, only if. All these goyim, these goyishe monsters of prick and pride attracted to Affiliated women, gonifs with their loves and lust for darkhaired darkheiresses, breastcrowned lusciously, princesses if not queens. Benjamin’s father, Unaffiliated — born, later converted, the first — Benjamin’s mother’s father, Hanna’s, Unaffiliated, check, check, probably sundering unto the first Unaffiliated, Adam, whose second wife seems to’ve been the first Affiliated Mother herself, and how to explain, calling her Cain inside for a piece fruit, very funny. Darkeyed, darker skin, or maybe just maybe degree of endogamy dependant so pale, demure, modest modestum in their natural habitat — in winter the mall, in summer the stripmall — often to be found in their long sleeves and skirts, a secret fetish this ritualwear, dressed down to their white sneaks shomering home on the Shabbos from shul: these women, these girls, daughters ghettowilling, shtupshy. And the goyim they end up with, even worse, dripping smegma from their every pore sebaceous, obsessed with fantasies of the right shoppingbags for breasts, a thickening neck hung with heavy amber jewelry, of women thicklipped, too, frizzyheaded, between their thighs egregriously burning Flatbushes to consume, consume, consume without ever consuming…O these dyed-in-the-lamb’s-wool-maydels — preferring the savor of unkosher salami, treyf schlong, endless unskinned lengths forced through golden doors, a Chosen Peephole through which to taste, sniff, or ogle: the throb of shaigetzes, each to their own specialized lusts, unholy desires but out also to ascend angelic ladders, social and business both; and so union after separation, love sacrificed to lust, new Unaffiliateds kept on being introduced into the line, water to wine, water to wine, and still any offspring, abracadabra, would be Affiliated, thanks Mom, as long as you’re holding the — lessening — line, how’s dad?

Tell him I say what’s up!

It wasn’t what’d transpired the last three months of engagement, or during the six months prior, which her parents weren’t aware of, anyway; it wasn’t even the audacity of the two of them, or the invitations into my home, how her mother had put it, he was a guest in my house, ate my food off my plates, drank from my glasses then my daughter, it wasn’t even the pigheadedness of his parents, how they’d never understand that, that, her mother had said, even she understood, it wasn’t even that he’d asked her, or that she’d ever accepted, or that she — mother, hers — had attempted then out of ritual obligation to stick her greased head into an oven preheated to the temperature of the last war, or that they actually went through with it, wasn’t even the wedding itself, or that she looked, again her mother, sooooooo gorgeous, it wasn’t even the possibility of an entire life together, lives, entire futzed generations exploding forth from one lone smashing of want against need; wasn’t even that night or what was to happen that night, she’s an adult now and yadda, she has to make her own decisions, her own decisions to make her — no, it was most perfectly that that was made that night, the result, the issue that irked; it was, very simply, the Kid. That’s how He, every he in His family — the sprout of an estranged seed, watered with a mixed drink — that’s how they were talked about, if only initially, until they, too, could talk, consciousness with a creditcard, platinumplus and the silence around you it buys: the Kid, the Kind, and just for the sake of argument, devil’s advocate and with what he’s charging I want you should forget about the fathers before, they who’d been born pure, you introduce a foreign element and, nu — what about the Kid, think about the Kid; they even thought themselves mature enough to kid around about it, the whole process, secretly thinking it an instantaneous evolution is what she did, him, also, doubtless, with regard to himself, a next rung on the ladder, ascended just like that, snap! and she’d snap her fingers, just like that! and he’d the goyim say guffaw, nudge her with an elbow recently moisturized and joke, I last longer than that, don’t I, then who knows, she might even in her laughing at him, beside him, feel enough of a new person herself to attempt a guffaw of her own, whatever that is and right along with him, that’s how they’d survived; and this is every woman, every marriage down the Senior line until now, after those twelve, this surviving, fullsized thirteenth — the litany Hanna and Israel could recite in their sleeps, which had always been without trouble, ergonomically sound.

It’s that violation all over again, older than ancient, the rendering of a sacrifice impure, marking it as illegitimate, a sanctuary defiled, Jerusalem forsaken and the Temple in ruins: her ovum being a Holy of Holies…and, inside her, tailspun moments after, she’s slumped, elbowkneed on the honeymoon suite’s tremendous toilet, he’s sprawled already halfway to the somatic Edenic, that’s when the encounter occurred, the illicit approach, solicitation repine, wormy rape: a burrowing, a burial if only of hope; when the sperm, always lazy, fat, and most probably Polish in origin, meets the smart, moral, and altogether perfect perfectionist egg. How it happens, hymn…he knocks on her door, of the house she’d lived in as a girl, this someone he’s selling something and she doesn’t know from what how would she, innocent as she is, she’s not even home, she’s away with her parents down the Shore, themepark Florida, or Jerusalem; or maybe she is home, and there locked in her room — a fantastic instance that most assuredly must remain Apocryphal — and she’s unable to move, to react, as this who does he think he is, whoever the gehenna, however he was raised — and it’s most definitely a he, she knows by how he knocks paw, then tries the bell, the key under the mat he thinks for once and for once the schmuck’s right, the knob, he lets himself in, and this putz, he makes himself mamzer at home: feet up on the furniture, drinking wholemilk, from where, not in my house, straight from the gallon, the sofatuber, he watches the screen until late, later than her parents ever let her watch, and unspeakable shows she’d never been allowed to know existed; and then what does he do, he stays, and she in her locked room can’t help it, she falls asleep, how long, 12:00blink12:00blinkclockradioalarm then the frontdoor, slam, wakes her up, someone’s leaving but it’s not the same someone expected; no, it’s someone else, someone who looks, acts, talks, and thinks, and everything else — though she has no way of knowing this — exactly halfway between the first someone and herself, and there’s this Thing, this odd weirdness between us, like what’s the weight, the word that it weighs on your tongue, guilt: she admits, confesses, begs…has done something wrong, realizes, a sin unmitigatingly mortal, she let something happen, the same as having made something happen, having remained silent, she’s responsible any way it’s minced to finish and the frontdoor, it’s locked eternally now from the outside, she’s helpless, absolutely goddamned helpless and shrieking for succor, You’re mine, you’re mine, you’remine — and the entire house’s settling in its foundations as if it’s laughing gut, for twenty, thirty, forty years until it’s all paid off, a divorce from the mortgage, a life agonizingly amortized of sin, having aged unattractively and unable to flirt anymore if ever she was she’s still sitting, here on the couch and drinking a from the mix Bloody Mary, talking her new nose to a throwpillow: I didn’t make a mistake, I loved him, that was all that mattered, wasn’t it, we’d planned it out beforehand, went to therapy diligently something like three times a week, four in the summer, isn’t that enough, that two people love one another, mature, it’s not like we ever futzed around on each other, or anything — to throw that pillow across the room set with sectionals, and resume her harangue to the pillow underneath, enumerating all her misses, her nears: I should’ve married Gary, Harry, Larry, he was always, we once, I ever tell you about the time he took me to supper and a show in New York, night he stole his parent’s…and eventually say three or so, with the light of the screen givingout the lachrymal evangel, its pledgedrive to benefit only those with love but none of her homes, clothes, without food or drink, she manages and with a swizzlestick stuck obscenely to passout, a life and even its dreaming — preempted…with storyhour over, unprayered, it’s time to go to sleep, Benjamin, will you?

Tell us another story, just one more.

You want another, sighing phlegmish pudding, an urge to smoke — don’t you know they’re all the same?

PopPop, Grandpaw Senior, whoever you are, one more…

Alright, then you sleep, just one last:

This Is The Story, says PopPop in a yuck yuck yabber, impersonating a foreign voice, as if that of Benjamin’s grandfather, His other whom neither of them knew, Hanna’s father Senior who’d died so long ago, of which war’s cancer forgotten — with MomMom’s crucifix swaying from his neck on a chain of seaweed, him the already caricature consanguine doing this goofy goy impression (perfected against the imagined model of all his late wife’s late forefathers), applauding his hands in mock frothy excitement, as he says, Of The Lumbering Dumb Sperm, & The Intelligent Petite Ovum:

Once upon a time, it begins in a land between your Mother’s legs and your Grandmother’s legs, and between the legs of her Mother and her Grandmother and her Mother and her Grandmother before that crotch, yadda, there was a Lumbering Dumb Sperm named Lud, no, let’s say for argument’s sake Mamzer who he’d wandered far from home in search of his fortune.

But where was his home, you ask?

Okay, in the far ’n’ widehanging testes of this terrible Oaf who roamed the dark dense pubic forest of a nameless kingless kingdom, it might’ve been Podunk for all we know, the wrong side of the tracks. And this Mamzer Sperm, he whistled a simple tune: tweet tweet tweet t’tweet, then said to himself in a language more like grunting that he the dumb schmuck thought meant something, it’s such a goddamned wonderful day! let’s wander into that sunny patch of the forest over there and find something to destroy! and so he did — tweet tweet tweet t’tweet! — and soon beheld through the trees an open grassy field up ahead so calm and so peaceful and so wandered there, and met an Intelligent Petite Ovum, an IPO known as Mazel, not a girl’s name, so sue me in your dreams…and then what you ask? I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow, my boy.

That, or the tale of Rumpleforeskin.

For now, get your rest, make a schlaf.

At least tell me what happens next, you say?

Alright, fine…a reversion to normally nasal lisp: the long story short’s that Mamzer, he rescues Mazel from Mazel’s wellmeaning but at times okay could be overbearing father — a King of Kings, really, and takes her away to an even more terrible third kingdom who knew even existed, it’s named Exile — in which no one invites them to lavish parties without at least a slight degree of wariness…you happy?

As habit evolved over the years, three of them of repeated instruction from Hanna reiterated again and again whenever they’d go on vacation, family or just the two of them, even away just for the weekend, which opportunity had been getting rarer as Israel’d work longer and harder for more money who’d ever spend (retirement might’ve meant death at his desk), Wanda’s locked triply and doubly checked all the doors, front, back, and basement, the two doors per porch interior, ex, the four deckdoors, too, had locked all the windows then let down the blinds, pulled curtains, timed lights set like alarms — her purpose, to preserve anything Benjamin might inherit, after her, and her own, as the Underground’s planning to repossess everything in One Thousand Cedars’ bracket, to ingather its lode to the Hall of Domestics, to house it there until its sale as a single lot to a fence as yet elusive, woody or wiry, going through the interview process, getting screened, prior to any dispersal, mass exodus into greater America, evading the authorities of Immigration, Naturalization, and the retribution of a reckoning substantially diviner: measures proposed then voted upon in a matter of emergency at the meeting of the Eve. Redemption, come up from below, and despite the locks, the alarms above, which are only the world of pretense, of appearances, surface — now, these women have their saving to do, personal scrimp, their own gleaning, its own degradation. Boxes are arrayed, breakables swaddled in newspapers outdated, This End Up. Underground, Domestics are occupied hauling chairs, chandeliers, tables, tarpulined paintings and books never again to be read, everything downstairs then down and out through wardrobes then into and through the wide floodlit tunnels they’re humming, they’re whistling, giddily insulting one another on down the line of waiting looters in every language that is, their vernacular an echoic, welcoming admixture of Slavicisms and the vulgar idiom of American pop, resounding like a party in revolt under the earth, whose face is being emptied chair by table by lamp: each Domestic responsible for her own transportation of the holdings of her home to the warehouse of the Hall (endtables with casters hoarded, lawyerhusbands’ carts used to lug home files, prized), and yet the proceeds from the sale of the lot in toto are to be split evenly amongst all members, without preference equally shared among Domestics, Grounds, and Maintenance alike, an inheritance from their old worlds and its outmoded socialist governance, though Adela and despite having received no explanation in return for a promise to honor a request this unexpected if not just untimely has agreed to keep Wanda’s absence from the others and, furthering hush, even offered to glean a portion of the Israelien household on her behalf (Wanda insisting on the Scriptural tenth, the holiness of the sum she felt sanctifies greed), while preserving the rest for what she, Adela, didn’t understand, couldn’t ask — for Benjamin, if ever He’d come of age, or for His guardian down there where Wanda said, Myhammy.

Adela wakes late from the floor of the empty Master Bedroom, long un-troubled loosening neck and shoulders sleep after having taken the entire day previous to offload the Koenigsburg hold, hands chapped, fingers chaffed, rung in tens of rings engagement, wedding, formal and junk, mutlifacetedly huge, all Edy’s — she’d given herself the night off, had delayed looting the Israelien’s until morning — though her limbs still a trifle stiff from lifting heavy under the sun that lifts itself, and only the prospect of the same today, more work than Edy and Alan’d ever paid her to do; she sloughs through the tunnel toward the neighbor’s across the way; she shouldn’t be found outside, they’d agreed at the meeting, it took them hours to, none of them should: already the sirens dulled above the earth, whirling aid to the helplessly dead; at intersections, mirrored for safety, dodging her fellow Domestics flailing, hauling their own chests of drawers hanging gawkingly open, an extra helping of horror for Hanna had she been alive, their contents falling, rolling pearls over which to trip and fall, bluntedged baseballcards, compasses without west, leaky thermometers, golfpencils eraserless, gnawed, lipsticks, perfume; dragging to scratch the eyes of the tunneled floor smashed mirrors and glass wardrobes unhinged on screws stripped then spilled, vacation, college and summercamp luggage lugged overfull, footlockers, trunks, suitcases teething zippers, seams ripped, ripping, linnerdance jewelry, earrings for the fundraiser dunch, pesadicht silverware tarnished in disuse, souvenireal porcelain heirlooms, glassily plastic tabletop trinkets, weepy chandeliers fisted then dragged behind to tinkle loud and hollow through their grunts, the imprecations and arguments of Domestics stooping to scoop up what’s been dropped, fighting over whatever remains — Markéta noosed in nine of Mister Rosen’s ties inspired by Chagall, Mojca whipping her on with Misses Diamant’s diamond necklaces clasped to bracelets. Adela dashing through the last stretch of tunnel givingout into Wanda’s wardrobe and, on reaching its portal and instead of meeting with the holy protection of a saint once invoked, there’s darkness, nothing: Wanda’s room sealed with rocks the size of a head, and past them and their mound, weathered cedar 2 x 4s, condemning passage, nailed into a cracked cross — distressing these boards, having been redeemed from Maintenance without benefit of appropriate requisition form. Adela heaves a rock to the side, another, again, tiring, passage impossibly blocked, she stands, making out sound from above — the din of heavy moving, of snaps, pops, hernias lashing out to crack like taskmastering whips, knotted spines — turns as if struck to speed through the tunnel again, through tunnels, tripping over tchotchkes again, furnishings out of any season’s prospectus, shattering the glassware of Moser, touristy Bohemian crystal, plasticpebbled punchbowls and molds of fish for the baking of breads, fukatokugawa vases if that’s how it’s said worth more than they’d ever suspect, coinlike clatter of silver and stemware, shards of plate catalogcarded, and the thick prick of tines underfoot, trampling the greed of her fellow Domestics scrounging, scavenging scraps of lingerie and tracksuit torn, radios, stereos, teevees and unwieldy, doorless microwaves, the contented, contenting like until she emerges through her own portal, toppling her saint, the substitute Anastasia’s accusative, sharply jutting head tearing loose the hem of Edy’s housedress and into her room if it could be said to’ve ever been hers, in the Koenigsburg house where Jana and Veronika are fighting sexually liberated and fiercely over an antique now antiquated silver menorah Adela’s left behind out of the sentimental, a vaguely religious fear that kindles respect, keeps burning the candle of superstition forever — responsibly tarnished, a candelabra smuggled Over Here one branch at a time up nine tushes that once had seats reserved for them in all the synagogues of k.u.k. Austro-Hungary. Adela leaves them tumbling entwined, halfnaked, their nails (sharp, they’d manicured each the other’s) flying to scrape at mouths, at their own images in one another’s eyes, Veronika and Jana who if not twins then should be, scuffling throes on the floor to become bound in the rug rolled over the carpet as if the unifying mummy of a Pharaoh, hardheartened. Adela scrambles up the staircase from the basement amid leaned screens and the photographs of births, bar & bat mitzvahs, weddings in their order, portraits of Koenigsburgs posed as dead as them all, through the hallways and rooms kitchen, family, den, dining, living and dying, through the last hallway that’s also the first, to its door that’s the frontdoor though it faces away to the west, unlocks it from the inside, its key held tight between the winded throb of her breasts, then down the stoop into the frontyard, directly into the floe, the slushy fire — the slowed, thick, freezesearing path of the sprinklers secreted low amid the icicle grass, and on timers.

Grasping her mistress’ hem, Adela dabs herself dry, she’s still naked underneath, unashamed, lets down the gown over her pocket graying and only then, revealed, takes in the shock of the assemblage. Jesus son of Joseph’s God, mutter of Mary, two hundred, three, a round rallied thousand they seem FEMDOMs, Development Security personnel, and Maintenance staff, their hats off, their heads lowered, as if suffering the Pledge of Allegiance to a flag nowhere to be found, as a prerequisite to what crisis of citizenship…Adela searching their stare in the direction of unidentified alien workers hauling the guts of the Israelien household out and into twelve trucks unmarked and who remembers licenseplates, some idling linedup to the driveway, others with their ramps pulled back to the curb. Adela vaults over the other curb, which is the asphalt hedge of the street dividing properties, responsibilities, lives, to tumble into the Israelien frontyard unmown if snowed, rises, pushing through more of this squat and maskmouthed labor, steps up the slated path neatly and respectful around the lawn furniture, too, packed in a protective wrap of glistening plastic, the comics and classifieds of newspapers with nothing left to disclose to anyone still literate and living, taking the seven step stoop in one reckless lunge then shimmying into the slit left open in the frontdoor with a book propped as a stop, who knows which and who cares. In the vestibule, she sidles past two workers carrying out the washingmachine or dryer, she doesn’t have time its cord tailing between legs and dragging behind them like the forked limb of an electrified demon; taking along with it dust from the floor, tangling with the rails of lain track, which hosts the motion of wheeled pallets to move what the workers aren’t able to lift, what they aren’t insured to attempt, whether it be too valuable or heavy, that out the front and rear of the house then onto the ramps and up them of still other trucks, their tires destroying unto the furthest loll of the brutebladed lawn. In the hall, another worker swivels down the same rusted length of track on a filmdolly, a camera rolling, getting footage of the entire groundfloor, door, hall, room after room, closeup on the doorknobs, then cut to the tile over which Adela heels, further into the fray to observe every foursquare invaded, with what to her paranoia look like government types, lookalikes, suspiciously suited don’t I know you from wheres; some of them taking photographs, with old, surely obsolete photographic equipment, flashbulb glare and smoke infusing the air, others with their superannuated for radio microphones wandering around shushing, apparently recording rare silence, themselves, laboratory-coated goys in brilliant white hazmat hats, booties, and gloves leading their similarly uniformed German shepherds through the hallways opening into rooms, rooms into floors, collecting what would seem to anyone else, Adela, smells evanescent, elusive; as maids insourced of uniformly idealized proportions go feathering in areas recordingwise finished with, finalized, at the flight of risen dust, rarefied specks, sampling it into sacs labeled with relevant locations: DESK #2/DRAWER #3, SOFA#3/UNDER PILLOW #1, WINDOWSILL #12—such an assemblage an affront to Adela, this duty done by dereliction, martyrdom by mote…

O Wanda, Wanda, why hast thou Floridaforsaken me, Wanda?

You’re here to dust, no? a matron asks as she straightens out the starch of her whites over fishnets, you’re late and not in uniform. She flips with the disdain managed only by the utmost professional through papers, a clipboarded stack, blueprints, a roll.

Take the upstairs, she says, beginning with the Master Bedroom, working down the hall to His; get moving, we’ve got two hours, three at the most.

An Assistant Site Supervisor, at least that’s what it says over her name, she clucks over, her head a uselessly nippleless breast tufted wildly with blond from the bottle, tucks a duster molting its feathers under her arm and so introducing the rest of her tag: Mary, that’s it, they’re all named Mary, to us; hands Adela from the pocket of her uniform a tweezers, and a sheaf of glassine sacs already labeled. Tweezer the mold from the grout of the Master Bathroom, she’s repeating its ilk already for the tenth time this morning, placing all in the appropriate sacs, one for each wall of the shower, north, south and, you get me, ceiling and floor, the toilet stalls, then from around the sinks, the whirlpool tub — being as careful as possible to preserve the integrity of the sample; then proceed, down the hall to each bathroom on the floor; don’t worry, it’s all already been imaged; but, she flicks a wrist up to expose a pink watch — you’ve only got ten minutes until they disassemble the Master Bedroom; God, you’d better hurry — you were supposed to’ve been here at dawn…

Adela loops her hair up, walks professionally together upstairs-upstairs, with tweezers and sacs makes her way past the Master Bedroom — such joy, shirking orders — its Master Bathroom with the two toilets his & hers, the bidet, the jacuzzi and sauna, keeps her face down to pass handfuls of other maids sweeping, dusting, vacuuming nothing in their areas, assigned; she recognizes none of them, they must be new here, must be strange to say — foreign: a kind-mouthed pigtailed shvartze plying a tub atop her head piled with the salts Israel would water, then soak in; a Mexican girl she has to be with that host of martyrs churchcandled in her eyes hauling three racks of shoes that are the slippers Hanna’d step into at the foot of the night, to slip the pair she’s eyeing not into her pockets, which’ll be searched, but onto her feet, exchanging her old maid, public transportation sneakers for these luxury fluffies with the loose pink ribboning and the bows by the heels. As Adela turns into the last stretch of hall, there’s a voltaic storm, announcements’ crackle, coming over the house’s infant monitoring intercom system who knew ever worked: Attention, the voice robo remote, mechanically feminine, Water Will Be Shut Off In Nine Minutes — Remember To Unscrew, & Label All Lightbulbs — All BASEMENT Perishables Including Medication Must Be Brought To The Kitchen Supervisor For Immediate Refrigeration—Adela heels away from drowning softly in the carpet, bluewhite oceanically plush, being rolled up tightly just a step behind her stride; down this hallway passing more suggestive maids and their observing recorders in still other rooms who’d even guess (Wanda, she’d only visit Wanda, through the tunnel, its wardrobe up to her room and return, the other rooms only an imagination, like the Koenigsburg’s, only different). What they’re doing here seems an abstruse discipline of what, sibling archaeology, familysifting, the excavation of daughters, maybe, these women in their immaculately fitted, speckless uniforms feathering dust, tweezering mold, yes, but also diagramming the disposition of posters, of plaques, compiling the loose stacks of blandly centrist newsmagazines, listing the order of books on the shelves, encyclopedias Volume 1 ABRAHAM — AVRAM, dictionaries and condensed biographies of kin, Einstein, Herzl, whichever Marx, insane, that and a million more processes that must’ve been incredibly well thought out, planned like war, anticipated like miracle, long before Adela ever arrives at the hall’s furthest funeral, which grave would’ve been the door to Benjamin’s room if it hadn’t already been tagged, bagged, removed, relocated. Wholesale. It’s open, exposed, scandalous to air, there isn’t anything left inside, not even carpet, rug, blinds, window; it’s freezing with the snow winded in and its guest, which is ice — they’d taken what there was to take, they’d repossessed all the possessions: no bed, that fourposter, which’d been Rubina’s then her mattress, too, the bassinetcrib never used, no chairs either, neither the chair fixed like the Heaven above the heavens above the turning earth, nor the chair that like spring reclined, which’d been brought here from Israel’s office and its conference room now barren (Everything must go! each to its own gleaning, professional, expert) — no blankey comforters, no cushions from any of the sofas Hanna’d always said couches, from the family’s livingroom, Israel’d said den, which had served as pillow for His pillows; none to sleep, none to wake, thank God at least with Wanda gone, but for how long, she’d said she’d be back for the New Year.

Tonight being that, the Eve, another Turn turn turn…it’s also Friday, the dusk of the Sabbath. As light earlier, they’d observed the entire rite, for Benjamin’s benefit PopPop blessing for the first time in too long, not long enough, what’s come over him, it goes lehadlik ner shel Shabbos, the lit (lehadlik) candles (ner), which were yahrezeits, waxen jars two of them set with serpentine wicks that supermarkets had stocked a yomtov ago, aisle numbered numinous now marked down for no one; Kiddush was said borei pri hagefen over the fruit of the vine, which’d been a rabidly sparkling, grapey champagne PopPop had had in the fridge since last Xmas; they washed, al netilat yadayim’s that prayer, Amen then waited on the buzz from the lobby so they could break bread, hamotzi, or whatever they’d ordered. Blessed Art Thou Lord Our Gaud…Who Hath Given Us Takeout, & Delivery — and then, what’s the bracha for dessert, for pudding as always, the warmth of its flesh, the spoon of its skin? Shehakol.

Benjamin’s put to bed early, PopPop lockingin SonSon, to sleepsleep in the roomroom of His MomMom; are you cozy, comfortable, suck it up, I’ve known worse. I lived twice what even your parents lived — I’ve lived double lives.

Only to return an old, barnacled, loosebottomed wreck at the end of his days — to youth; a late evening stroll along with the waterfront at the changing of the guardian tide, which wets his way along a lip of expectant froth, an undulating tongue of wake, sinking in then swallowing down to dampen his shoes and socks, almost tripping, to tumble onto the sharp weed of his whistle, fallendentured, suckedgummed and burdened, too, a bag schlepped over a shoulder’s stoop, filled with those nightly fresh, skyshelled orbs known as Nest Eggs, late evening and its speckled space being the best conditions for collection. After a’gathering from along the shoreline, amid the ribboning of bows from the crash of waves, his own Xmas presents, belated tokens for the near and dear, eggs uncovered from sand, redeemed from tangles of kelp, hypodermiclike shards of shells, found amid glassy drift, pyres of driftwood, fallen clouds of sand, packed like snow, grained with ice, PopPop — tattered in overcoat, scarf knotted like a second necktie — meets outside the sandside, seaswept eastern entrance to his tower a goy who must merit the rating of at least an acquaintance, waving I’m so excited more hands than all the poor of the world would know to clasp in the brotherhood of schnorr and so Pop-Pop stops, feels at his heart, sets down his burlap bag, fishes the hook of a stogie out of a pocket of his overcoat, which is furry and full of holes as if gnawed right from the skin of a deepsea Levantine monster, and lights it and sucks and lungs out smoke and steam, waits as this acquaintance in a felt hat and dewy mink approaches him in a wade and worm around and through a hulking, violently slippery pod of squidy, octopusal mutants. Dim menaces, terrorized with three legs, actually slimy entities of two legs each ferociously lamed by a distended, additive antenna — they’re merely the night shuffleboard enthusiasts, congregated under the sunny blast of facility kliegs, the goy highstepping over the flight of their discs, thrust cues and on into boxes, ten points, twenty (the laws of mourning don’t prevent them from enjoying, even if they’d had any respect), to greet PopPop. But who is he? PopPop removes his glasses, licks the wonder onto the face of his lenses, breathes and wipes, a glare, a blur’s bubbling smudge, the heat from the tower’s lobby fogging again even at this distance whenever a fellow tenant comes and goes, the revolving, revolvingly vertiginous door — my sight isn’t what it used to be, but he’s said that for as ever long as he’s had sight; though, then again, neither is that that needs to be seen.

Enough, we’ll let the thing talk.

An openingline, long rehearsed, memorized by mirrors of lobby and bath.

I’m making a fortune in furs, I’ll tell you, seems with this weather last few days…it’s peculiar, isn’t it — sales are up what, like two hundred percent.

As he tells you what he wants, he tells you who he is.

It would be Freddie, wouldn’t it, who else the none other, who knows how it’s spelled on his bell: Freddy, maybe, the Fur King, newly mounted, crowned in a taxidermical head, anointed with formaldehyde, a sheep in the clothing of the wolf, which is bundled tight under tens of gekkering foxes whose tails have gone red with shame.

Listen, he pleads PopPop, hat in hand, scratching at the bumps on his bald that seem prospective antlers, it’s not profiteering, I’m as sorry as the next about what’s gone on, what’s a goy to do, tell me, he attempts a handshrug, trying it on for size, forgive him it asks, he’s new around here…just trying to make a living, nothing wrong with that, no, got my daughter with the abdominals and always with the yoga meditation talking my ears blue about responsibility and such, but I’m telling you, he’s telling PopPop, Faivish olev ha whatever it is, he would’ve wanted it this way, no doubt, he was always after the sale, all about business, life is death he’d always say but business is business, which is both and it’s good, listen I’m telling you now it’s almost too good — now this would’ve killed him! that he doesn’t know what to do with his gestures, as if to ask without asking, any typology tips? and since his hands of tens heads dumb don’t know what to do with themselves either he hides them, in the pockets of his mink, furry little rodentholes, lintlined burrows, and — despite the cold as he’s not sure if PopPop’s listening, or had answered him, or of anything — he removes his earmuffs, which are bunnypuffs, the tails of rabbits that thump no more and, breathlessly, shoves them into his other pocket.

What about you and this grandson I’m hearing so much about?

It’s true what they’re saying?

You know some people are asking questions?

You got maybe something warm for Him for winter? We’ve got to keep Him in good shape, alive.

You don’t worry about us, says PopPop, please God, everything’s fine. He’s wearing an old rag of mine, I’m wearing a newer one; when we don’t trade, we share, send the spare shmatte out to be cleaned.

It’s been pleasant, Friedrich, but I really must and yadda with lessening tact, he heaves bag onto back, offers the fur a snotted sleeve limply shook, then slumps through the doors, which are automatic to the left and right for the handicapped when they aren’t in the middle revolving, through its mortuary lobby, funereal arrangements of flower atop low benches like coffins filled with stone to the elevator, express, overclimatized against the outside inclement, spurting muzak, an icicle clarinet, a snowflake cymbal, dingding he digresses his tweed tighter, the gnaw of the gut, hound’stooth, raises his collar and resumes a whistle at meeting this other orphan, a filthy wild though appealing update of a newsie or shoeshine type, who lately lived in the elevator, left to fend for himself while on vacation by a grandfather who’d lived in the tower until he, as Affiliated, died, without his firstborn grandson, who over the last week was given a uniform and salary financed by the facility’s more generously gullible tenants in return for doing what he loved best, pushing his home’s buttons at the violently random. He grins small fangs, scratches skin, pimpled one cheek the other pubered with stubble, then flicks a middlefinger out to depress all the floors in a swipe, last among them the eye glowing PENTHO SE.

Even with all this happening, PopPop says in interruption of his own humming, I should wish you a happy and healthy, pursing among his hides for a late holiday tip — may this year be better than what’s passed, and not wanting to waste an egg on the boy, with stiff nervous fingers finds a dime to drop to his pocket.

PopPop leaving behind him a beach on his heels, from the blowsy elevator to tread the wet over the carpet laid intermittently rumpled with dune to the door to his penthouse, an opalescent sun its button of bell whose plaque underneath, if rung, proclaims in text and sound, POP — POP (has that ring to it, doesn’t it? he’d said to Benjamin, icebreaking, shattering stuff, this getting to know you), makes as if he’s digging himself out of his pants again for his keys amid the loose change and changeless sand as the door to the elevator shuts, and the metal with its urchin descends. Then, he frisks toward the only other door on the floor, opens it to the stairwell and falls down a flight edged in green railing and emergency lights, tripping over the threshold and out the door a floor below klutzy footing until steadying in front of another, pants, pauses, sucks air, straightens his hair in the nameplate’s reflection, ARSCHSTRONG writ in wrinkles across the forehead, untucks, then tucks in again the tails of his shirt, tries to put a hand in any pocket of his vest, then realizes he hasn’t yet slit them. A hand unpurposed is as a deliverance withheld and so he knocks, redemption, as ordered knocks three times more, knock knock knock then — an arthritic shuffle; an eye’s squint through the peephole; a surgical procedure this unlocking of nine locks, and then there’s the deadbolt to think of; a gentle gentile appearing simultaneously young and intensely old, not as much newbornlike as a fetus overstayed, a fruit gestated to sensate and so, overripe, he slights the door, draft, light, plucks from his mouth a slick and yet rough prune for a tongue, and through the sliver with all along the chain still on leans slowly to lick at the tonguing returned of his lover, who just darkness ago had been the repressive responsible for Benjamin who should already be sleeping upstairs, dreaming of anything other than this, God forbid. Then, Arschstrong withdraws, shuts door, undoes the chain in a rattle, opens wide: PopPop, with his hands out in front of him, his late offering bagged, a fresh hatch of Nest Eggs.

A happy and a healthy, Adi, let auld acquaintance blah blah, I should feel lucky to be alive. A wonderful New Year, though that was probably months ago now; here’s to new beginnings, and to my Benjamin, too, a comfort in our winter years…once I get named guardian, the papers go through, the accounts revert — just think of what we can do: I’ve never been to Greece, have you, never been to the Islands, don’t even know what they mean by the Islands when everyone’s always saying they’re going to the Islands. Venice, never been to London, Paris either, or Rome, Minsk or Pinsk, with you I mean, what’s Siberia after all without you?

Tonight to be the last of their assignations, each of which would satisfy thrice per lunation: sessions of sex slow and dry, despite any lubrication — and they’d tried them all to rashes, allergies, itch, once’d even made their own out of PopPop’s liposucked fat — unabashedly analytical, measured in how hot (tush temp.) and dry, their orgasms later noted in a leather ledger Arschstrong keeps in the kitchen in the drawer along with the pen and the knives, though they engage themselves down the hall in the bedroom, sunk amid hazards of splintered wood packingcrates, looseflapped cardboard boxes, scuffed suitcases and trunks, socks swallowing socks, balled into bulges, tight and dark wads stuffed to puff used underwear scattered sexually negligent, with talcum powder just everywhere, a dusting of weatherform white dirtied with dust, as if neglect purified; as they’re switching positions from the favored Thrombosed Mosquito to the exceedingly advanced Reciprocal Six Handled Spoon, Arschstrong spurting a last helping of glide onto the rub of his lambskin, Pop-Pop asks he can’t help it:

You’re leaving me, why?

I’ll kill myself, it’s something I said, something I did — Benjamin, He’s only temporary.

Relax, says Arschstrong touching a shaky finger to the head of his lover, I’m only moving across the hall. You remember the Golden-Schlitzpickels, they died, you know, like so many, too young, it’s a sin, and with an oceanview…

Theirs is three times the size!

So is mine, Arschstrong says as he enters.

Dead of night arrives, that inviolate guest, unseen, unheard, leaves like stealing, having pocketed the clock. Balls fall, inexorably. They lean on one another, sucking each other’s shvitz, gasp air recirculated, the soul of the ducts. Then, as if variety’s been made mandatory to pleasure, they retire their silence to what Arschstrong’s always called his Florida Room, in an apartment in which all the rooms are actually, technically, Florida Rooms, there to admire the haze of their engaged reflection in the glass that is the furthest wall, which would slide open on its greasy track to reveal just past the patio used for storage only — skyline, frozen. What a view, away from the ocean, toward the parkinglot, plow and corpse, the weeping palms of Babylon, the street that whites west toward the highway. Miami sobered this New Year, unforgiving of revelry, left corkless, without bubble; there are no lights from up here that aren’t sirens, the lingery grope of emergency pulse; the balloon of the moon resoundingly popped, by the darkness.

After two attempts, one culminating in mutual cum, Arschstrong invites PopPop to stay, he’d never done that before; theirs has always been strict congress, sweet, quick, though not as hurriedly harried and awkward as the inevitable exit to follow. To get older is to get none the safer in your own skin…PopPop’s flattered, a gratitude perplex; if an apology, he’s uncertain whether it’s been offered to him or by him, for such premature arousal of every suspicion, that scare with the socks, the underwear, the powder. In a corner, a plastic plant ornamentally webbed with teabags patient for repeat steeps. To warm them, Arschstrong heats a pot, weak mint they sip in an ocean of lull, lazing about the sofa’s plastic slipcovered lump, surrounded by the floats of garmentbags, toiletrycases, scissors, tape and twine. With a pillowcase spared to shammy and what’s left in the kettle, Arschstrong removes PopPop’s sandals, washes his feet, individually the toes then, dispensing with the other foot’s plug, puts a shoulder into it deep into the hiccoughing flesh, rimming the void, pale and wrinkled, lies on a knee his other hand, its wristwatch just ringing midnight, an alarm preset, a shriek of the veins that strap down the arm, binding his grip to the battery of the heart. As if to insinuate that PopPop should leave, please and thank you, Arschstrong giving justification to this madness, abrupt, by saying time for pills his and yours, his toilet, beautybed, a call to his daughter out on the other coast of estrangement — and this with the pillow’s shammy still dripping onto the floor from which the rug’s been removed, rolled and hogtied. PopPop steps into his clothes, takes up his saggy bag and in that lean kisses at his lover still sitting, out the door then up the stairs one dainty step after another through the door to his, which he unpents quietly, not just tiptoed but discreetly up on his pedicure, so as not to rouse Benjamin, who’d stayed up midnight late though locked in, forced to keep company and amuse with whatever belongings of MomMom’s PopPop couldn’t sell, didn’t, no one’d yet offered the right price, no one would: hummel figurines forever unparented, earth thrown into a kiln then fired to kitsch, pastel samplers and quilts, unfinished knit caps and booties, which bled yarns for the grandkinder of friends, not her own; then, on a highest glassed shelf, a furbish of spoons silver but tarnished, souvenirs brought back from the vacations of others, always, to remember to her where she’d never been, never would be, which was most everywhere outside Florida and northeastern environs. To try the knob, to make sure of its lock by bolt, and, satisfied, quietly, to his room, to become naked again but alone, hanging each piece of his suit up on its designated hanger, PopPop falls onto the bed and asleep over the covers, to turn from one side to the other along with the year, the millennium, all.

If in our sleep we dream of dreaming, and of nothing else, then we might understand the terror of the times; it’s the failure of disaster — which, like every unwelcome guest, like the guest that is sleep, arrives always an hour too early, during which you’d hoped to prepare, wash and clean, skim the newspaper, have a bite of something to eat. We lie poorly; we toss, we turn — and even our turns are turned, a last leaf fallen as flake, blown in its cycle back to the very beginning of mornings, time and again if only in each iteration estranging, as any ending’s already known, is thought of nightly and always, just disbelieved until the grave, the sittingroom, standingroom Shiva, the mourning of neighbors, of family, friends; the impertinence of year over year ringing real from our guts empty but churning, the imposition unsettling, a calendar left blank with no lineage to mark the days or the numbers, or else rived altogether too many times and again into black, which is total: two different cycles, run both at the same time yet opposed, wash and spin dry, permanent press and delicates, that was Wanda’s department, as it was Arschstrong’s: how he used to take care of laundry for PopPop, the cooking, the cleaning, what not, for sex a kneel and a mouth and for worries, an ear he couldn’t hear out of without the ringing buzz of his aid. Another knock, yet another and again and the tired old nude wipes himself from the toilet, green fires of money lap from his sit, there’s more where that came from stacked in the shower, behind the pink curtain, watermarking the tub with its filth. Finally out of the closet — all of his closets have been cleaned out. Arschstrong walks from bathroom to bedroom in which he painstakingly puts himself through a suit three decades old, he hasn’t in years, gathers his handluggage packed (a horde of what matters, his passport, license, new limitless creditcards that just came to mild interest, plus toothbrush and paste to be carried on); only then does he go to the door, no need to peep himself prepped as he knows who it is, and if he doesn’t then the stranger can’t be worse than expected.

Hallway’s full of suits, two of them, one of whom, an immaculate, towering shvartze, ports his luggage, overpacked, to the hall’s furthest elevator, service, while Arschstrong, accompanied by another foreigner, with his pleasantries he must be Mitteleuropan, he thinks, takes the residential, whose scamp operator’s been financed to take the remainder of the night off, before being forced, bound, gagged then broomcloseted. While descending, this foreign goy in the pinched fedora hands over to Arschstrong an envelope in which as agreed are the surveilled, images disagreeably focused of him and Pop-Pop, naked, engaged in a joy named in memory of that urbis that once neighbored Gomorrah, which has no sin left to its name. A limousine idles in the drive, ahead of another, this second limo shabbier, scratched at the doors, fender dimpled and two lights smashed out, the latter plateless, too, though registered to the federal government. All shaved skull and sunglass pincenez, a voluminous leather duster over his suit and tie, which are black, the shvarzte opens the limousine’s door, Arschstrong simpers inside, the limos pull out, in poor, skidding formation, disappear into one another then into pitch, whose direction is always northeast. One limousine to go further, though, as north and as east as the Delaware and the mouth of the Parkway, all the way back again to the state of Benjamin’s birth, which is Joysey, if a Garden itself then a paradise barren, Eden bereft — a scrubscape of low malls and gnarled, haggard, known better days pine; while the other limo relents earlier, as if it can’t take the cold or the time, takes the turn from the lightless interstate to Washington’s rural if still subdivided environs, Arschstrong in its rear sucking fingers, the attaché held on his shivering knees. He’s liveried to an impressive rancher vacated upon this clear and bright Sunday morning, with his kinder and their own out tending to church (even Arschstrong once married, for what he thought of as normalcy, only protection), at a special vigil this Sabbath never again, a service of solidarity being held for the victims of recent events, and so he waits, sits on their porch and wastes himself in wicker alongside the bowl for the water and the bowl for the food of their dog, who’s absent itself, scavenging bodies. He’ll ask to stay, for acceptance, to live here, spin out his span however long it’d be, and please not too revolute painful. An hour later a metallic gray minivan makes time through the artificially greened, rolling in it Development and even before it manages and on problem brakes to slow to a stop, grandkinder — his, he realizes — spring through the windows, hope they’re already open; kisses one for each then one for the wife of his son (reminder, ask him for her name), a handshake, maybe even a hug for her husband who’d rejected him now returned if too late and inside, Arschstrong nodding, as if gathering the tense urge of the lips; he lightens himself in their kitchen, atop their table synthetically topped, mounding a mint of money before he falls into a chair he’s sure is there but isn’t and so onto the floor where he remains sprawled, and weeping.

First and false, this day of new beginnings, up and fortified with bran for brunch, a sit on the toilet, girded loins not quite proverbial, fresh resolve along with an argument against such headlined in memoriam above the folds of the morning papers. To unlock Benjamin’s door at seven sharp, the same hour at which he’d free his late wife His MomMom, to put her to work, daily tasks since his lover’s, or once; to wake Him and say, another day — the clock poured in fresh sidewalk concrete to still history at now, to sink the past in the ocean of present…getup, washup, dressup, eatup — over the fruitplate, a diet, we’ll talk strategy for the lawyer, our appointment’s on Monday at nine.

Into the bedroom and instead of Benjamin in bed, His MomMom’s — there’s no outsized infant lump or toddling lunk, but a shriveled pucker of a person with a head shaped like an egg, as it’s brilliantly bald, set with eyes and nose and a mouth like the cracks made by the earliest of beaks. Or, it’s a worm, wriggling that head as round as the world, and as swollen. Its glabrousness goading. Who else, PopPop thinks, what else to suspect: maybe one of the more senile residents around here, old Mister Alzheimer, perhaps, wandered home to the wrong unit, it’s happened before, it’ll happen again but he won’t recall when. PopPop checks for a wheelchair, a walker…tries it on, this variant of take my cane, hold it or, I’m just happy to see you, then laughs at the thought, offers him a sleeve, a cuff of the hand; and, as he extends himself as if to shake, he can’t help himself, he begins tapping a finger as if to break with nail this squirming shell and emerge from it a SonSon.

It’s good to meet you, too, Mister Israelien…or, it’s what’s his name, snap, a crackle and clap, eyes shut — PopPop a lifelong sage of the news, a frontpage scholar, recognizing the former secretary of the Treasury, has to be, he’d just spent time with him on the toilet, over a bowl of black flakes, this I’m not sure we’ve been introduced recently promoted from his previous Administration position to sit at the edge of His bed, a dead wife’s. What’s his title, the new one, the mind’s going, gone: Secretary of Affiliated Affairs, that was it, a novelty breakable for the cabinet, moldy, locked. How to describe him: he looks like an egg, though his dewlap like the testicles of a turkey. Everything above the lips squints in slits — that dry, thin wisp of fec. Dreck, that’s that smell; our charge’s laid, needs his changing. PopPop sniffs. A moment ago, Das — that’s it, that’s his name or an acronym or abbreviation for what, at least that’s what the networks had called him, the President, too; as for what he’s really called, Keiner or Keynor, who can remember — he’d snuck a knuckle up and into his seat, emerged fisting an incontinent clod, then stroked on its black as a moustache. Distinguishing, reassuring, security smeared. He’s smaller than you’d expect, and especially unimpressive sitting, arrived in the uniform, fulldress, of an unspecified military: head skewed between uneven epaulets, the rest of him bound in frayed sash; the pants straining, but the jacket baggy at the chest doneup civilian custom: its lapels luxury enough to accommodate his many badges, citation, ribbons, and medal.

His boots have marched in mud over the tile, which’ll never again be as clean as it was.

For you, this Das says, I’m here in person, the voice the tinhorn tinkle of his own decoration. This is sensitive: we need to brief you, find out if you’ll be cooperative. We hadn’t anticipated so many, all these surviving firstborn — least of all a relation…and there isn’t much time.

PopPop pinches pants to kneel at his visitor’s feet, between those blemished boots, and there on his plastic patens, the tray of the new knees bearing atop a hip or two probably needing to be replaced again, too, and sometime soon — to grope beyond darkness, feeling under the bed, and through the trash there, wrappers, the remains of food hidden, no slippers, no shoes.

We’re sorry it had to be this way, we didn’t know if you’d be willing, but let me assure you, Mister Israelien, you should be — you shouldn’t worry. You have my word: everything will be provided, your meals, accommodation, a seat at the table — I’m saying, the choice is yours, but we’d love to include you in our plans. Behind the door, PopPop righting himself, nothing. We’ll be waiting for you in the lobby, take all the time you need, say ten minutes…you might want to pack heavy, it’s even colder up there. In the closet, lost luggage. You have a jacket, hat and gloves, a warm winter coat?

To the laundryroom, then, and only the scrap of a sock, PopPop limping with it to the kitchen, wiping at his forehead. To open the fridge and there, emptiness, save takeout or delivery discard, containers and bags, foil, waxed paper, wet receipt and grease, sop rung around where a tray once fell, its form held in gravy as if the outline of fatty chalk after a crime. The table, cleared clean. Count them, the chairs are all there and pushed in. It’s been wonderful to make your acquaintance, Das whispers down the hall. Again, hoarsely, I want to assure you we’ll do our best to keep you and your grandson happy, and safe. Tread, such a plodding. Trust me, he’s saying even softer and nearer, you’ll get your explanation. At kitchen’s threshold, he stops; he could do better with the posture, stooped to the clink of his honors. PopPop, he’s stricken. As Das smiles, flaking moustache, clicks heels. The frontdoor’s still open from how he’d come; the boots squish.

PopPop dodders down the hall, back to the room, his wife’s dead now Benjamin’s disappeared, to touch at the head of their bed, the pillow filthy in its case on which whoever it was had just sat. From there, a sudden sodden heat clambers up his arm to shut itself mad into his heart’s inmost chamber. Pop-Pop gives a shudder, a tingle, his arm numbed: MomMom’s pins & needles, prickling flesh from the shoulder’s hock down through the elbow, funnily boned to his fingers, stabbing the writing on the wall, or grabbing at the paper’s pattern of flowers — a consolatory bouquet…to seek support, to stand, live on. Ten minutes downstairs, it’s colder up where, clammy Miami, alone, not safe, never happy. As in time, this is an infarct — these are comments his women once made, these were cues: earthshaking, his wife; unstable, his daughter-inlaw…

Whether judged or not, whether meriting or no, though it’s not up to us — if it was, then…PopPop’s dying. Despite lust for Arschstrong, known as luxuria, or gula, greed’s avaritia, the lazy like — and who knows if in reward for the grace that’d been their one week together, him and Benjamin’s — he the shirker, he the enlightened, the weekday modern and Sunday skeptic dies now how he began: within the tradition he’d once forsaken. All’s vanity, pretense, mere role. It’s dramatic, theatrical, geriatric stock staged for the footlit curtains closing up north and Downtown, Second Avenueways, which though in hiding an illustrious street is at heart a vein that, unlimited, exposed, flows south through the island of his native Manhattan then on down the highways of the coast to bind New York’s beginning to Miami’s deadend — the lifeline, the timeline interminable, the intestate Interstate…the aired path of the snowbirds’ perhiemate migration, and the wavelength of the radio and television signals he’s channeling, too, on their frequency their cries, their overwrought shows.

An honorable, traditional death, heldover for reruns — in that it all takes nearly an hour, in one account, while others hold two or ten times that much and more; or else, in some interpretations given over to the mystic lacking a timeslot, he’s still dying and always will be forever, replayed without redemption, eternally, infinitely, heaven or hell. PopPop staggers from bedroom to bath, its chest of pills, tablets engraved with milligrams of saving hope. Dropping them scattered. To steady atop a mountain of rug tripped over then drug, through the hall, its wall and switch he flicks to dim the light appropriate to such serious passage. A shout to the livingroom, a scream to the kitchen to echo tintinnabulatory within the suck of the sink. PopPop beats his breast, this dizzies him, unsupported with this drumrolling beat he falls, flamed across the livingroom, the familyroom, the den, and the backstage, too, of all other rooms besides, their capacity of other dimensions, mystical, mystifying: his drop to the sofa taking another hour itself, with gravity only just awake, waiting its weather patiently out on the balcony.

Want to talk gravity? eulogize death itself! Talk about PopPop’s fall from that couch to the one floor of the rooms that are all themselves only one room stageset and propped whirling around taking twice the hour of his previous fall, how it feels; he rights himself amid a cushion’s cradle, tearing pillows to the floor to better comfort his demise, the mourning impending. How many days dailied and their nights the run, the rushes, not rushed enough. Upsets furniture. Upsets the janitorial staff, working disposal floors banged below. A wild animal it sounds like. Though a sign out front says, No Pets Allowed. Pop-Pop collapses again with a breath, gathers a loose strand of strength, the fringes of the slipcover, bunching the cut of his robe and the pajamas he on weekends shrouds about in; writhes on the pillowed floor with thumbs in his lapels, exhorts in a voice infused with temporary wisdom tempered with what tempers all the residents of his apartment tower, all the elderly almost over lives facilitated below, to free themselves from sin and do remember him kindly; addressing himself to the Staff Physical and SpeechLanguage Therapists, too, Psychogerontologists and even the hated Leisure Director who’d once revoked from him his pool privilege, in punishment of an accidental locker pish — to him as to others PopPop sermonizes; advice he dispenses, honors he bestows; every scrap, rag, rind and peel of inspiration on pain of insight his life has saved up for now, hoarded from sources both ancient and popular, Scriptural quotation and advertorial slogan, catchphrases dropped for commercial taglines cut, over the years stored up in the gray ham beating between the blue-screened, whitewashed walls of his skull. He turns a trip, this somersault to stand, stumbles again to flip and walk on his hands a stunt, his robe falling open around him, this cheap cotton Wardrobe & Makeup melting…where’d he get this stuff — saved up in Storage?

Naming friends and enumerating enemies, for the cautionary benefit of neighbors downstairs floors forever and his unsuspected Arschstrong, too, his lover and would’ve been his and Benjamin’s heir — PopPop doling out wealth he doesn’t have to people he doesn’t really know, never really wanted to anyway; leaving his sun to his SonSon, and may the larks flown south for the winter serve as witness, let their worms live enough to attest. A window, PopPop stands a last, gropes at the sill. Violas swell from a rooftop string-section, behind them winged woodwinds chirp about balconies. From the elevator in the hall, through the door still open, a chorus rises up from the depths, the basement sauna and surrounding pools lap and wading baldly cast with swimmers synchronized, taking a diver they’re swooning pruned the Kaddish, in harmony to the hunk of lifeguard doing a version of faygele in a shrilly brilliant cameo whistle…

He’s dying! my God, he’s dying!

PopPop tearing at what’s left of his hair as if tugging from his head his own response with the dandruff, yelling: I am having a heart attack! I am dying!

As old as death this fall again, back to the kitchen — what a stunt this brunch’s fling, in truth a jump or pounce, prat and rattling glass, rupturing the last act (another halfhour); leaning limply on a doorknob turned with his weight to humble him to knees in the hall, an other hand reaching into the air, still and stale — a wreck, this underventilated apartment with the heating way up and the impotent sun spurting itself through the unwashed, unshaven skylight — his head held snobbish, as if to face away from his wriggling toes, gnarled in yellow nail, he can’t bear them, the weakly veined and restless legs and breathless crotch, in an always last attempt to right himself, to rise. A farewell as extensively meant as Shalom in its every translation, its rewrites, kick-starts, punchups and toneddowns, tightly mouthed: with blessings and curses for all, for relatives, friends, for even just the relatively friendly, the acquaintance and the stranger among them; with obsecrations and wishes, goodbye, the sigh of its syllables again: Sha-lom…his eyes opening after the style of his lips, to the mirror above, around and whirlwinding, to pronounce to himself in reflection an invocation of the worth of his mother, to commend his corpse and soul condemned if soul he has to God. He says his goodbyes now a third time absolute, absolving any prompt: Shalom, Shalom, Shalom…shutting eyes, mouth, face grayed above the flush of heart.

Throughout PopPop’s facility, from towertop to basement bottom, mourning’s been underway for a week already: Unaffiliated though eligible, still attractive and accommodating with money and recipes of their own widows beyond and below, those inveterate cookers and cleaners who’d moved here maybe to land for themselves on Florida’s fishy shore an Affiliated husband, his fortune, their luck, these survivors of intermarriages and failure — they’re out on their own decks below his and rending ritzy their fresh laundry mourning white with spare falseteeth, tearing their sheets and assorted feminine unmentionables to shreds before hanging them out to signal what distress or sentinel under the cool of the coming moon. All day they’re lolling low their sad sag, over their precariously frowning railings like petulant lips, they’re sobbing, weeping the age of water, their flabby hands held to faces shaken out into faucets of flesh, one eye of each the hot water, the other the cold and so, it’s lukewarm tears they’re sprinkling all over Miami, as if to purify or douse. Upon their hair, which is wig, or dyed, ashes heap, luminously scorched particulate blown from the pile of corpses burnt at the furthest edge of parkinglot and, too, atop the roofdeck of the adjacent garage — a great cremate, as who has the time or resources for mass burial. Despite surgery electives and pricey, painful injections their faces, they’re fallen — on the knees of the nose, their cheeks begging for it (compliments) — on the form of a wiry, uniformed official below with the brass, the moustache’s rank, giving orders to the limos parked in the drive. As smoke from the bodies burns off into night, PopPop manages, just manages, to scroll open an eyelid, a brittle curtain or carpet soaked of its red; and with it attempts a wink that’s only to resolve into a roll, dull — which failure damns and so feels itself death; the end of an end come the credits, the stars.

All air’s grounded the days following disaster…not days but an afterlife, which is indivisible, and so even if heaven then truly hell. An avenue, they emptily follow, a street, without escort, the city beckoning: a dark ancestral finger curled to coax, both to bring near and to scold. Laning, leathern strips of tar. A fringe of ice, a knot of tree. Their prayer is only a siren. Two limousines alone together, pass each other, are passed, a gleam of fender, grazing mirrors, bumpthumping and cutting one another off, northeasternward, far up the reach of black, this dim span of everlast cold; the aired flat earth of the seaboard in all its binding chains, a franchise of the known: gas stations lately condemned, treyf eateries just out of business, prospective lots of forested nowhere, On This Site Will Be Built nothing anymore, a plot zoned fallow, this strip retstripped. Though through Maryland at the exit for Silver Spring, while others hold by Virginia and headed toward Fairfax or Langley just south of Washington the district, the government limousine swerves from the highway, the other vehicle stays its course more east and northernmost, on into the day mapped white in noontide light — up and always up the Interstate abandoned, plowing past stakes of evergreen loneliness, relieved every mile or so by pits of firewall dirt.

To follow is to lead if in the direction most opposite, an ordinal most opposed — the route of the landrover in reverse, an Exodus rewinding itself through a desert of ice: snowstorm, galling winds. Hail the hardness of stone the size of the sky falls to the windshield, trapping darkness in the web of its shatter. Our driver, a Mormon minor who seems as young as all Mormons most probably are, and every schmeck as innocently perfect, turns into a skid without concern, his face frozen blond and harmless; then, evens out again with a slight sigh to ride the middle of the highway without end, without middle; the fall effacing lines, the lanes useless, with shoulders slushed to watery shrug. Benjamin in the back, there are two others waiting for their introductions; one seated shotgun, next to Heber the Mormon: he’s the shvartze we’d been getting at earlier, name of Sonny Hamm though he’s known also as Testicles, to be pronounced in a manner more philosophical or poetic than most — Greek, though his people long ago came up from the South, the capital of Africa; the other’s seated alongside Benjamin, hidden with Him behind the window that tints to separate front from rear, two zones of temperature and volume of radio static: a foreigner, the name’s Torque Mada. Despite the smile, the lips as tight as scars, he keeps on his head that fedora without apparent humor. Maybe he’d been told to suit up like this, for the sake of impression: doublebreasted, pocketwatch that needs always winding, the sparkling piss of its chain. It pinches. A sensation of slow burning, a headhaze, a rise in His gerd. He’s slumped against the window, His bones feel weather-made. Awake as of just now, the last pothole, tires’ slide — feeling the slow flow of power channeled once again from the beat of His heart, recovering from the injection that’d fallen Him with midnight, the secularized eve of the New Year. Assimiliated to who knows how or when, there hadn’t been a struggle. He’s kneading at an arm, up toward the pudge that falls from shoulder, its bandage unremembered: a sanitary strip profaned in image with a wondrous array of popular animated characters He can’t hope to know, He’s too young — ratty mice, cats and dogs, and piglets.

In one interpretation, you can forget pain, uncomfortable’s the worst.

Benjamin shifts to make sucking flatulent noise on the wide leather seat. His glands feel hardened, swollen inside Him just under the skin pricked, as if balloons of condolence, inflated with bile. I’m sorry, get well soon. His throat’s thorned, His mouth a bouquet of tongues, wilting flowers. A limousine a womb, its mother luxury — offering every amenity without such twin of guilt: there’s the latest model television screen, which is blaring technological snow, racked alongside a stack of recent magazines and newspapers headlining the tragedy throughout the last week of shock, onto specifics, statistics, facts, then the editorializing calm that is the grind of daily blame; and then a bar, too, from which He retrieves a can of soda in a flavor purporting to be diet, pops the top, proceeds to spill atop a skidding rumble half the thing all over, PopPop’s robe and Israel’s shirt underneath that are actually two robes and two shirts held together only with hope, the pants that’d been three pairs of Arschstrong’s before the surgery to his gut and its effectual weightloss, which’d been extensively scarring — a deepening stain aired as if the twin or mate of the blood let from the road’s shoulderborne, rubberravaged corpses stacked for disposal and slicking the freeze, their flow sustaining the grass giving way to stumps, the stubby trunks of trees the pubic pines of the earth, the needled gravel, which is the death of the earth, its own grave.

Revived, and sticky with thirst, amid the trickle of waking, His having to go, Benjamin flings kicks at the partition, slings fists against the window inside.

Are we there yet?

And silence.

How about yet?

Which we ask when we’re nowhere, lost to the void to be mapped between dislike and hatred, betwixt irritation and rage.

To count the licenseplates, to bitch the taunting signs. Patience, patience, shalt thou pursue, to pacify, subdue. To memorize the miles, then recite their wear. Only the idle shall distract the idle, and none shall inherit the perpetual revolution of the earth. A tire, enumerate every tiresome turn.

Mada finally faces Him and says, be quiet, sit still…your grandfather’ll be waiting for you, we’ll be there soon enough.

I called him my PopPop — shows what you know, schmuck.

Mada taps down the window inside the limo, taps on the shoulder the shvartze seated up front.

And why didn’t he ride with us…I’ll give you one guess, you putz. Hamm, Mada says, we need more, another one quick — three ccs or so should do it, thinking, stat.

Thinking, too, He might not even remember. Both can only hope. It could’ve been worse, it could’ve happened to me.

I need to pee, Benjamin says and holds at Himself. A rummaging up front, clammy hands, a testicular bag. Hold it in, Mada says again, biding time, as if anything you want to hear’s already been said by better. Benjamim flails, turns to grope the stranger’s suit, His hands pale, His loins tensed. A rumbleseat, up and down as if to nod — it’s urgent.

Jesus goddamned, the shvartze says from his search his head down, we’re out of tranqs; must’ve used them all up just to get Him out of Florida.

I need to pee!

Who knew He’d be this big?

Now, I need right now — oowww, and Benjamin hits His head on the headrest in front; in pain scrunching His face so that His glasses pop from their ears’ safekeeping, to tumble to His lap.

I’m blind, my bladder, too — my everything’s complaining!

Heber from behind the wheel lowers the rear windows to let in the air and wet, the frozen issue of their unholy union. He’s like this little kid, who says, he does, and without taking his sunglasses from their mirror of the darkling road, who’s like a grandfather, too, His own, and with the worst qualities of both; the Mormon just making a suggestion — piss out the window, will you?

I won’t have Him urinating all over, says Mada and he ups the windows on his own, dusts the snow from his hat, which is still on his head despite the wind and his seatmate’s own gusting.

Hamm, when are we expected?

In this weather?

Heber tears the meridian, ripping the shift, and He’s either thrown or throws Himself along with the motion to wedge within the void of the window separating front from rear, not to be raised.

Another thing, Benjamin says from His hang with His body halved, I have to shed…it’s personal — you wouldn’t understand.

A flake, a fall — you would?

A sign flashes from out of the mist, and on Mada’s order Heber swerves from the Parkway exiting into the turn, through the lower lot then skidding to stall just in front of the northbound entrance to the concrete bunker reststop, with such force that Benjamin pudge and all’s set free, unstuck — sent flying through the void separating Him from the shielding’s sprawl, the wipering arms, the obscenities that madden the dash, His legs straddling the head of the shvartze thrown, His teeth gnashing themselves mourned at the wheel.

Hamm staggers out of the limo, then tugs Him after him by the feet, then the legs and waist.

I’ll take the kid, he says, spits, and then to Benjamin, better stay close.

Mada rises to smooth his suit then light a smoke against the weather; asking Heber, how are we for gas?

Middle of nowhere Joysey — a tongue of asphalt set amid a mouth of pine, gaping as it asks its questions of the sky. What is the nature of all this cement, this concrete and irresponsible tar — explain the modern, will you; its encroachment upon a wilderness despoiled…wherever there’s an interpretation, rest assured there are interpretations, many. And so while some hold that only now is everything the same everywhere the world over, from Joysey to Jerusalem and back, and so that all is a mere litany of simulacra, the bane of difference, enemy of the individual life, or even — say the mystics among us — it’s that we’ve all lived these lives already, ages earlier, eras ago, others hold only that Benjamin’s been here before, this reststop, just last week, this service-plaza, it’s that simple and on a swerve and stop of Wanda’s own discretion, for directions, bathroom’s coffee and a nap — and so explaining His familiarity, the ease with which He adjusts to all this sensing; the plexiamenity, the manicured shrubscrub, the silent language of Parkway plaquery, such signal warning: fluorescent construction, crossedthrough then struckout; and then, the red tree stop, the blue food & lodging, the white flower yield — set deep in snow over a rainbow of mulch He surfaces in His progress to uncover a path with insecure, recovering feet. Benjamin proceeds through the doors into the interior, is processed. A ringing of growths endowed by their Creator, of indeterminate corporation, with diversified outlets of fastfood left hastily shuttered, a newsstand dimmed with tragedy, and a souvenir kiosk, selling to no one the most transient of necessities: stuffedanimals, pins and stickers, maps to hats and shirts and swimsuits, commemorative spoons crazy to sup with, know what they’re worth, what they will be; then, to the right again familiar, its bathroom, the M’s — a week ago, it feels a weak season, that stopover with Wanda to fill up on shrunk food, gas for the rover, to take a seat and weep under the voice of the flush. Emptily immaculate now as then: no one’s used it in a week, perhaps, white as if snowedover, bright, clean, not a leak, a mirror without streak, disinfectant stings. Again, He heads His urge for the stalls, but this visit’s directed by the shvartze to a urinal adjoining.

You’re going to go? Hamm asks.

You’re going to stand over me the whole time?

That a problem…you don’t have those neuroses, do you, one where your kidneys all shrink, when you’re incapable of pissing with anyone present? and he shoves Benjamin up against the fixture as white as a tooth to gnaw at His gut. To pish, He pushes, tenses His thighs, crouches to clench the opposing faces of tush — they’re not on speaking terms, give them time — dimples their cheeks in the briefs of His father, one pair for each leg; then, shuts eyes to imagine: a kitchen faucet gunked green, rain from the tap, Israel pouring wine that Friday, Manischewitz melting a tongue from his lips, a grapeknot, a pinkening urinal wafer; palms His prostate, pulls, tugs each teste, rubs rolls His scrotum around, but there’s nothing doing, without drip, drops His hands, sighs. I’ll show you how it’s done, and Hamm leans a head over the partition of the urinal next, steps back a pace; only you got to be patient, takes a while to get it all out. He slits his zipper then goes rummaging around in his pants and shorts and then, wrangling a wangled grasp, gradually extracts length by majesty and hardening by the tug an enormous member unfurling, slowly, luxuriantly, uncircumcised as if, circumscribed by worms through which vein strained swells, steady pulses, the black beat of a lower heart. I keep it wrapped around the left, he says. Phylactery of the leg. Its roots to be found buried in great bulges, twinned, rising under the tightening pants. I’d take those out, too, he goes on, only they don’t like the zipper none. Teeth for tooth, a mouth. And then with delicate fingers, an expert tact, the ultimate retraction. A fascist helmet. Foreskinned darker. Benjamin’s awed, if awe’s to die amid torture. Angry, martial, there’s that familiar tattoo, a light rustle, tinkling on porcelain, then giving way, to heavy flow, a flood deluged in steam. Hamm fists his shaft then squeezes, shakes, ekes out a last spurt, a final drizzle.

And Benjamin, breaks.

Only later, there’s the shame of admission — anyway, it’s all caught on camera…where I was when suspect wasn’t; sir, occupied returning penis to pants, and underwear, which is tight and deliriously striped. Unlike any animal known, or prison: Sing Sing, where he’d supped enough. Hamm turns, spatters drops of stinging piss on his pants, down them to drip below pockets and drear his knees, as if he’s kneeled atop mopping, pitterpuddling through his underwear also to dampen the legs. He gasps his pursuit across the tilefloored veldt, as quick as the sleekest predator though nowhere near its grace, his tongue out to shadow that other massive endowment still wagging, and its even more massive foreskin, too, as if the dark flag for a nation forgotten flapping wildly in the wind of his run, his fast dirty feet in their shoes trampling this foreskin now, liberally powdered, though it might be snow from the floor: how he runs up onto himself, as if his foreskin’s a welcomemat just pulled out from under, tripping, over his unsnipped flesh falling flat, on his face on the slick tile next to the sign that warns Slippery When—is anyone here a lawyer, is anyone else here at all?

Torque Mada, out in the foodcourt, calmly waiting for assistance, anyone who works here, a sentient pimple popped across the register, pussing the keys. Most of the employees have advantaged the tragedy, taken off, personal days, to mourn strangers at home and that with the screen out, only occasional electricity. He has two hands on a tray stacked with hamburgers a week old, complimented by a host of condiments, wilting fries washed with soda wanting for gas; him wondering whom he should pay and why as Hamm glides risen out of the bathroom and across the floor, his hair and hang still proudly out, his head gashed, two front gold teeth of his loosened, kicked in his slide to skittering flight toward tables at the far end of the glare. An echo, he’s screaming, waving hands, doing semaphores of an unintelligible nature though you do get the idea of Jesus, and even more offensive obscenities shouted, him knocking over tables and chairs, the destruction of concessionary displays of myriad intricacy: pyramidry rendered of chocolate candy, toiletry tombs. Mada throws his tray down the line, off the end just for effect falling, scattering burgers, buns, special sauce, lettuce, tomato, onion, grabs Hamm and steadies, then the two of them run arm-in-arm, toward the exit they’d entered from with Mada and as if no one expects slipping and falling himself over his own scatter, a rogue patty with its melted swiss square, on his face, finally spilling his hat. Hamm, what do you think he doesn’t stop he wants out, toward the doors, pushes where he should pull then pulls out into landscape and lot, to head N/NE as door signage indicates deep into the Kieferöde beyond. Heber left in the limo idling with the inside heat on all the way up, the door open and his tuxshirt, too, its ruffles fluttering in the storming midmorning; his shoes dangling over the ice, pants cuffed high to bare his knees, he’s smoking an unfiltered: flakes of ash fly scattered across his chest, which is hairless, and he breezes them off and their embers with fingers gloved, as Hamm ever so fitfully slides across the wetwaxed hood, to ride shotgun, reaches around Heber’s neck as if to strangle his bowtie, a clipon, drags him by it in and behind the wheel shrieking an approximation of find Him.

Who? Heber grabs at his tie as he revs up the limo.

Who, Him, the fatass kike, Jesus the lardy yid I’m talking who else, what’re you thinking?

You let Him get away, Heber’s yelling, futz me, futz us, we’re dead…still, he flips down the mirror over the wheel, inspecting his hair prior to releasing the clutch. Hamm opens, necks his head out the window, then out the roof for the sun.

Benjamin’s just down the lot, lumbering over the asphalt, trash, foodwrappers, and icy oil as fast as He’s able, not having been toddling for long and born this out of shape, making toward the Kieferöde, which is the Joysey forest that trees everywhere beyond the city, anywhere that’s not citybound, set in rings grown concentric, and hung with infernal cones — pining inland to heaven, southwest to hell…

There! Hamm shouts, pointing, He’s almost at the woods…and Heber shifts a turn, throws the limo madly, aiming its speed at the gross quavering tush. Hit Him if you have to, says Hamm, and hard — wasn’t our fault, dumb luck…just get your fender smack on His hynie! Heber floors, topspeeding at this looming rear…Benjamin only a blur of pants and trunk, then embraced by the branches, comforted in the midst of the boughs. Desperately, the limo goes hurled over the curb of the lot, falls into a sluice, slamming into an embankment of woody decay, icemelt, smoke wheezy from the hood: Heber’s thrown over the eructed airbladder and into the windshield, Hamm tumbles through the door, lands tush over head, flails, his hands grasping at logs dead and wrapped loose in diapers; the limo’s wheels turn up dirt, mud, the severance of weeds, the vehicle entire revving one last, worthless assault, raising itself up on its rearwheels as if posed alongside the Unknown State Trooper for a proud example of municipal statuary, prior to flopping its flab metal down again, finally, what a mess. Hamm surfaces with a used diaper perched as a nest on his head, tries to stand, slips on a log submerged, falls again into the sluice as insects unparticular to climate begin their swarming around him, assemble tightly into nimbi, artfully shifting their shapes — isn’t that an elephant, its trunk hovering about his mouth and nostrils, or a lion, a bestial storm, manelike clouds. He finally rights himself, staggers to the other side of the limo from which he drags Heber unconscious out of the dent shaped like Heber in the shatterproof shield; leaves him on the asphalt, propped against the limo pouring fire, tires singeing his tux. Mada mugs over with one hand denting down his hat, the other holding a pilfered plastic sipper, in which he’s iced Hamm’s two lost teeth, found slushed on the reststop floor, having been spit to slide slip under a chair against the easternmost wall. Limoside, he stoops to enshrine the sipper in Heber’s hands limp, taking a moment to arrange them in a disposition of prayer before he and Hamm make their attempt on the Kieferöde.

It’s the wind that rustles them in, a gust of rope, a whipping noose — branches snap underfoot and those under them, sog; at lot’s edge, last scattered lungs of leaves still hang from the boughs, breathe uneasy, giving way to the horripilation of needles, sharply incising of flesh, prickling floor. Staying near, they scurry the two of them as one, a mutant rodent now sundered at its gut by the jut of a tree it has to pass as they, on two legs each they hurry, they run; dense stone foliage snaps up against them, whips into their faces as hard as knots, as barbed chains…Mada shouting His name and it echoes in the voice of Hamm, who shouts to echo Mada with them too occupied in the preservation of their status of employment to notice the difference, if any; them running deeper into the needles’ slice, the blistering cones, then having to slow, the forest treeing denser…rimming these immense windquaked piles of leaves, and huddling, too, around widening trunks dark, deepfurrowed, furry with moss; these piles themselves piling into one solemn pile flaming with ice, identified as Joysey in atlases too soon to be made obsolete: they slip into this pile of piles, and into splenic cranbogs, scumponds of sunken, groping root; slicking on slabs of blighted bark, which is the fallen scab of the wound that is the tree, a scar on the horizon known only as white in this weather. Their feet mire in sap, freeze, they fall then right themselves only to lose each other, themselves, nature fills their mouths when they try to scream, what, why, Shalom, Benjamin’s name — echoes echoing wet leaves around tongues, as tongues, down their throats into stomachs, needles, also, that’d slit throats down to navels, spilling their pursuit all over the floor of the forest, amid the dreck and the imprinting paw.

A wood, the Kieferöde it’s been called, where many of the wealthier residentials of greater Siburbia went to loose their canine companions aged old and useless. When You Won’t Put Them Down, Put Them Here, an old plankside sign offered in the ought tens, bought as a collectible curio summer memories ago by a retired Philadelphia lawyer weekending at an antique market out by the founding of the forge that was Batsto: Jack for Sale, its reverse went on to declare, by the bushel, the basket — Apples — Pumpkins — Golf Course Sand By the Bag or Trap…they’d drive themselves out to this particular weathered marker, maybe driftwood set to demarcate another, more intimate, distance, that of love fallen out of, perhaps, an incalculable exertion; at whichever exit, a tenthed mile, a third, mensurated like mad, amid the wilds of New Gretna, just a shallow inland from Mystic Island, the milchy oyster bay and shoals giving way to the wetlands by which the Absegami first came to settle Absecon, the cattailed marshes turning to cedar, the birchedbeery, dogwooded wade; its exact number, though, if any it had, a secret to be passed around only in whispers at dunch parties and schoolboard meetings from brother to inlaw, a wooden designate standing high and holy menhir, megalithic, ever ancient and older even, as if natural, organic, grown of the earth, in the early light often recommended for the execution of this particular ritual: usually the morning of a Sunday with the kinder all still attractive, intelligent, promising, and unsuspectingly asleep, they’d drive on out, stop for coffee black for him, milked and sweetened with flavor for her, drive then stop again on the shoulder rumbling as if the earth disapproved of their betrayal and would quake in punishment, to swallow and so betray them, throw it in reverse, stop then throw open the hatch doors of their vehicles allterrain, to kiss and kick, slap and punch and, ultimately, to lead by the leash — there to let their unwanted pets loose to the world. And the Top Ten it’s your faults given for this were, drumroll please…Lameness, Rabidity, Old Age, Senility, Newfound Allergy, Unwanted by New Husband, by New Wife, Scared the New Baby, Newly Moved In Dying Parent, Grandparent and the like — don’t get defensive, it just ran away, we’ve been driving around searching for forget its name, it answers to hours, all Reward Offered day.

And so the Kieferöde’s stumped full of dogs of various breeds, many now regarded as domestically extinct. No longer around for your roll over, sit, stay. In a stark, terrible reversal of the laws of evolution — which reversion seems in the air of late, doesn’t it, an upheaval, an overturning — these dogs had devolved to an existence prior to that of domestication, to an incarnation even earlier: before the morning Shema, according to one rabbi or another, when a dog was nearly indistinguishable from a wolf. All were carnivorous, all ate meat, ate anything providing, though were starving, are always, these what to call them omnivorous, these allaccused, and manynamed: monstermutants, postnuclear primitives, survivors of hearth and home and neglect and abuse and of love, not enough, just wandering around foaming, gnawing hides, rending flesh with teeth sharpened on teeth; rendering their skins parchmentlike, palimpsested, adorned with scratchy symbols and daubed marks the language of an ungardened estate. And not only those still alive: of those lost, their boned carcasses lie everywhere ripped open to dank decomposition its stench vomitous; rot, the mate of disease. Predators swoop down to rend, tear flesh with talons; fleas swarm overhead, maggots teem pleasurelessly in remains. Verily, these are the only known denizens of the Kieferöde, predatory flying things, nibbling pests, and their native dogs, now a newborn and His frustrated pursuit. Mada initially thinks these dogs are dead, have to be, though are they playing, is this only part of the game: whispering at first, here Spot, tear out my jugular, or Hearsay, the Philly lawyer’s mutt, those precious billable morning hours fetched out on the beach in Sea Isle, Hear Say, come boy! — they wait for Mada to approach, then spring at his gut with an imposition of jaws, starry teeth, brilliantly yellowed, though, just prior to the bite, there’s a simper of slaver, they fall, into fur heaps, exhausted; it’s obvious they haven’t had food in a while, wet or dry. Hamm about to pet at their exposed ribcages, their flanks stretched thin, withdraws his hand, himself, with rakes, scrapes; who knows if they’d had their shots, whether Hamm’d had his…

Needlemarks covering their matted flanks of one vast scar, slicings through their coats, of which some are merely pilled, and others totally ragged, prophesizing in their motley markings the ineffable, the excruciatingly obscure. Those scrappy slits of weather, nature, and affliction untold loosing, also, the inner jellies of bulging, bloodshot eyes: there’s one eye bleeding, the other hanging out the socket by only a single thinning dangle; noses veined on by a mere shredded nerve, a fringing, a scapular tassel; frayed straps for tails and phylactery ears; hairs skewed in the electric antennal as if their existence shocks even themselves. It’s evident, too, they’d been rolling around in their own dreck, as the reek’s overwhelming, and black, both excremental and fleshified, and fiery, ash, with a whiff of the marshy egg to the east, it’s cold, and it dizzies: Mada’s loafers encased in droppings, these sickening green flecked in red, and pissyellowed, in every color of traffic’s bypass, control — the lanes that divide the forest into forests, the wood into woods, the known into all these many separate unknowns; every three steps or so he lands a foot in a leftover dogdish, overflowing with urine so acidic it scalds through the turd, then his loafers, dress socks, skin; then how he steps into it all over again as if to salve, and shrieks, inhaling remnants of the latest autumn, fall down the wrong throat.

They bury their burrows in wormy dens, hidden by snow, in pocks emptied by the force of forepawed rain, nests of leaf and needle, piles, logs hollowed for infestation. And then, come the dawn of late afternoon toward winter’s dusk, they crawl themselves out, to prey — what’s left of them, that is, what’s been left, their own stray parts, their lost. As many of these dogs are missing limbs — some with limbs hanging by torn tendons, others dragging themselves on two front legs only, on two rear legs, on one up front one rear left and right, right and left or, one leg or anything less how they’d deal. It’s apparent they’d long ago adapted to cannibalism: once rich dogs fed and watered well, exercised and groomed, even with papers, certificates of bloodline, shots and widely accepted veternary approvals, though now straggling superlean, scraggled scrawny; in their mouths, hunks of other dogs, either gnawed from them or loosed in miscellaneous incendiary, strayed in unfortunate mishaps, lost to accidental deterrence: four legs to stagger into errant leashtripwire mechanisms, you have to be careful, traps set down, concealed, leafcovered; dogs, only a handful, that still have their collars, their tags, by which they’ve been leashed up to treetops, hanging spread for the eagles, the night owls, and noontime hawks: who’d hung them; what, exactly, merited them this punishment — that they’d been coupled in heat on the Ark two-by-two…beware, what’s justice to the dogs?

With saliva freezing in jaws, both sires and dams, dogs and bitches, pups and whelps, slash at one another, then huddle together over their weakest dead to warm with the last pumpings of innards, and then, finally, with the smokelike steam of their panting; in masses emitting whines fiercely piercing at the chirpless pitch of dovish, preyedupon snowbirds flown south to tend to their Nest Eggs, anywhere but here with its graygrim weather and violence. With slobbersome, hotheavy tongues, they bay their own natures separate again in a snort, in a terrible gasp, dispersing in whimpers at dawn, with raging stomachs, with the stirrings of growl, a roar echoing from within the past shared. An instinct, they sense — intruders; they want their bones, a life to bury, other than their own, to grave down into earth.

The sun setting, and in its wane a host of tapetum lucidum reflect the moonlight risen over the snow, its dusky sandsheen — the Kieferöde, aglow with their eyes. Though it shouldn’t be in conjunction until the opposite season, the Dogstar winks above, Sirius to shine at the very height of the sky: nature resigned to regression, whistled home, put to sleep. Time is dark, and the packs attacking, not attacking, too tired, reluctant, retreating, seem deeply afraid — of what, the lost light, the starlight, the moon’s…of what else might night up ahead: a clearing, burnedover, barren, a forlorn expanse of sand topped with the rime of the prevailing hyemal, the whole of it ringed with stones ritually, and so as if a firepit or altar sunken, unmarked by tracks. Mada meets up with Hamm here, fetched and dogtired, they’re bit up, their clothes hanging in tatters; wounds flapping like the tongues of their limbs, they suck them warm with the wound of the mouth. Then, they hurl the stones of their encampment at the dogs more to air emotion than to injure, soon tiring, toward morning, the death of the stars. Hamm heels up a turn of sand, Mada sighs doubt.

Opposite the clearing from their entrance, a swath of old growth reduced by burning to husks, this clutch of trees gutted to molder — trees so closely grown, so barren and yet so near and twined, they’re one, as if splinters of the Great Tree, destroyed in the first lightning on the third day of Creation. In the midst of this burnt, wasteheaps, dumped, irradiated, who knows, and you really want to take chances, on trashcans municipal issue from any last Administration, overflowing a grossgummy slurry; above, plastics clinging to ashen branches as if shrouds for ghosts, windingsheets of wind; further: a huddle of wrecked hulls, the chassis of antique cars, junk without tires, up on their gas canisters and cinderblocks for repairs only the dead could perform; a disastrous prop aeroplane lost out of Newark, its propeller smashed, tail-twisted — blame a hurricane named the same as your mother, during which you, my boychick, were conceived; what else, the forest floor: a slippery and fall patching of kitsch novelty postcards once postmarked Atlantic City, lost on their summery ways to grandkinder residing northward in zips 10somethingsomethingother; rotors ripped from defunct telephones, discs gusted to roll edges across the scathed ground; dead AA alkalines, 9volts, spent bullet casings; a clutch of umbrellas, more metal spokes than holed fabric, tumbling around the trunks of trees, picking up radiosignals — foreign and maybe even extraterrestrial, yet outdated, old news of it all — amid screeches scratched on the exposed reticulations of roots; snakespidering a tunnelling web westerly and south toward this tree spanned wide of mysterious metal, its unpainted, autumnally oxidized leaves forming a mottled netting that, upon later inspection, are only odd, interrupted sections of fencing, makeshift and weathered, rusted, breaking here and intermittently there over ravine and ridge, piles and all midden manner of natural swell, the compost of stray cats, the ruin of paper mills, turbine, grist and furnace remains: a fence strung high and taut with barbedwire, tightly coiled to threaten, too, the wires that’ve flurred loose from Parkway’s edge, just further a wave, a thumb out and flag down — powerlines screaming their shadows, torching ponds of stray gas to flame, guttering at trunks of all root sunken with nothing left ringing above them to burn, no soul left to become ash, air, damning sky…

Benjamin, though…He hadn’t wandered as much as hurled, vomited Himself atop the mess and slithering over, to wriggle with the wind, with the treewind, the dogwind, Godwind geschwind, that of every quarter then against them, too, winds from all opposite fronts that make for this perpetual weather: unopposably gloomy, grave; maneuvering Himself stomached, roly-poled, scraping the clothes from His body, the skin. Unharmed upon reaching the clearing He continues through it, not to the right, and yet neither to the left, as it’s been argued by those who’d wish to forget this Joysey sojourn out of shame, but straight on, directly into the woods further burnt, immediately upon entering which His tshirt’s tail, used to patch the seats of His multiple pants, gets snagged, He rips, it tears; the mend says in white type bolded on blue: Goldenberg, Goldenberg, & Israelien, 25th Annual Firm Picnic, stained with the blood of the chosen.

A flag, a Joysey standard. Raise it high and proud above the any, all of us as upright as poles. Over the Gatekeeper’s, He remembers…the Development’s, too, had been blue and white and red, with a house in the middle field, stripped of family, its siding striped and windows starry. Benjamin slows into the pace of this memory, the sidewalk stroll from house to house, everyone of them known and the neighbors within them, knowing. An afternoon with His mother recovering outside for a walk, Hanna in the stroller, with Him pushing, to remember…these woods aren’t familiar, though, nothing doing. The little greenery He’d glimpsed, that’d been gardened, neatly, plots both herb and flower left untilled for the season of His birth, with the rest and more public of it landscaped, kept to grated planters along the slabs of Apple, Birch, Cedar, concrete, asphalt, planted to take root amid gravel that would ground the tankings of tiny pet fish, Judy’s gold, those upsidedown floaters flushed down the drain; with the odd weed, Developmentapproved rest assured, superadded for the sake of diversity. Trees separated, appropriately, spaced at intervals surveyed, all paid for by — Depro, the Development Prettification Organization, His father a founding member, and as such open, fair and solicitous, from donations received at the generously anonymous. Each tree would have its sign to own, tacked at trunk: Pick Up After Your Dog, as imaged with a mensch without face kneeling to scoop at poop; Curb Your Dog, no, curb your meaning; No Littering, except for the litters that are signs; alongside plaques that identified each tarred tree with its sponsor, whether individual or business, which was an excellent tax deduction — welcome to the sacred grove of the accountants, Mister Buchhalter, CPA, from down the block a ways.

Half Benjamin expects those other placards, the Latinate wood, those that identify tree from trees, and from forest, which sort as to type, Genus, species—as if to provide an experience more welcoming, more understanding, by way of introduction to the outer world, the earth unkempt by our trivial science. Him left unprepared for such surroundings, then, these trees so oddly intertwining, grown up from out the earth at any which way angle: these trunks writhing, without fruit, around each other and up; a canopy of closing trunks, obliterating the above; the occasional two trees merged entirely into one, forking into another, growing out the other; strangling two trees growing out from their trunk shared, mutual roots, common ground argued over in a high, conflicting silence…spindly burnouts starved of bark to peel from bone, their pleading limbs waved fanatically, fingers spread to the vault in a supplication charred, and chilling. He makes past them all on tiptoe into berryless branches, bush, through the webs of spiders, their spinneretwork sticking to His face, sticking His mouth from saying, fine dewed silk that holds the light, and then’s ripped through, torn by sound, by the gust with which it’s brought — the faint rataplan of wind, a clattering of the clouds with brandished branches. Fire tears the Kieferöde, a weapon unloading into the later sky, each bullet the beat of a wing…birds scatter, the echoes of their calls disperse into wind, as winds themselves; the snow snows on unabated. And then the smell, which is the promise of smoke, of heatless smolder, then the pineneedles, too, to Him an outer household disinfectant without any hint of that Floridian citrus, PopPop’s balmy lemonlime: more like an organic dank, an illicit wetness, as if of the panties of His mother schlepping, at the end of a long long day of rushing around, vomitous at depthless stink, the basement’s crotch, that of rot’s own grandmother, mind the hip, the slip to break all cracks; the reek pervades, subsumes, wafts spore, fungi and lichen under the horizon’s door — the woods, He wipes His mouth, an abandoned bathroom…to remember the womb, fold fast the underwear drawer. He’s wet Himself; what’s let is frozen; His knees are spurs of ice.

To trudge ahead with legs pissheavy, with hands under His arms, digging out the soak of His pits, shvitzing less from His escape than from a motherly exhortation to fear, that and the wet only freezing Him, slowing Him, more. Benjamin’s pants cling tightly to His body, His chest heaves Him out of breath, a babied mass of chattering fat, a shiver tightly wound around a spine. He’s panting for air, air, any air but there’s only the falling flake of ash, smoke flagging a heaven above weather. Then, the burnt wood clears, the trees disposed even sparser until only stumps remain, agelessly ringed, tressed trees within trees, then a fence in the distance, forever far and tall, with barbedwire curled atop, snarled sharp; to lick the metal, and stick. To step over puddling mud, intermittent holes hailed, He’s holding the fence so as not to lose it, its marking there…barbedwire merging with the clouds — they’ve grown into and around each other gnarled ever since the advent of all fall; He’s slowly rimming for an opening, an out, any.

Along the perimeter, scattered postal letters, these unopened, and more postcards, from Florida, registeredreceipt packages addressed to the same address that is none ultimately under a God’s directory of assuming names, stamped in ink wetted smeared into the earth. Benjamin stoops to overturn a soggy envelope, postmarked three years, two weeks ago in red, another letter to Santa or a party so named, c/o the North Pole; these letters forming circles around stockades of large square package, paperwrapped, tied in horsehair twine, darkstained in oil and leaking slow schematic drips that might only be melt, rainbow wires stick from them, and ticks inside. Iced hearts, about to explode, the spleen of the mechanical. And between these markers, sunken pits, ponds rare as they’re not aflame. Small pollutions, poisonous to think. They sizzle, hiss; their gases give a rise; an eruptive skin, tarthick. He thinks, to make ablutions, to stoop to drink from your own sink. Oil stains of the first rainbow. Ask your reflection — to destroy what world no more. Then further, over the last week accumulated, as if by the unlikeliest of weather up against the fencing — as if an offering to its metal limitation, linked indissolubly to authority’s rule: there’s a whole small mammal frozen, kept from decay by clouds and snow, and, unbelievably, too, from scavenge, placed to keep the form of an altar of halves and quarters, of unnibbled wings and thighs and breasts, most probably poultry, those of a chicken, or a turkey or both marked down on sale Aisle 10 from Thanksgivings and Xmases past, a coin lodged in the whole’s gizzard, perhaps, rendering it inedible, unkosher, tainted forbidden…a blemish festooned with rinds of pork and feet and ears and snouts and those other various entrails and meats of the pig, offal and flesh hung with bacon daintily, delightfully toothpicked to the hoarfrost of chops; ringed by a dozen eggs thrownout upon inspection, candled badly, wafting with the stench of the marsh. It’s an occult kind of ecclesiastical arrangement Benjamin finds here, is frightened by, further adorned with an order of oysters shucked, halfshelled, and a meaningful scattering of mussels, shrimp and squid also frozen to keep, a shellfish assortment, a gift basket of clams. High above this gourmandizing tower, a garment of mixed materials flagged from the fence, barbed to the wire to flap in the cold as if a warning, in its pocket two tickets to the opera or movies for next Friday evening (but cancelled). The entire tabernacle, maybe that’s what this is, Benjamin thinks as He avoids, not wanting to desecrate, not needing the guilt, marked at each quarter by cheap plastic lawn ornaments of the Virgin, themselves individually fenced off by lengths of rosary loosed of beads tied off to wire and trees, each miniature chapel, or church, fronted by the planting of crucifixes, splintered, branches and boughs thonged together to cross; all of it dazzlingly packed and floored with a flossy excelsior, shavings not of wood but of a whole Parkway motel’s worth of shredded New Testaments, as if prayers left behind by pilgrims in the hope of appeal — these being the local losses, and shrines like these appearing everywhere of late; heapings, makeshift piles windily scattered, unholy dumps to which all would, late at night, on dunchbreak from work, or on their ways home from work before nighttime’s conversion, haul all their olden, obsolete embarrassment — their sacrifices; that that’s to be given up, rent then lent out to decay out of season, in the chance of living differently, anew.

Benjamin wanders amid this incomprehensible humus until, there’s a noise: that weapon again, discharging its last, a strafe to empty, without warning this time — no longer a bird’s death, but a dog’s bark, the report of a howl; echo and echoed talking at the same time, to each other. He falls to the ground amid the stockpiles of worldly denial, this seasonal abnegation, or potluck — it’s a laughingly rumbling, regretful quake; the sky, slit, split, falls from the trees, lands on His head, needles to pierce Him laid splayed.

An approach sounds on the snow, loud and coldly damn it let them know what’s coming.

Benjamin raises His head, crawls on His back, His stomach, slowly makes forward.

A stump stands inside the fence.

A walking stump, a wanderous wondrous stump, astride the altar, decked with hat and gun.

Benjamin goes to put his hands up, way up, then realizes that if He does He’ll fall on His face again as He’s crawling.

I gave at the office! the thing talks, too, I toll you once I done toll you a thousand times — I gave at the office, goddamnit…the goy’s not quite a log hollowed out, but he’s wearing one, held up over his skinny with rawhide suspenders. His beard’s to his knees, bristled with thorns, streaked with berries suspended in the puke induced upon their careless ingestion. On his head’s a helmet, Kaiser Wilhelm style, an apple impaled on its spike. He nudges the muzzle of his gun to target Him — this here’s a Palesteinmade Mwhatever the hell, it’ll hole you right up…Benjamin half bows into a pond, dripping rims the fenceside altar on allfours still, rises.

You ain’t a dog, is you? the goy asks, lowers his gun, then sets it down against the altar’s fence, squints an eye, the other’s patched with the pad of a waterlily. I ain’t going to say it again, he says. Stand up. Stay. And so Benjamin heels, straightens out, cracks His back. I want you to take off your skins, slowly now, you’re already halfway. And so Benjamin begins to strip, easylike: disrobes His clothes, first shoes and socks, then plural pants, the goy stares, everything, he says, so He gets Himself nude out of the fruity underwear, and the pressed pinned shirts of His father, lays all in a wrinkling heap — throw it over…and the goy slips Him a slop pail on a pulley slid along a downed powerline. Not folding ever, He stuffs His clothes down into the pail, which the goy in the log reels in over the fence, then shimmies up a tree inside, logged torso and legs smoldering trunk, he descends with the clothes he heaps at the rear of the altar. He leans over, strikes a match from his mouth on himself and fires the pile, whistling through oozy gums he blows on it to burn through the soak — puny smoke, the flames gutter: this offering refused, Benjamin’s pants emerge only singed.

The goy lifts his lily, squints what’s his one good eye at Him and asks, what’re you doing here? To stick a twig in one ear, stick out the other. You lost? Got a name?

I’m fleeing.

He scratches at himself, raising splinters — they after you, too?

Benjamin thinking, who isn’t?

He peeks past the goy into the fence’s interior, nudging up on His tiptoes and around the altar between them: the growth seems to clear, comes sparser, unnaturally nude; resembling nothing but a risen scalp, a barren balding from haphazard uprooting, use, trod upon, paced gleamingly naked if not purely white, coldbleached leaves and needles giving way to a covering of only a small stubble of saltgrass up from under the snow — a skinned head, rimmed around to the west by an armband of brackish river, flowing toward the east and its trees, the dogs, the Parkway then the Atlantic, there the water refreshed of its frozen clarity, clouded and heavied with salt; this and its compound — apparently, a vast wall — hidden by the forbiddingness of this altar’s late treyf, pilings secreting all access.

Anyone on the lam’s a friend of mine, the goy’s saying as Benjamin sidesteps idolatrous Madonna statuettes, the shrouding vestments, censers extinguished, and the meltfilled, birdbathing, dogdished fonts and collectionplates stacked. I know a victim and you, friend, whatever your name is, are you ever Him; the goy stooping Him through a hole ripped in the fence, squeezing Him in — its links stabbed through with the voice of the wind, as if in warning but which: flee thither, or don’t; the chains bind His flesh, slice and gash at His pudge. There’s no infiltration here, he promises, serious lockdown, my perimeters are ultrasecure, and he releases a bush back into the wild, on the other side of the fence snapping it into its planting to screen. The goy stands with his hands on his log, proud and beaming, as if after a kind word, a compliment or thanks. He takes from his helmet’s spike its rotted apple and with wrinkly lips lays into the mold, a white fuzzed sheen the same shade as the flesh beneath, he gnaws from it a hunk, spits out half a worm and now has two teeth remaining: you want a bite? he asks, then swipes the mud and the moustache stray from the fruit and with an empty smile offers it out.

But Benjamin’s otherwise occupied, turned…to that incongruous wall just beyond: a height of irreconcilably colored bricks, loosening from their laying, their cracks covered over with paperings, scrawl — so much so that it’s all drossed, weighted down, leaning to topple with wind.

This here’s my church, the goy says, replacing the apple and with a sweep of filthy hand beckoning closer, the fingers webbish and flicking dirt from their flail, HQ of LAFF’s what we’re calling it this week, the Libertarian Armed Faction or Front, haven’t yet made up my mind…you might know our work? Forget it…and he raises his rasp for His attention: I’m known as the Most rt. Irreverend Lemuel Leeds, Chaplain-in-Chief, Joysey Irregulars, the first, last, and only division of its kind, thank you kindly…Benjamin, though, He can’t be distracted, diverted, over here, this’a’way, despite how with hands and fingers and nails sharper than shivs or drops of weather and with slitted eyes and snakish tongue, too, Leeds persists in showing off his station, its militant amenities, the lately newest improvements he’s happiest about, the first line of trenches freshly dug, the dock only recently planned: what I’m saying is, you’re safe. Secure, for now. Amid this openness, veiled. A pox upon the shaved pate of the earth.

At the foot of the wall, the lone structural survivor of disaster, a boiler’s bankrupting explosion, a gristmill’s wheel rolled amuck: a ruin of destroyed foundations, blackened bricks and gray, too, and others in all of near sunset’s shades held aloft with mossy mortar — are a number of portapotties, Chamber of Commerce white if sullied, and reeking of waste, piss, and antiseptic fluid, scattered amongst what have to be hundreds of monitors heaped haphazardly, their screens scoopedopen, the wiry guts and circuitry cleared, then refilled with sandy soil; they’re being used as planters, hosting the growth of what might still flower or fructify winter: tuberous roots, black and brown and other wasteshaded, turdy starchy things that’ll squat in the stomach for seasons. Benjamin extends a fat finger to knob, to turn their volumes up to silence, as if for the edification of a flock absent from the multitudinous religious furnishings surrounding: rickety pews arranged in sloppy rows, a rattily cushioned kneeler at front, a hassock turned splintery lectern topped with a rock to prevent it from being blown away that’s how grievous it is, and how weak. And then further, as He wanders a looping, around — the house, the old homestead failed by its flimsy wood and globbed white paint: on the inside of that wall outside papered and graffitied heavily with all manner of misprint and image, and there kept safe from the weather, Leed’s oversized trailer, doublewide, without hitch, surrounded with scrap and junk not waste or the dump of materials found but more like hunks and even rooms of the trailer that’ve fallen off over time, undersky. Off its cinderblocks, though, and sinking slowly into the wet, it strikes Him as nature itself, as if so overgrown and for so long it’s become, finally, organic, embodied, incorporated, ingrown: the stairs leading to the door are stumps; its roof the slatted rows of long dead trees the wind might’ve swept into shelter.

But it’s the wall above that interests, that holds. Webstuck to it under kinks of spiderwork, nailed, screwed, needled and pinned, there’s everything you ever need to know (but, yes, were afraid to ask), the casebook displayed, the fact file. Benjamin approaches it again in His wend, slowly around and circumambulating around its corrupting presence amazed, what not to be by these skins, these hides, maniacal pagings parchmented by weather, burdening the faces of slagblackened, goldenbrown brick: windrustled tattery newsprinted images of white middleaged Midwestern balding and cleanshaven and glassesed politicians posed in meticulously managed stages of photogenicy and colors of tie blue and red, faced amid a clutter of magazine clippings, tearsheets of fawning, gawking celebrity profile: who adopted whom, who’s dating, who’s married, who’s all broken up; faded mugshots of movie and television actors and actresses and those ostensibly famous for doing nothing, for being nobody — an act, their eyes and mouths circled or xd out in black; above and below obsessive reams of mullet length statistics subtracted from the ERAs of assorted Yankels or were they Metz pitchers since traded in an unspecified though rare losing season, multiplied by a multitude of precipitate statistics for greater Berlin circa every year of the last war; a ream of passenger manifests, apparently, recovered from the wrecks of defunct, Russianbased aerolines who could read that language, that unalphabetical foreignspeak; timetables of garbage pickups for Harlem, New York, New York; a flapping, dogeared map of Mormondom, Utah, strung across to nails with human hair meshing together every known abortuary ever to offer that procedure of damning sin for under a grand out-patient; Leeds’ hands splayed open it seems what with the dirt prints that remain used as stencils traced in pen on a map of Joysey, superimposed atop National Parks Service and U.S. geological survey maps of the Kieferöde with areas of probable dog saturation labeled and keyed according to the phases of moon; pornographic stills of male and female minors, hairless and pigtailed both demandingly angled, cut up and remade halfsexed, quarterlimbed, their resultant anatomies sectioned, and labeled: hearts, livers, kidneys, and spleens, where they would be embellished, in chalk and charcoal, with various gematric inversions and retrogrades attempted with the mailing addresses and telephone and facsimile numbers of a host of Texas holding companies with interests in both oil and war; the ages, too, heights and weights of their CEOs along with the dates of their mistress’ birthdays, then stapled and clipped to an alphabetical list of and scripts for the medications they take for any sexually transmitted viruses they’ve been given by them; Leeds says, finally noticing Benjamin’s curious browse, did you know that when the Freemasons dedicated the Washington Monument, that it stood, what’s it now, 555 feet and 5 inches tall, all those fives, and that its base, you should be aware, is 55 square feet and then that the windows they’re set 500 feet above that base, too, isn’t that crazy, I’ll be damned — now, didn’t know if you knew this one, either: that if you take the base and you multiplied it by sixty, or in other words by five times the number of the year’s months, which are twelve, and you get what, 3,300, that that’s the exact weight in pounds of the capstone of the thing, like the pyramidschemes the aliens made, the allseeing eye up there, Ra the Sun God, the Cyclops on the paper money bill, you with me, if I’d had one I’d show you with all the poisonous spiders and Latin; follow me here, as the name Washington as you know has ten letters, of course, five times two, and that if you then take that capstone’s weight multiplied by the base yet again you get, just give me a second here, 181,500, that’s it, which is as we all know roundabout the speed of light in miles per second, the whole atomic project, this is nuclear now, you get it, no one survives; and then, that if you take Washington, the name, I mean, which has a numerical worth of 122, with W equaling 25, A, 1, S, 19, H, 8, you get me, alright, and then let’s say you go and take that 122 and subtract another seven first for the G in George Washington, and then again five, which is the governing number of the Monument, as we’ve found out, and also of the Pentagon’s pentagram, if I haven’t yet mentioned, which is the symbol of the devil, Satan 666 (and how many letters does George have? now you’re getting my drift) the dragon serpent and the fallen prince of this world taken times two for the division between the base and the obelisk’s top, between George you with me and Washington and what do you get, you get ten, also the number of the Israelien tribes and so of the sons of Jacob, too, of Israel the goddamned IRS ATF kikes and then let’s say you go ahead and map that onto the calendar, say, the 365 days of the year and what do you get again, you get 105, if it’s not a leapyear, that is, which is the day that taxes are due, you get how it’s all connected with the Vatican Mafia and, if you weren’t aware, the day Lincoln died the same day after having been shot the night before, which…not only nailed and screwed and stuck with web and spit to the wall but also stuffed, stuck deeply into its cracks, between the burnt, ferruginous bricks, as messaging mortar, as all that holds the whole repose upright, keeps it from falling from its own grace: as a safe and secure depository for this madness, preventing it from becoming actioned into violence or humiliation upon the surrounding beach communities, exits north and south on the Parkway, just upstream, then down to the Delaware Bay. Far to the edge, a strip in white spraypaint, a thin listing stretch swathed entirely with naming displacements, interpolations of vowels:

STEINSTEIN:: STINESTINE, STEINSTEIN:: STEENSTEEN,

STEINSTEIN:: STINESTEEN, STEINSTEIN:: STEENSTINE,

STINESTINE:: STINESTINE, STINESTINE:: STEENSTEEN,

STINESTINE:: STINESTEEN, STINESTINE:: STEENSTINE,

STEINSTINE:: STINESTEEN, STEINSTINE:: STEENSTINE,

STINESTEIN:: STINESTEEN, STINESTEIN:: STEENSTINE,

STEINSTINE:: STINESTEEN, STEINSTINE:: STEENSTINE,

STINESTEIN:: STINESTEEN, STINESTEIN:: STEENSTINE…then above everything, at the very fall of the wall, the height of its highest loosening brick leaning to topple atop the slats of the trees roofing the trailer — it’s the head of a dog, killed in attack or that’s just how its expression’s been preserved for the mounting.

And, what’s this is all Benjamin thinks to say, standing naked.

Don’t you know, Leeds says on his way up the stumps to the trailer, figgering I’ll trust you — it’s the plan, understand.

No.

I’m just pulling your putz, son, what’s that they say, pishing buttons, and he gasps, leaning his head out the trailer’s lone window, also its chimney, and puffing smoke — this stuff was here when I moved in, you know, came with the wall…

But you must be freezing, he tries to say, through deeply worrisome coughing: come inside, chow’s almost on.

A trailer little more than an oven, its longways spanned down the middle with a flagpole fallen, suspended from window to window, one of its ends still topped with an eagle melted of wings: stolen from its stand outside the local euthenics school, a State Police outpost abandoned to tragedy and its rampageous dogs, a city hall with no city left to its name once the ironworks went bust, the mill broke down, rolled its stone to seal tight its sepulcher. It’s now the spit for the pig, the leftover half of a whole sow Leeds’d been feeding on the finely mealed remains of minority mutts then slaughtered just last week for his Xmas, since turned, a mite sour: an appreciably fat, devastatingly hairy faygele pinko of a sacrificial animal, an oinker one flank remaining being lashed with thick whips of greasy flame, a conflagration fed halfwise, crosssectioned, with bushels of leaves drifted down on wispy midnight wipings of dreck, then stoked, too, toward its premium rump, with its young — Leeds left its piglets inside as a sweetening. Kill and heat, a recipe as old as fire and death. To improve, he takes what’s left of the apple from his helmet, stuffs it into the mouth of the porker. A locomotive puff: a snout’s two smokestacks, one for you, one for me. Tickled pink, more like gagged. Pig, the food of the Gods, Leeds says as he heaps on it rocksalt that might be nits from his hair, the only white meat for me. Trichinosis, it’s government fearmongering, don’t be fooled, it’s all disinformation…subversion, a repression mentality — afraid of the psychic gifts, keep on giving. Benjamin freezing and unable to breathe. Mind it, will you? It just needs to warm up…and Leeds heads outside, returns up the stumped stoop with a canister of gas, pours it to empty over the spit; it flares, their meal singes; he leans over to savor and so basting the whole dish crude with his beard, then shoves an arm up the animal’s tract — it comes out utterly far from clean, so treyf ’s served.

A table’s outside, one of the portapotties toppled lengthwise, halfway drained, and Benjamin’s sent out to set it.

Plates? He asks again at the doorway and Leeds distractedly hands Him a sheaf of papers that comment last week in obituary, eulogistic columns.

Utensils? Welltrained, brought up civil. And what does He get for His trouble, which’d been Hanna’s — only an annoyed eye, lilied disgust. Fork and knife…meaning, with what are we supposed to sup the food that God hath given of Himself unto us? With another one of God’s gifts, with two of them if we’re lucky, that of our hands that’ve been wrought in the image of His. Give me yours, says Leeds stomping outside, here hold mine — nothing weird about it at all. To say grace, then Amen, not a woman or an anything else. With his left he stirs at the tableside toilet, wrenched from the potty, plungering away at its moonshine brewing, pure grain, joy juice with just a dash of melted weather to taste. He offers Benjamin a preprandial sip from the rubberized font: al-cohol, he says, only good turn the Ayrabs ever done us, though why they won’t drink the stuff themselves, don’t ask me; goddamned diaperheads, sandshvartzes, though they have the right idea as far as Palestein goes, I say burn, baby, burn it all the damn down…not just in His throat, this rare heat: the smoke pouring pink from the trailer’s chimneyblack window. Leeds rouses from his squat atop the table’s disembodied potty, hunts a peck around, retrieves from a rut in his yard under heaps of fallen wall, amid paperings and jaculatory jot, a rusted chunk of chainsaw, takes it up the stumps with him inside, feels fingers over its tracks pushing splinters out and through, then revs with the ripcord, slices off a hunk of pork, taking a good stretch of his beard along with it, wiping, a napkin.

At stoopfoot, Benjamin holds out His newspaper scraps — necrology plus erroneous sevenday forecast — rustling, shaking, already drunk. Leeds tosses to them a generous flank, then revs again for himself and slices, serves to walk his meal back outside. Hope you’ve worked up an appetite. Dig in. But He waits for His host to partake, which is more fear than respect, or pleasantry, Hanna’s polite. Leeds’ head rears up, dinosaurlike, as if a raptor rapt for prey, this old, oddly carnivorous bird: nearfeathered facialhair, thin wrinkle mouth its lips dripping grease, undifferentiated gross, strands of sinew stuck askew from between remnants of fillingful teeth, stoops themselves, stumps, ruts amid gums, nubby rots, or just one of them, or half, and a tongue, or else none at all maybe and tongue forked, perhaps, no tongues that aren’t meat just hanging from the hole whose, He observes, dentition lacks entirely, lost or pulled it’s anyone’s guess.

Pork: Benjamin had never had it — who do you think He is, thank His parents, their rabbi, his insatiably parochial God — had never seen or smelled it, heard its own goddamned oink, never petted a specimen at the zoo, no, neither, but He anyway knew the restrictions, He’d been born knowing. He’d never not kept kosher, when and how the opportunity to pig out on forbidden foods? Wherefrom trefyheadedness, who would even think or ever could?

He knows that His virgin doesn’t serve Him, that first taste, it’ll sicken, it has to, poison even, has already without it, a lip, a mere sniffling lung. All in His head, His head’s saying: psychosomatic the symptoms, the parasitic signs, a worming, and Benjamin’s feeling them, too, wriggling up His fingers, down His throat, furrowing the burrows of brain — imagining small, generically animated pigs pink as sin, shvitzing hot as psychedelically napalmed, turning flips in His gut, rooting around down there in the bile colonic, dirty snouts flaring deep amid the gastric denature: His stomach, the trailer, piglets nosing evidence from off the westernmost wall. An estimable mouthful, a steaming morsel — such virginal schmeck weighs upon His tongue yet to be downed, the meat and not the lingual anatomy that if swallowed itself would choke and make bestially dead, which is why the drink, grained booze more and more of it He plunges, too much and profane of a Kiddush, it’s never enough: L’Chaim, L’Avram, L’Benjamin, too…come on down’s the idea, the digestion’s fine — the flow tasting like antiseptic, thousandflushed with a tinkle of blue chemical toilet deodorizer, potpourri sprinkle, faint hints of moldy potato peel, onion-skin, and low notes of musky piss vintaged last week; it washes past, and with it the hunk of pork flows down whole to gag swallowed, without bitten chew; it would’ve snuck up again and out if not for a slap, quick and feely from Leeds leaning over.

Perfidy, he says, you was hungry, then smiles, haven’t had anything, reckon, in a while.

It slithers, a raw pink leeching the animal’s parasite’s parasite slow in its own sleazy grease — to settle in His stomach, a fresh new infestation, this hosting warming Him wrong, an eating fever of fleischig, this meat shvitz and yet, amazingly, without guilt. Thus the squeal of revelation doth enter…pork! this stuff edibles incredible! It can’t be believed, what a ta’am, what a taste; Benjamin breathes. I’ve never had anything — what? Only a growl. He teethes into His next, tears at His meal with assenting nods of the head: one’s slob another’s primitive, and both He’s happy to be.

Pork, Leeds says finally satisfied, proud almost as if he’s responsible not only for this specific preparation, a recipe he’ll secret if only for the kooky thrill of it, but also for the existence of the species entire: it’s the universal meat, after all…you know this, closest animal to us humans, it’s like cannibalism without the threat of prosecution, incarceration, all that prison raping to death — hell, even the darkies agree, they love them their white meat, finish it off with a little watermelon, spit them seeds out, grow their own, if not for the weather. And then you got those people that just went and died, you know, poor souls, the Affiliated they’re calling them, they didn’t know what they’d been missing these however many thousands of years, I done lost count since Christ; too occupied making their retirements, too distracted making the world turn on time, beats me, I’ve been beaten before. I’m glad they’re all dead and gone, serves them right; I hear you got just the firstborns left…you heard the one about that lastborn kid they think survived — they need to find that kid and give Him the business, the what’s what, just deserts. There’ve been rumors, you know about this — former Treasury secretary or head of the Fed out on this nowhere Island, New York, hope of hopes that hole gets totally wiped out soon enough, hand of God or earthswallowed, it’s done enough damage; anyway, this Das they call him, don’t know what it stands for if it ain’t his name or title, he’s out for the firstborns: if he’d do what I’d do then I wish him all the luck in the world…cowering, Benjamin’s a lump, stumped for the saying at the end of the portable, semipotable table, pottydrunk, stuffed on seconds and thirds, more and still nude.

Jesus, my manners in heaven and Leeds gets up only half lucid himself, staggers into the trailer — you must be freezing, he says, ain’t no one yet used to a winter like this…scaring up on a kick, a flail rummaging, think I got an outfit around here somewhere, something from the good old days — he’s rooting amid slop, dripping, jars kept of offal, animal effluvia, raising his head to the wall of the trailer and its cross hung there, the crucifix for a scarecrow that’d never quite worked on the dogs, a scaredog, why not, frighteningly thin branches burdened with white; he rips the shroud off then crows out with the uniform of a Klansmensch — you’ll look just perfect in that hood, it’s very vertical, slimming, throwing it to Benjamin who shrouds it on over His naked; it’s way too tight, but it works. And you should definitely put on a new face, all excitement now, a little much fayg, what he hates — but something new, something different…stoops to grab up snow, under it a fist of sandy soil and below that, black, while with the other hand he frees Benjamin from the gagging peak, on backward, turn it around and try to find your eyes, the slits Oriental: this is so they won’t recognize you; and he begins applying the stain as liberally as his politics allow, digging the thick frozen grime into His face with greasy, rough-wrinkled fingers. I should remember you are who you are, and not this minority reporting out and about, else you’d be in a hell of highwater trouble…lucky for you the more bowls I drink the better my memory gets; what in God’s name was I saying, who are you? he goes as if to punch His teeth, the only light visible, though just knuckles his guest a dark dimple, Benjamin’s wide cheek he shrouds again with the hood he then pyramids high by the tip, its pointy white foreskin: don’t worry, son, I’m kidding, that’s just me having your rib…

A smattering of shots, then two, three more and their echo, their echoes — Leeds falls to the ground, to the hole he’d dug for the face of his guest; it’s not that he’s been shot, as the blood about his mouth is the pig’s, underdone. Those swine after you, he says, don’t worry none, we’ll hold out, I offer full protection plans, no money down, sanctuary veritably guaranteed, this wall’ll never fall. I’m ready for a fight, a standoff, anything; we’ll hold here for months, years, Armageddon, we got enough pork — goddamnit, kid, he’s too loud now, smacking the earth and seeming to cry, I’m only a chaplain, ordained, licensed and bonded, but still…there are rules of engagement, there are dogs. Attack, will you. Fetch the yelps. Simpering whimper. Bitch out the bawls. Then, more shots, the undocumented calls of miniature, metallic, silverbeaked birds…a trampling of nature then fence. Benjamin gathers the hood tight overhead. Leeds quiets, puts a finger to his lips, raises another two to his eyes, with yet another finger points to the wall, sucks his thumb. He follows him, and they take shelter in silence: a squat behind bricks and trailer still puffing its signal…Leeds inconstant, disconsolately weepy one moment then all planning energetic the next. He beats out a march on his log, then springs up and begins searching himself flailingly, desperately behind his trailer the sloppy piles of trash — overwhelmingly papers and leaves fallen from potty refuse dumped black to freeze the baldness — for thrown bones or leftover flesh scrapped to serve, to appease the hungers of the howlings that near, then recede: the fierce howls and moans coming in waves too strong and too irregular for the creek, and in echoes of sounds too distantly dim, too muffled by the trees and leaves then dispersed by the wind to hear as to species or sense…only to near once again, a circling of noise and heat, a brutal noose of scurry and snap: this attack in its muster not animally savage, as would be expected, with barking and bite, but apparently organized, taken out back and executed with discipline — human’s the suspect, the goyim’s good shepherding…

An hour hunts, stalks its approach in ritual ringings, a merging of smokes.

Suddenly, a voice reveals through a megaphone:

Send, it distorts, if a voice of God then the voice of a god testing, just sounding it out…an airhorn, then, so sorry, it says, I pressed the wrong button:

Send, Send, am I doing it right, can you hear me, you can, Send the Minor Out, how’s that, and You Will Not Be Harmed And Neither Will He. Good. I’ve got it now. I’m alright. Be Reasonable. We’re Reasonable People. Or If Not Reasonable Then At Least We’re Trying. There’s No Excuse. I Mean Escape. I’m Sorry. I Apologize Too Much. My Therapist Says I’m Making Progress…enough. Don’t Get Wise With Us, You’re Grossly Outnumbered. Then, gevalt what next what next…there’s from nowhere, as if both visited down from the clouds and as cloud itself — smoke; not pigsmoke, smokesmoke; they’re setting everything on fire…it’s a strategy sieged without mercy, without appeal — if you can’t beatem, burnem, and so this tactically torched forest, the scorching of woods. All’s aflame, the tinder kindled, untamed: the wall’s caught and its craziness burns to growl big, a roar despite the pelting of sky.

The toilets, they smolder.

Never! Leeds says with regard to what, he’s already forgotten, but it’s the thought that counts to ten, nine, eight…then hesitates toward what would’ve been three — throws a grenade that soars up through the fire as if an expelled spark, a bomby wingless creature flying freely over the wall, lands…agents scatter, a smatter of suits and the flutter of ties like rare snakes, the grenade doesn’t — explode: goddamned clods, he says, pinecones, what, defective under battle conditions. A slash of tongues, a roaring, the roofing trees aflame and so they decamp westward behind the trash pilings that front the river further, cedarbrown beneath ice, a stilled running of rust. Our position still secure, Leeds yells into his fist, over, he hisses, a fiery crackle, a burning burr in his throat, the boozy dizziness and the womanly, weakening stress…remembers only then his Mwhatever the hell, remembers it’s all out of ammo. And has been for weeks. Three agents advance slow steady in lockstep, firing shots into twilight, downing stars to be culled for collection. They’ll be examined, byopsied by communists, Mexican migrant trash, aliens picking a new glowing fruit. Regroup, Leeds says, retreat, whatever; he rips off his helmet and punts it away, making contact with it at the brunt of its spike and so hurting his foot, which is bare and so, bleeding…the river’s our only hope, he says limping, gnawing his tongue — I’ll ready the vessel, you hold them off…but without saying with what He’ll defend, Himself and His host, his churchy compound and their Joysey land, besides, any better ideas, the chainsaw he shoves into Benjamin’s hands, Leeds scuttles scarce, into needly underbrush, the shorelining sparse, scurrying low, bareheaded balding and stooped: there to the stolen rental canoe loosely roped to a stump on the verge of the creek rearing his property — a vessel battered old, striped in white peeling paint, beat out of shape in aluminum.

Benjamin follows behind, waddling in white vesture smeared over the slick and snowmuddied; His pointy hanging hood hooking in His lumber on a perimeter’s branch hanging low, snagging Him, choking, breathlessly bringing Him unbalanced to fall — rearing up the saw panickingly revved in His hands to tear from the ancient, ashy tree its moldy boughs and bark, them crashing down on Him to hit on a root exposed, jaggedly knobbed, knotted, to gash Him on His head, the saw remaining lodged in the trunk. An advancing agent in a suit and tie the black issue of what department there’s no time or clearance to tell grabs Him, lays Him out face up, lifts hood to air Him, shakes, slaps, He’s out. At Benjamin’s falling cry, Leeds turns from untying their canoe, his straddle of the gunwale with one foot to steady the thwart while with the other still bleeding he’s stomping to free all from the freeze, then — he’s frozen, too…shrieking, they’re agents, kovert kosher operatives, Gmenschs they are maybe diamond merchanting Hasids, perhaps Mormon Hasidim, militant lesbian activist fascists who the futz knows; him tipping, to almost wading, kicking hard at the ice into water surrounding the bob of the logged canoe, eventually freeing its hollow freeze, shoving it out then over the floeslick, to water open if sludgelike, thick like a pudding or iron soup, bog metal smelt and yet cold: grabbing the paddle by its shaft, choking up for the steering and heading upstream against flow, deeper into the woods, the Kieferöde dim, its piney hide. The canoe, though, throws all downstream, along with the under-current a tug imperceptible and yet stronger than him, fate implacable and should’ve been humbling. Leeds drops his paddle in midstroke to cup hands, yell again a last for Benjamin but by now he’s forgotten the name. Sounds like — I lost it; the whistling water, finally flowing out here, and whiter with force, a froth that’s rabid, that’s thirsty. Purifying, too, washing to swallow. All hands cupped to the bailing. More agents arrive onscene, commence laughing, they can’t stop…and, are you ready for this — it takes six of them, two to His legs, two to arms then two more holding up the saggingly white-sailed, surrenderflagged middle of Him to triage, to lift Benjamin then hump Him herniate through the woods to the clearing, along the way the agents surrounding His path, the trail newly marked, trod and fired, shooting stray at the dogs coming near, never close. Carcasses lie everywhere, theirs, being ravaged, teethtorn, and savagely pawed at by dogs still alive if only barely, though shot through themselves and singed, with others clear burnt, their hair hardened to an insectlike shell, a pest’s exomost skeletal. With existence at peril, they’re less inclined to attack (these instincts so terribly tough to stray lost); they sense out the danger, react with a low. Heads hung with night, they cower and bitch, drag themselves sorrily into loggy dens to recover, to heal; they’re slowed by the bullets lodged in their hindquarters, their flanks — there to lick at their wounds, though still hungry for anger they gnash, as if feeding on themselves never sated.

And far below a raging helicopter — a robotic locust native to a local military installation who knows behind which stump or sump it’s been hiding, its spindly rotors wild with whirr — rising high then north by northeast again through space amid dark; humbling the supplicant trees, a forest bending from the copter’s cresting rise to bow low as in that dream of Joseph’s — it’s Leeds, hurling at them and God Who hovers above and below them, in every tree, as every leaf fallen and under every rock overturned, a handful of dumb, pathetic stones poached in his progress from river’s bottom and weighing down his vessel, his stolen rental canoe, aluminum and holed, weatherbeaten, shorebattered, snubbowed, which’s rapidly sinking no matter how fast he hurls them up, hurls them out; stones dropping, though, always just short of the airlift. One thrown directly up at the gyred glint above the wink of the moon falls directly down, hits him in the upturned face, knocking him over and out, to hold fast to the lip of the tossing, the rapidly whitewatering teeter, the river widening with the force of the current, if still cold and hazarded frozen, sharded sharply with ice toward the shores. He attempts both those banks at once in a flail, a futile grope, inevitably a doggiepaddle, is swept downstream, and further and brackish, toward the salting, the calming spanse of the ocean ahead — just over, it’s said, your run of the mill Joysey waterfall, this kill fluming logsplit, gaping its taillike spume spread as wide as the day; then over it he goes, hugely, whiskwhipped with a snap beyond the effervescent edge, aired to the rocks that rim the tidalpool below, not whirling but stillgray beneath a white unforgiving…to dash there, going under — then to surface; gasping a grasp at the stones he shrieks out of his own mouth now, as the canoe — turned birdy, as if a helicopter itself of one lone rotary paddle stilled by the gravity of the moon — comes down upon Leeds’ head, emptyfirst.