Witz

III

The hall is — what’s that they’re searching for, what is it that they always say—hushed; filled with bodies still alive if kept as cold as the corpses to which they’re related: this mass of firstborns ignobly birthed from one dream into another, huddled to the floor of the Registry for a meeting. They’ve been woken by sirens; sleep’s still in their eyes, night’s sand and damp in their knees and fingers — they’re so naked, they’re not even wearing their watches.

It’s early.

How naked are they? a voice might ask, a little late.

But listen. All time has been confiscated, to be reset to the hour of the Garden, the timeless Edenic. No clock has ever hung here in the Registry, or been set atop the Great Hall, and no clock ever will hang, and none will ever be set. This is an orientation, in the other direction, the direction most opposite — not east by west cardinally but in time, the past, or in the eternity that is tradition kept daily…O think of the opportunity! think of the spoils to be unearthed in such still! And know, too, there’s no further contingency, this couldn’t have been planned for, mapped out, or plotted. Any better than it’s already been. Among this generation, who’s the prophet, tell me, the navi, I want to know, who merits a vision like this. Bring him to me and I’ll cut out my tongue, I promise, I will — I know I will.

Hundreds of thousands of firstborn males have been forced onto this Island — ingathered they called it once, a making of Zion with their brethren left dead — and you thought seven seals and a prancing white horse were too much, nu.

As for me, I wasn’t there — they left me home alone. I was gazing out my parent’s window.

At a reflection, I don’t know what.

Good Morning, & Shalom…eighteen mouths grilled in rust say at once from every recess of the space in a thousand languages, and this one, too, which is God’s.

You are now in the Great Hall. Our program will begin momentarily. Until then, anyone know any jokes?

That’s how you can tell they’re alive — that they finally silence the silence, ask each other in whispers then roars: the Great Hall, what’s so great about it?

Hymn. Allow yourself to be told.

In the beginning, there’s the schedule, which is the Law, they’re inseparable, of tablets — ten hours given down on metro Sinai. Mondays and Thursdays we wake, we wash, we pray and eat, then buss and clean, don’t forget to rag the sponge; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, sweep and mop, sinks and toilets, too. At every eve of the month, which is the new moon with its silver, you disinfect, you polish polish polish every other. Friday is Saturday, is now the Sabbath, which we call Shabbos. Observe it — it’s the only item on the agenda at which attendance is mandatory, wherever you are.

To give you an idea — it’s month the fourth by the civil calendar, month the tenth by God; January’s being forgotten, keeping watch for future north and south, not east and west, and so the flanks are exposed, and the revolution enters through the sidedoor, the porchdoor, the basementdoor, the maid’s…is everyone with me?

And all the heads nod, if only to wake. God, there must be millions of them, heads and necks thick and thin and hairy arms and legs, wandering to the Hall from their muster on the square, to receive the newest of gospels by gossip.

To be precise, this is the Registry, historically the Great Hall’s main room and the Island’s most preserved from its previous function: plasterwalled, roofed with barreling brick; a balcony slithers around to strangle, a knife cutting the inside’s vaulting height. At one of its extremes, the east, which is the front they’re presently facing, there’s a dais, topped with the only podium to be found on the Island, fronted with the seal of this new tenant concern: David’s star revived, encircled with white in a sea of blue, a representation of the land upon which they’re being kept for observation, survival; this podium has to be schlepped from meeting to place, from gathering to session, briefing to conference — another’s in the process of being requisitioned, its sexagrammatic seal’s even now being stamped onto all. At the rear of the hall, westerly toward its door and the massing of those arrived late, laggard, and so not given shelter, made victim to the flog of the weather, a numbed mumbly muddle of disabled or otherwise ailing survivors, the incapacitated with walkers, in wheelchairs; gurneys have been rolled; they’re swarmed by devotedly uniformed, nametagged attendants, essentially strangers, and necessary medical equipment on rental.

All of them, though, they’re naked not to be humiliated, only to be cleansed. To be briefed debriefed, their clothes, underwear and socks have been outsourced to sanitation, offIsland delousing, antiseptic douse; hosed, then machine wash again and tumble dry — how much they miss their maids, their hospice nurses, caregivers, bubbes and sisters, those inlaw, daughters and wives. Garments that require drycleaning have been marked and shipped accordingly. Everything will arrive back this afternoon by barge, it’s promised, unless the water’s frozen: the Hudson’s lower bay at whose Island wharf the last stragglers of the assembled stand, one foot to test the shoring ice. Thousands before them stand and sit and lean, as unhappy and nude as birth, as paled, only to be reborn here, to become initiated into this, the newest order — mourning. Though they could’ve staggered the orientation times, divided then subdivided them into groups, there’s no time, too much work: anyway, the totality’s what interests in this endeavor already failing, failed, the way information passes as rumor, whispers down the mob. And so morning for one’s been consecrated as morning for all — a host of histories lived simultaneously, symbiotically, Creation made coeval with Law. And this despite the cycle of any profaning, daily time — that of this continent or another the same, and, too, that of any family, work, or nightly love; all ingathered to this rationed, ruinous Island and set to an ultimatum’s test: forced union in damp, moldy quarters, early woken solidarity without brunch or even coffee yet, made subject to the life of a single people, its purpose…two clocks received into millions of hands: upon the metal mountaintop, the skyline’s Manhattan beyond — two cycles cast down to asphalt earth. Rain pounds rapt at hilly windows, its rap silenced by snow. All are encouraged to save their questions for later. Don’t waste them. Keep them safe.

High above the furthest doorway, in the back of the balcony at the back of the assemblage entire, a boy just of age and only recently fatherless raises his hand out of nowhere, then shouts. Ooo Ooo Ooo, call on me…over here — what question can he have; heaven forbid us assume. There’s a great rustling, a jocose jostle, as the kid’s accommodated, he’s handed toward the front, the crowding unclothed passing him to each other, up and over one another to the railing, his feet to dangle over the balcony’s filigreed edge. Perched there as if a musing God, a philosopher, or a miniature king just resting a little, still mulling, he scratches his head as if he’s only now lost the nerve; then, after a moment clears his throat and with his voice just breaking asks his question out into space — as if a tiny planet, to be accompanied by the murmur of moons.

The kid says, when do we eat?

Suddenly, amid hushes in shushes, pshts, fingers held to lips pursed in thirst — try to behave yourself, set an example, fix your hair, look your best — two goyim have entered the Hall, coming in up the stairs then through the crowd with their escort, guardparting with elbows, prodding with nightsticks, they’re proceeding down the aisle to the steps up to the dais on risers: one Doctor Abuya trying for dapper in a dark suit blue or black they can’t tell which, white shirt, slickly red silken tie, he’s pudgy, pasty, an excess of face beset by jowls, fatty as if of plastic gulleting between where the chins should be the chin, a wad of white hair messy atop the glaringly inclusive forehead, presently adorned with the unflatteringly rectilinear metallic glasses of a goy you can only trust never to trust, and so you know him — his eyes distorting his face with squint, like dimples made by fingers, knobbily kneaded into the face of unleavenable dough; the other goy, to be known to them as the Nachmachen, is taller and leaner though for now largely inscrutable in a tight robe that flows to the heels, hermetically dark and expensively hooded: half alterebbe, half secretsociety monk (a shadow purse of lips, a crescent bone of nose); everyone thinking in whispers, how important does he have to be to get away with a uniform like that. Doctor Abuya grips the podium, uncomfortable, stiff and shifty, his knuckles pale as if he’s at stool. And then silence — until he sighs, loosens, holds his pants in his hands, hoists the band up to his waist. From his hood, the Nachmachen forces a cough that’s a signal. A swath of slate descends. Chalk is brought, a clutch of bonewhite fingers borne to Doctor Abuya atop a pillow trimmed in plaited lace; the young Arab assistant retreats, scampers back into the wings. The Doctor feints to follow him off, his hands held behind the back, his stomach sagging him hunched, but he’s only pacing, around and around the surface, suspended. A blackboard hanging unsettled with the weather inside. The stripped boys and those older, beyond death, they sit, they stand, they throng, impatient but laudably so given the circumstances, who would believe; their eyes and heads follow his pacing; their ears swell, the hairs prickle; they pay attention through the nose — sniffling, an occasional sneeze. Only silence and the goy’s fatty footfalls, until — a screech…then, erasure by a coat edge, charily pinstriped wool stained with white. A small laugh bursts out from the assembled, in odd, nervous clumps, and the Nachmachen stomps a foot on the dais, carpeted in thick blue, which mutes his reprimand to a muffle. On the board slightly swaying, blackness is quickly being covered in markings, with numbers and letters in fingernail scratches like unhealing scars, desperate scrapes either for life, or against it—the Schedule…

0600 is Reveille, meaning wakeup, they’re advised, with a rousingly roostery trumpet, the metallic horn of a mechanical ram: the morning’s sounding of the Garden’s siren, which had been made to alert to air war, to send people a lifetime since dead, their entire families and livestock and what food and drink they could and candles by now a century past eaten and drunk and kindled extinguished down into the earth deep into their bunkers, to huddle amid the graves and the dust to wait out within them the damning fire and sky — it had been looted from a town in Europa, which has since been forgotten, in Polandland it was, a village whose name in any language has gone unremembered, untongued. It sounds loudly and long once again, though this here’s just a test to make them familiar: conditioning, call it, to put the fear of governance into them, to install the alarm in their souls. Then, static pours through the PA, whose speakers, they’ll find, are rigged up and wired throughout, perched like rusted nests on the signposts, boughdeep buried in the trees, suspended from every ceiling corner, screwed under grates, secreted down crawlspaces, inaccessible ducts, under each pillow, feedback, in our very own mouths…

Shalom, Garden! the Voice says, that of their new deity who’s to be referred to only as Das, good morning!

Overhead, generationold fluorescents go mercury mad gas discharge, flick flick flicker, remain fixed.

On the square just outside, a slip of water once used for docking and now, frozenover, an orchestra tunes, warming up for the Flag Raising, delayed.

As for the flag, for now it’s just a naked pole, as no one knows which stars to fly — the fifty spangles of fivepointed, or the single whose points number six, maybe both. We’ll keep you informed; it’s still being worked out in committee.

0630 is the time of Morning Prayer, which is known as Shacharit, don’t ask — with a projected thousand minyans open to any denomination; rabbis off to form groups, scrambling to put in the forms for tallis and Torah. A guide to available services is to be posted like teffilin between your eyes, upon your arms, then on the walls between the two Commissaries; check it, as there should be daily updates.

On the Sabbath, though, things are different, and on Fridays late, too, when the holy begins. Shabbos it’s called, mark it TBA — we’ll proceed; I’m sure you’re all very hungry…

And so you’ll be excited to know that everything’s kosher. Always, it’s glatt, rest assured: no outside food’s ever allowed. Mehadrin. The Shade Administration vouches; the President’s given the hechsher himself. Hope that answers your question. What else? We begin serving at 0700, and provide three meals per day. Our menu revolves each moon, regurgitates you might say. All meals are served in the Commissary, which you’ll find labeled on the maps provided as #7…and there’s a mass folding over, an accordion wheeze of outscrolled paper, a squeezeboxy tear. Might we share, mind if I save myself over your shoulder. Seven, sieben, sept, sette, siete, siedem, hét…interpreters secreted throughout the Hall call out numbers, the informative Babel. On offer are all your favorite popular cereals of sugared flakes, and healthy granola, too, müsli with seasonal fruits to top (allow us to take the opportunity to thank our wonderful sponsors, including ten or so companies allied with prominent senators and a conglomerate or two for which President Shade had once been on board), along with a full complement of milks, percentaged whole to skim and flavored almond, butter, chocolate, and soy, those for the lactose intolerant. Of course, we’re speaking of the Milk Commissary, it’s the dairy that’s talking; you’ll find the Meat nextdoor, labeled with the #8 and eight echoes throughout: acht, huit, otto, ocho, osiem, nyolc, BOCEM…of course, both are strictly supervised; we’ve got inspectors working around the clock, mash-giachs they’re called, stick around, you’ll get good with the slang. As most of the survivors, like most of the dead, are unobservant, Kashrut, which as it’s explained again and again and in the deepest of details is the keeping of the dietary laws as given down from a mountain made of earth and so, inedible, will take some getting used to: please, Rabbi Bunkmate — explain to me the lack of brunchmeats, the sausages forbidden, the absence of bacons neither lofat, nor excessively stippled…why O why is brunch always dairy?

Welcome to your tour of the Commissaries…these two long and low, screenseparated, twoentranced rooms, tiled and laid with tables separated by squat columns themselves tiled an institutional white. To the left, where you get your silverware and your fine china, a burning bush of metal. A sign’s lettered italicized, bold — Deposit Trays—And—Dishes Here. To the right, the foods, their lines forever long, lasting throughout the day beginning with night then into the same meal next, all over again: lunkfast, linner, dunch, and on into brunch, how they’re still queued, thousands deep — everyone, to the omelet station! with its migrant who knows and who cares from where chefs flipping the contents of skillets over their hotplates, a freewheeling cheese selection apportioned on translucent plastic cuttingboards, grapestarred and nutted, crumbling gouda, gooey brie; alongside the vegetable offerings: pepperwell giving green, red, sweet, and spicy; imported onions to tear; mushrooms handpicked: a delightful array of mycological oddities imported from Wielkopolska, grown in premium mycelia of don’t want to think about it, its earth, nu, don’t think to ask. I should mention a bit about the eggs, though — they aren’t dairy, and yet neither are they meat. Fleischig’s the term for the flesh. Milchig just as it sounds, for the milk, what a lingo. Rather, eggs are exemplar of that third species they’ll know from now on as Pareve. It’s neutral; gustatorily speaking no mensch’s land. Meaning not this, neither that, here-there, yes-no…I know, it’s tricky. You’ll adjust — that’s a promise.

Their guide’s a guiltless intern in from Bumble, Iowa, here to gain experience in any field that’s not corn. He stops for a breath, savoring the waft of fresh bake…this is the Bread Section, a vast marbleized surface mensched by a skilled cutter of crusts resembling Dad, Aba, whatever you called him even if he was absent, at meetings away, always at work; and we can’t forget the bagels, now, can we? In daily from the yeastiest beaches of Brooklyn, trucked across the ice hot and fresh, crustysoft suns of hole, burnished rings of gold: waterboiled glutinous, everything to plain, toastable in individual toasting units located just across from the containers that safeguard the condiments, that keep and preserve; the oils, vinegars, sweet and salty dressings, and interjacent to extensively sneezeguarded, oftrefreshed troughs of spreads both flavored and plain, butters and buttery marge, jellies, jams, preserves with rind or peel and without: creamedcheeses, schmears plain and whipped, and all those brands that’ve been liberally flecked with tomatoes sundried then shredded, infused with salmon smoked, chopchived, too, mostly for the edification of the adults among them, or that of any kinder preternaturally sophisticated, with according discernment of palate. We aim to please; that’s what we’re here for, what we’re for here. To stuff a nameless napkin into the comments box, the charity of complaint. We Welcome Your Suggestions. We need less, want more. And out. And then further on down the line, the line’s line endless, a waiting wait — to push, to pushshoulder, shoulderelbow with knee and hand shove ahead their trays along runners: beggars can be choosers only here; among these loaves and hairnetted fishes, gravlaxed, herrings sweet and sour, in wine and briny cream. Selection varies. Appetites, too, then tastes. At the far end of the Milk against the screening wall on whose other side is a replica for the service of Meat, the saladbar, administered by women with a tendency to spit: they demand you eat your veggies. A clean plate policy’s in effect, don’t you know, enforced on pain of seconds served up with a side of guilt. These mothers cry, eat up! grow already, will you?

And if you’re thirsty, their guide announces, on this tour a mild mestizo Mexican named Fausto, he says, spiffed in yarmulke and tracksuit, and I know I am…laughs ensue, titters — we’re proud to offer only the best in juices, squeezed fresh on our premises from choicest Florida citrus (from concentrate); this served up to their parched from out of great gurgling rubbermade trashcans stirred with oars, then ladled out with plastic pitchers roped and knotted off to handles, each of them the trashes labeled large in yelloworange spraypaint with product, Pulp, A Little Pulp, and Very Very Little, none without. As for wine, it’s served only on Fridays, with Shabbos dinner, which you’ll be eating with your families assigned — red or white, good vintage. All name brands, overstock from California. And Palestein, also. If it’s ever water you want, feel free to find an icicle to suck.

0900 begins the Garden’s School Day, with mandatory enrollment for all no matter their age or education level: the kinder alongside professional professors, doctors, lawyers, and wholesale illiterates in any language known. There’s so much to get caught up on, so little time to care. At this hour, in the windowless rooms of the wings surrounding the Registry, and in a number of outlying units, too, in mismatchedly ramshackle sheds and annexed trailers, temporary structures rental or lastmoment erected slipshod and so soon to be razed to make way for shelters of a more permanent nature, which are expensive and so the financing begins…the latenight, underground audits of firstborn assets, the brunchside, bunkside pledge drives, multiplatform fundraising initiatives implemented for the sake of new beds, chairs, and desks — they’re studying, in rows yeshivish, of learners quick and slow, of Malamuds and Lerners at their markedup, knifed and gummed and grafittied tables creaking under their books omnilingual, books and languages both on permanent loan from recently domained area parochial schools, courtesy of unasked donation, benevolent largesse anonymous only in its receipt, the pitiless ledger lines, page after page flipped foreignly to distract them from, what…Doctor Abuya’s been assigned to the eldest class, invariably the least advanced, difficult to deal with though invaluable in influence; he stands in front of them parsing, glossing, wising up, a foreigner, a usurper, just a lesson ahead of his pupils, middleaged, geriatric and older even, ancient: to study — knowledge never ends, its endeavor never does, only the time in which we have to risk it, is it worth it; if knowledge promises wisdom promises happiness, maybe, and if not, then. To study the value of study. Here they work their mornings in ulpan, crashcoursing the mamalashon: the holy tongue shoved down the hole voweled into their faces, wondrously agape if breathing in snores; the afternoon, though, educates the hours of laziest attention, those of wandering gossip, grabs and gropes, the torpor of distracted flirtation, is given over to the secular, to practical business and communication skills, with pertinent mathematics. If Adam has one apple, and Eve has two, it’s a better investment to buy the tree. Chop it way the hell down. Build a goddamned shopping mart. And plant trees of plastic thereupon. Very good, Avram. Very good. All these lifesized, fully competent and heavily insured adults stuffed behind desks, with their bellies overflowing the swollen wood, squeezed into chairs tight about the thighs. Menschs all, displaced paters familias reduced to immaturity, reverted against their will, ulcerated, idle — insomniac professionals just going out of their futzing minds, if we’re being frank: middle of a perfectly good workday afternoon and you find yourself pacing the hallways, as forlorn as a hospital’s, as spare as a court’s, annex to annex with a class schedule burning in the hands, plodding through every rationale, justification, drivethru philosophy, the selfhelp exhortative; finding safety, solace in the bathrooms, smoking quick cigarettes out windows and cursing teachers, perched on porcelain while they’re expected in class to recite, to approach the intimidating presence of blackboard — how did we get here, what am I going to do. Plot a lawsuit. Hatch an escape. Hang yourself from the fixture in the stall. Above the watery laughter of the tank. Suicide. Many do. The Nachmachen’s is an easier task, and holier: stalking the younger ranks, the choice kindergarten classes, he slaps their faces, tugs hair, makes sure their yarmulkes, which are mandated, stay always on and fastened — prodding, demanding, insistent, imparting to them their own tradition, their only inheritance, despite their resistance to its assumption, despite their unwillingness to take responsibility for its meaning, its future; though tuition’s already been deducted from their accounts, which have been frozen by Garden, Inc. offIsland, in escrow, presently administered by the government and invested in this, its venture, reinvested in life, which is theirs, which is them. No appeal.

And then, after class, its brute bell ringing out to air their excited shrieks, enter the age of extracurriculars: our ocean lately iced, they quickly change to dip themselves in the heated pools, Olympically domed in glass to Island — West; Free Swim’s M — Th, 3–8, and Sun 10–5, though the times just like everything else are subject to change or plague…what a life, what encouragement, support — to become involved, included, to be welcomed warmly into every club ever founded under heaven: chess instruction’s offered and so soon teams are formed, and tournaments are organized, lessons in piano and violin are made available to those demonstrative of talent — apply in person at the Prodigy Office, POD 33–6…community service is an option, an opportunity it’s called, also that of interdenominational outreach: hobbying at a home for the aged; litter pickup along local highways; mornings publicly speaking for broadcast at Midtown mosques and churches, detailing recent experiences, the script of how thankful we are; then, evenings privately reading poetry to other orphans and the ill throughout the greater metro area: instructing the world, in its popular mass or only one at a quiet time, in the very culture in which they, too, are being instructed, despite the fact it’s dead.

Attention, the Library is Open.

And here they gather, standing amid haphazard stacks unbound, confiscated from the collections of the lifeless, Fifth Avenue’s umbilically far and stillborn twin.

A miracle, in that they’re women — though they’re employees, the only women here. And don’t even think — there’re strict policies against that, and they’re enforced, too, any infraction punished with affection withheld. Of those paid to attend to the survivors, these are the most beautiful, conventionally speaking; they’ve been hired for that, then gathered up into the folds of this room that’s most recently become the Library with the dedication of appropriate plaque, which is bronze, a ceremony accomplished in silence, without circumstance, without attendees: a multipurpose, utilitarian hall, with a gymnasia’s appointments, heated by the humidity of shvitz once spent upon its burnished burls of flooring, laminate, polished to a greasy slick, walled in by plaster festooned with insignia and jerseys, the retired shrouds of police and fire heroes; streamers faint in light fluttery from raftered sag, amid the stick of banners, bunting, spattered with squalid insects; two hoops, one on each side, lacking nets — between them, an empty scoreboard’s hung over a stage; the books are stacked in alphabetical piles atop the inbuilt bleachers opposite, stadiumed precariously as if to cheer in their silence the topple of the ceiling.

At 1800, precisely, this matron enters all in a bustle.

How to describe her? She’s busty, chesty, whatever it’s called she requires for herself and even her title a hall’s wide berth, is due an approach that is its own announcement, given grand entrance with suitable clearance; flushed and winded, hoarselunged with her sighing and how exuberantly she’s entitled, but to what, she hasn’t yet demanded; her heels click as if in preemptory reprimand, clack pushy; you can tell just by the way she carries herself she thinks she’s better than you, her very presence a judgment on yours, which is an imposition; the strap to her purse wound around her arm as if a vein, darkened to writhe above the skin; a frump knot of hair and a loose flap of film: she leads a porter who schleps with him the podium on loan from the Registry’s morning assembly; the porter’s son falters behind his father, with an ancient 8mm film setup he sets atop a bleacher’s books librating. Breathlessly, the woman lays down her purse at the edge of the stage below which the podium’s placed, alongside more heapings of books these without covers and perhaps just loose pages all of a single book, a universal, unread, unreadably total book yet to be cataloged as to the interest of its worthlessness. With fingers dunced with arty nails she dismisses the hired librarians: homely women stooped to their unpedicured toes; they drop their tasks, shuffle out with stares for the young women seated and silent; then, she dismisses the porters, too, these family Kush (mostly shvartze or otherwise minority inmates repurposed from prison, their Garden service intended to lenience their sentence), who gape at the girls on their slow ways out; the woman takes her position at podium, straightens it centered then begins with roll, leering a moment at each face as she kisses out their names…

Here is another orientation — though directed toward secrecy, which is located neither in space nor in time, but only in the head, and therefore private, beforehand classified, disclaimed…Mary? she says, and every girl out in the room seated in their metal foldingchairs posturewise unimpeachable raises each one lacey gloved hand with an innocence that’s debilitating. Eager, earnest, here. All say, altogether, present. Amen, she works her way down the list: Marys check check check, they all seem to be named Mary, what a coincidence to ponder, to squander in fear, and so they bite their lips again in unison, into a weep of blood, weeps, unusually nervous, anxious, in this waiting for what’s next. A shiksa showcase, an extravagance of health and hygiene: these are girls almost women, a moon or two until spring away from their fullness, their ripe; to be perfected only now, if a touch early, a little young, they’ve been selected for that, for that very innocence, appalling, the willingness in their giddy bones, their sympathy for the cause or just desire to help, to be of some aid, some service rendered to tragedy, that and their bodies babied, don’t think they’re not what — proud, greenishly grateful, flattered. Accounted. Forget selected, then extensively profiled and interviewed then selected again; they might as well have been engineered especially for their present purpose: with their surfaces smoothmachined, an expert and easy gleam secreted wet below the skin, a pure denuding whiteness flushing veins like festive wires, as if they’re robots dappled with attractive, demographically approved freckles, symbolically parceled moles, the rivets of their soft planes, the endearing scars of playground, playdate stitches: Zeba’s fall against the kitchentable, Isabella’s tumble down the stairs…they’re real, though, pinch yourself; it just happens they’re all named the same, they’ll have their new names soon enough. Every one of them daughters of Garden maintenance staff, of nurses, redpalmed laundresses, chubby charwomen, foodpreparation personnel; they themselves are all on paper maids, however nominal, or indulgent, that employment. As for their actual purpose, how they’re to earn their true keeps, that’s the secret of their assembly this late afternoon and rumor stiflingly short of notice, only after finishing up their final turndown service—1700, unless their charges, bunked with apologies due to scarcity of space, had tagged a foot the evening prior with the placard provided, Do Not Disturb—leaving a macaroon on each pillow logged in drool. Here in the allpurpose, makeshift, scuffed floored Library, walled without shelves, without system, they sit, in moaning, rustbottomed foldingchairs, demure in their matching outfits, tight’s dark uniforms new with matching nylon hosiery stretching netting across their thighs to surface islands of flesh exposed, stockings webbing even tighter ever darker behind the knee, the length to which the frill hangs from their puffy little skirts slit high, slightwaisted, into which their blouses have been bunched tight against the bud; their polished heels clackety click impatiently, too, as they gossip, give susurrant whispers of hair, to keep their hands occupied lying dusters of rare peacock feather under their seats, placing purses on their laps, opening them, rummaging and applying from them makeup, lipstick, and mascara into the mirrors of their palms; then, once readied, presentable, they straighten themselves again into that posture nothing less than laudable — so wonderful, it’s been said, that the entire Library chaotically surrounding, each and every book, could be balanced on their massed heads for parade through Island streets as yet unpaved.

Good evening, girls, the matron says.

A giggle risen to pop on the bulbs bared to empty heads above…all attention’s turned to her, whoever, their matron, and her breasts like two suckling babies swaddled with a labcoat to which a nametag’s been pinned, saying: Sex Therapist — Staff. They can’t look away, can’t blush, their eyes are hers, their lips; the Marys in unison flip wisps of hair from foreheads free of blemish, from brows kempt, untangle locks from lashes slick in upkeep. Atop a chair of her own she nudges with a heel to the front, the matron dumps her purse, trivially overstuffed, messy: lipsticks glossy, matte, tampons knotted together like sausages, diaphragms like condoms and a cervical cap, gel and spray, loose change, below everything her pointer, with which to smack her own tush as she paces the room, the heads following her to dizzy.

Please stand, she says, and altogether they stand and wobble, on heels they’re still getting used to: they’ve only been on the job for a week. As she paces, the woman looks them up, down, as if assenting, in an invasive nod, not indicating approval, more like its opposite or hope, with slight sighs, low whistles given out through the perfectly attractive crack between her fawned front teeth, she pokes, she prods and pushes…Mary, not you, not you, not — you! pull the hair up and around, yes, now let it down…no, let it fall, that’s it, keep your fingers out of your mouth…take off that necklace; get rid of that ring…Mary, no, no, no, no, yes — keep your head straight, you! I want your shoulders back and chin down…suck in that gut (palpates) — what are you laughing at (pinches), it’s not like you couldn’t stand to lose a few yourself…remember, she whispers, these are little little girls, at least most of them, the latter halfdozen — like for you, better a padded, a pushup; accentuates what you have, rounds out what you don’t…wandering her way back to the front, she goes down on her knees to search for an outlet, to light the projector with its cord engaged in a sensual snaking around her waist, her thighs, as if she’s to plug the device into her very crotch, the always warm and wet socket of her own power; then, she removes her shoes, loses the labcoat, the nothing underneath to nude, unashamed.

Strip, she says, there’s no blushing here or cry, it’s not allowed, we’re women…billows of cloth, indoor cloud — mounds of clothing like whispery cirrus, like melting, melted icecream, spilt milk…excess buttery fat to heap about the feet, then stirred a step out of and around, to whip: the Marys strip slowly and selfconsciously, item by item soon teasingly, too, bit by bit to baring all, as if they don’t know whether they’re flirting with themselves, with each other, or with nakedness itself. My God, she says, that marbling, those striations; I want you all to exercise — and grow that out, your hair; I want curly bushes, huge…turns from them to the door to the hall, opens it, wheels in chiming clink of hangers, a rack of wardrobe left by the porters departed, in her draggy, stumbling schlep knocking books over and open to pages loosed from bindings to wind around the hall in gusts from the slamming door; paper leaves like chaffing, burning labels, ironsafe, white cleansed from dark colors separately, Made In An Image: the newest clothes, they seem too small, though intended modest, longsleeved and skirted, these uniform black and blue and whites, sweaters standardissue, shoes and accessories folded on the shelf atop, separated there by tags not of size, style, or brand but by identity, which sister.

Get dressed — you, Rubina, and you’re Simone, the tennis shirt, the white white one, don’t worry, it’ll stretch…you, you’re a Liv; those stockings to hide the thighs on you with those nice neat little irises at the knees…you, you’re more the Judith type; she was into bouncy blouses…she’s handing out assignments, dispensing identities, coupling them sibling to her cause. My job, she says as they fumble with their futures, is to turn you into relations…the monogrammed backpack, with a pencil behind the ear — yes, you have to wear the headband…the Marys dress, become others, turn to others as themselves, all relative to one another, a halflife, still becoming: skimping on flowery underwear, bras for those who need them (which sisters and not which Marys), buttoning, clasping and snapping zip up hips as the woman, too, steps into a hanger’s clothes: a dark scrunched skirt, pink cardigan over white camisole, her necked adorned with big jewels on bulkier gold. As a mother, then, she stalks the room, screeching out inquiries parental above the dressing’s din: who’s His favorite sister? does He even have one yet? what’re His favorite foods? quick! rip out the heart through the stomach, anyone have an answer for me? how many squares of what kind of toiletpaper does He on average use? does He use on days He has too much dairy? anyone, anyone?

Let’s begin with something simple…

Which Mary she is, even she doesn’t know, hasn’t yet remembered, she raises her hand, waves it desperately, then whines as if she has to pee.

Her mother sighs, what is it?

Who?

A reel’s readied, the lights overhead strangled with trembling, infanticidal hands; the screen’s the wall in front of them, whitewashed pocked plaster that backs the stage edged with tattered curtains; the woman flicks the switch. A world opens on a longshot, another hall, its weather…snow, the static sky. 10–9–8 kept by circles, blinking as if eyes wandering noctivagously over stage and floor — a flicker, and then His mother, His Ima, her form projected onto the woman now dragging the podium to the side, the body shot across hers, boned, one face ghosted upon another…she shuffles outside the shot to adjust the height of the projector. A woman, rising, raised, levitated, floating…halfdancing to silence, or she’s having a seizure, she’s palsied, perhaps a virus, at least she’s able to laugh at herself, she’s laughing, but at a friend, or with her — but no, she’s not deformed, mutated or miraculous, it’s more like the film itself, which is silent and slipping unfocused, again, and so the matron returns to the projector to steady the image atop its stack of books, wanders halfway across the shot toward the podium removed, returns and readjusts, then interrupts the image yet again and stops to stand far to the side and say the name, Hanna, voicingover the mute…her maiden name, Senior, married Israelien — can everyone hear me, I hope you can; I hate microphones — they’re only good if you don’t know what to do with your hands. She quiets, wets her lips. Here maybe ten, fifteen years before she died, forty if she ever told the truth about her age, give or take a few surgical procedures. 36–30–36, fivefoottwo inches tall, or short she thinks, a bit of a complex there, averaging 130 pounds when not pregnant, which wasn’t often: acceptably zaftig if not a Beshemoth, as she’d always joke — she had a sense of humor. Her husband Israel, whom we’re just getting now, the mensch in the green suit, this was a decade ago, forgive him — he found her attractive, she had beautiful breasts: above average, as you’ll notice, heartily unproportional…with nipples asymmetrically positioned (here she points her pointer, a collapsible erected, extracted from her bag) right pointing up, left down, stray hairs around the — surprisingly small — areolae; a cancer scare at age thirtysix, a cyst was removed, a scar; she has stretchmarks around the waist and thighs and at the armpits, too, a polio inoculation shot to upper left arm near shoulder, radial wrinkling about the face…but don’t take my word for it, you’ll have an opportunity to observe at a later date — we’re keeping her on ice, in Storage.

Her occupation, that of a homemaker, wife if you prefer, or mother, that of the undifferentiated uxorial…note the hairstyle, she says suddenly: it’s a wig, she blushes this once only, the one I’m currently modeling…as Hanna’s head’s flicked up to obscure the shot, pursuing, zooming in on the appetizer buffet behind her, the meaty pinks and vegetative purple — like many women of her enlightened generation, she wore it short after age thirty or so, thinks of it as feminine, but manageable…henna, but a between shade, undecided, or placating, peacemaking, a reddish brownie blond; she went light on the makeup save lipstick, professed a marked preference for skirts at the length of the ankle; in reasonable shape, especially given her twelve pregnancies, eight of them to date, with credit due to classes in aerobics, weekly episodes on the treadmill set to easy.

And, if you aren’t noticing — the woman dances.

If alone, adorned with necklaces of chamsas. A cocktail hour piano/violin.

Observe, please, that this is formal dress; for her, this was fancy. Her underwear preferences tended toward the synthetic, less panties than modified girdles, rearlift enhancers, thighslimmers, waistsnippers, what have you — the entire life cataloged, mailordered by phone, through friends; lacey brassieres with trimming underwires, floralpatterned when risqué or plain in white or black. Her hosiery fleshtoned. Her nails she kept manicured, professionally, in a shade and brand that’ll be made available to you shortly. Patience. I ask you to note the jewelry. Conspicuously chunky were the presents. Amethyst, silver, gold, what she picked out on her own. She holds out her hands, gangly jangling. I’m presently wearing many of these pieces…then gouges a projected eye with the tip of her pointer and says, you don’t know this woman, though she’s now your mother, understand?

And altogether, they exhale; gum pops soft, red lozenges gulped loudly.

Questions. All of you know the boychick I’m speaking of, Ben, one of our Garden’s more famous charges — or have heard of Him? and their heads nod in a row out in the hall dimly far from the projected light. Needless to say, everything I say in this meeting is to be kept strictly confidential. You’ve signed your sisterhoods away. We’ll hold you to your word. Exercise caution and your abs. Your lats and glutei. Marys, daughters — you are to be sisters to one another, and to Him: to keep Him company, to gain His confidence, how should I say this — to keep Him occupied…meaning, to seduce Him — to entertain His body, to distract His brain. In this assignment, Hanna, His mother, is to be your instructor, your mentor; maternal guidance in all its trusting worry — her here the one now dancing, or this evening she thinks it’s dancing, why not, let’s indulge her, that’s what daughters do. Or should be doing, if they’re behaved and well brought up; and you are — try to remember how well you’re provided for, how you’re kept always fed and warm. And thankful as much as ungrateful, too, it’s difficult, it’s tough. I want you to study her, to learn me, to become her daughters, mine…I want you to know her as cold as she is now. Observe her every moment and physical movement, her every overmothered eccentricity, the way she holds herself and others, the tic of the eye, the teethe of the lip, the scratch at the elbow, too; any and all idiosyncrasies you’re able to glean from stock and inspection firsthand, which will occur tomorrow at a time mutually convenient: daughters to bundleup in hooded down, with school announced cancelled, and so gathering instead for the true examination around the frozen slab upon which His Hanna lies, Morgue-stripped, bluegummed and crazyeyed. Anatomized. Dissect her, it. This, the womb from whence you came. Scalpels out. No copying.

Learn to walk her, to talk her, live her, breathe her mouth in yours, to give you life, I mean…eat her and sleep her — because He will; her when you rise up and her when you lie down, her when you go and her when you come, especially when you come…and then this business again with the pointer, her hysterical tapping; what am I forgetting?

Some of you will have your hair dyed, others will be given wigs in various shades and styles; many of your noses will require lengthening by pros-thesis; we’ve already gone ahead and rounded up their six pairs of glasses, frames we’ve refitted with new lenses, nonprescription…and then — and this is why you have to stay in shape and not get pregnant, or menstrually bloated, bellyfat and soft — if all else fails as His sisters, we’ll revert to your normal shiksa states, you Marys blond and blue, allAmerican, you’ll forgive me…I’m getting ahead of myself.

You’ll follow my instructions, and Hanna’s example’s what I’m saying, are we understood?

Lips lilt sibilance in the suspiciously affirmative, then giggle…that’s your first mistake, she says, your last — in this family, no one ever answers when spoken to for the first time, not even for the second, or third; they ignore. Then they yell themselves again even louder.

Now quiet down and pay attention, watch; what you’re seeing is upper-upper-upper-middlemeans, it’s said, classwise not too bad though taste is often the reversal of fortune — we’re talking six figures just a promotion away from partnering seven, with smart investment…late period Assimilation is it, and this despite the ostensibly religious nature of the event, the occasion Hanna’d call it, less a celebration than an observance, a catered cultic rite: the Israelien parents attending a function, was what Israel would’ve said, an hour after the synagogue, and so not a mitzvah bar or bat, but a wedding kashered with the ketubah, the contract writ upon the chuppah, which is the marriage canopy, then the heel that signs the break in glass: a wedding of whom it isn’t known. Whether family, most likely that of friends.

Allegedly, the videographer had a problem with the sound — I’m sure the lawsuit would still be alive, if they were.

CUT to the elevator, mirrored, marbled, its grand entrance, expected, that of the inlaws — or already the guests of honor finished with their quiettime snuggling sequester, the tradition of their intimate room, its connubial consummation…they’re lost or only unfocused, dim and rangy in this hall as if it’s unwalled, gorged on adornment, to dizzy, to right and steady now — lavish like ten, twelvegrand a night lavish, posh even far past the sofas, the divans and skirted chairs, the glossy white lacquer of another, different piano in the upper righthand corner, then a zoom past morbid flowers, the lilies bluepurple, occidentally called stargazers, Lilium orientalis, tightlipped white roses, they seem frosted sprigs of grass set in vases of glass so delicate, so fragile and thin, that to pour water in them would shatter all, it might; a mensch and his queenly wife head themselves like she’s his daughter, too, a princess if only for the day, the night, the happy arrival of the bride and her new husband, groomed again after that moment or so left alone in which to remember each other, today’s purpose, that and to break their fasts on one another, with snapped fingers and arrowed tongues…the bride and her father, or the parents of the bride or parents of the groom, they’re rethinking in how apart they are, alone, how it’s impossible to know them in their making their rounds, their public faces, the outward, untoward smiles, them receiving blessings, kisses, hugs in their seven circumambulations they’re counting through the lobby then a right through a doorway and breathlessly on, into another hall; she whoever travestied in a fresh clump of chiffon, him schlumpy however resplendently remade in bleached teeth and loosened bowtie, they enter the mix, become the swirl, apparently already intoxicated, as drunk as the camera, handheld then even with tripod, jerky.

Inside, the tables are stacked with numbered placards, each area of them the family and friends, the coworking congregant strangers completely separated by a host of diaphanous screens decked in blue & white, the color scheme of the evening: Royal and Virgin to match the drapery, the tablecloths, the swaddled chairs backed with flighty silver bows, napkins ringed with gilding, the florid centerpieces, the bride’s dress, shoes, and purse — what does a bride need a purse for? especially when the line for handing over the enveloped and carded checks terminates with a bag held by this immense, unsmiling Palesteinian securityguard, onloan from the local skyscraper of the groom’s employment, his father’s, hers. Then, this not quite matchcut, back to glimpse Hanna across from that wife, or that daughterwoman, secondwife or ex, secretarylover among maybe fifty, sixty others circledancing, a paralegal hora; the groom up in a chair its legs unsteady in the unsober hands of best menschs; the bride holding a napkin its other corner held by him…Hanna holding hands with all these women circling women circling woman, of diverse ages and affected lives, the ravages of an aging time, its effects evident in the very faces of these dervishly circling feminine clocks, their hands clammed, their chests panting a mad heart’s tick, a pill’s tickle, wild now that they’ve managed to just themselves squeeze in, ringing off the inner enclosure of celebrants with their arrivals, fillingout the edge of its sacred courtyard, from the predatory perimeter pace of the minority waiters just beyond: they’re like dangerous foreign beasts, they can’t help it, like wellfed, sweetbreathed lions; how they’re all paws proferring their offerings of appetizer, trays of wieners, kabobs speared through on toothpicks of every rainbow’s hue; wraps, fingersandwiches, God! I hope you didn’t miss the stirfry, the meat and mixedvegetable; carvingstations heap blood to the left, savory altars.

To the right, three suited kinder loiter around an endtable splashed with a pinch of glitter, strewn with straws gnawed twisty white and soiled linen napkins, a surface used only to hold drinks both empty and not quite, interred glassware, alcohol displaced, discarded on the way to a drink ever fresher, a thirst new and on the rocks; sipping the remnants, they forsake the cold buffet for the hot microphone and into it mouth greetings foul to their hosts, private profanity, injokes; their younger brothers wave, make scrunched faces, make the twofinger alien ears devil horns antennæ sign, a resourceful panoply of other obscene gestures directed at the embarrassed bashfulness of their older sisters, half, a Shanda not their names but their very selves or at least their bodies, that they dance a dawdling shame with a number of older, balding menschs whose wives have already seated themselves at their assigned seats at their assigned tables and pout, moan, fight amongst themselves for possession of the plastic party favors, the Taiwanese novelty giveaways, grabbags’ swag, oversized sunglasses, glowing wizard wands. Favorite single uncles glide halfdistracted, smooth receding hair, combover, brusharound, pick at wedgies, loosen the knots of their neckties so as to give enough slack to hang themselves from the fans and fixtures in the event of extreme lonlieness or their paid escorts’ extravagant duress; other of their dates, these lesbian aunts, adjust their tight, waistteething undergarments with none watching save the assembled…a gape of mouths, set to drink, to eat and talk, with further drink to wash words down, without meaning save a warming gurgle, a bitchy burp; a fit of sneezes, croupy coughs, Gesundheit’s mouthed and thanked. A mensch obviously with the hiccoughs, his wife arrives at his side to scare him with a glass of seltzer; for her, an extra glass of ice to soothe her swelling, weepworn eyes, everything’s so wonderful, it’s just my luck, I dressed for a disaster. Other drinks more like melt are worryingly brought into balance, carried through the shot from the bar tended to upper left like the last standing wall of a godless Temple; interrupting conversations, occasional groupings of untuxed bowtie. Menschs in singlebreasts, doublebreasts, in threepieces, vested, invested to the fullest extent, as nothing’s ever optional: the invitation in one pocket, their placard placesetting in another. Who do you have to handle the divorce? You might keep me in mind.

A mensch arriving directly from work, a doctor oncall, or that lawyer returned from emergency court, an ambulance fetch turned vehicular homicide, a businesscard dropped on a woman’s toe resulting in severe hematoma; excusing himself to the bathroom to change into his dressier suit: one arm in his shirt, one out, one leg in his pants, one out, he’s halved and hurried to let his wife know he’s here, she hadn’t noticed. Another mensch standing in the last stall, then sitting almost naked: as he ate and drank he’d spilled and food fell from him and his fork and he stained his clothing, article by item; each time he’s so klutzed with drecky luck removing himself to the bathroom and there removing under the sink and then in the stall whatever clothing stained, first his bowtie then his cummerbund, upon which he’d spilled wine, then his shirt, which he’d taken off when he’d spilled on it gravy, then off with his pants when he’d dropped his knife on them to cut between the legs, and so there he sits much to the humiliation of his wife now hurrying herself on home for another pair, a spare, without even a full meal in him or a drunk in the cooling bathroom, barechested, wearing only his underwear, womanly soft and fat.

As for the women, their dress is formal and is called formal not for its style but for the way you have to wear it, seriously, straight of face, as a sarcastic smile or an ironic eye makes it seem all a laugh or flinch: two women in the same dress in different colors, two women in the same dress in the same color, two of them in different dresses in the same color, then many of them in many different dresses in many different colors, laughing blush into the ear of a mensch himself struggling to hear, and to make himself heard over the din with the cocktail hour soon becoming two and the string quartet only just finishing and then overtime, they’re union…halfheard gossip, metropolitan pretense, obnoxious, mingling with Siburbia’s frustrations, quaint to most, the grip and gripe of the flighty, fleeing Developments; the dinging of silverware on glass, stemware raised then drained; a dropped tray of plates the caterers had been made to rent from the synagogue because who can trust their kashrut, what a scam; as the quartet becomes a trio, a duo, then a cellist solo; in the lobby, the pianist takes over, tinkles away with pathos enough to the cloakroom, the bathroom wait, then gives out the Gershwin like it’s money: “It Ain’t Necessarily So” not necessarily slow, though loud enough to mask the last glass and porcelain swept smash sounding at the threshold, attracting the irked attentions of the father of the bride, finally, it has to be him with his fury and forehead, then a hundred bridesmaids, a nosegay of them the bouquet caught redhanded, redfaced, the event planner and the synagogue’s socialhall manager himself to stand around and shriek tongues as if cancelled checks at the help, enjoying themselves as much as the guests, maybe even more.

The help, they exist only in occasion, every day after night into morning’s cleanup and bagging detail, every sweeping function, life as event, as tidying up after those honored, never them. They’re tired, destroyed, just trying to save up enough to continue college, to pay off debts, loans and lovers; why not leave a tip: waiters, waitresses, tenders, and ushers who five nights a week observe only the happinesses of others, party strangers, are often even asked to participate, in saddening lieu of family or friends; they’re in all the period footage, with their hands heatscarred, with the same shiny knees and ragged cuffs and tarnished buckles, their upsets everfading, with the same listless, spent expressions for this woman in a purple minidress and pink mink stole her husband stole, how she seems to be invited everywhere, her husband not so much: an immodest neckline, her shoulders social out the ears, and, too, with an evident heft on heels so high her knees can’t breathe, a wisp of pearls she strangles with one stocky, shortfingered hand manicured in squoval, the other mauls a plate of miniaturized maize in a singularly nauseating glaze of sweet & sour…I shouldn’t, she mouths to a friend, I really shouldn’t, then crowding the tiered cake iced in her saliva: she’s on her diet again, for the love of a mensch across the hall not her husband but his brother who he holds a tumbler of water in his left, one of vodka in his right, or it’s the other way around, even he doesn’t know; they gesture lust to one another, the mating ritual of the properly insured, the sacred dance of the wellsalaried, choreographed just a step ahead of casting: all plates, knives, forks and spoons down to do the dance of the dividend, the propitiatory gesture of the seasonally bonused, yearended, quartered, the rump moves creditlined, lit and smoked with the mortgage burnt at candlelighting — them surging to the gathering of the now fed, drunk, cigarettebreaked orchestra after yet another set by the DJ whose idea was it to hire him, whose recommended references supplied…they’re playing our song, and, nu — have you heard the one about the Davidsons in B ? them liningup with their requests, fountainpenned on the napkins, linen and so costly, they’ll show up on the bill; the emcee finds a tambourine under a heap of fractured maracas; the hired dancer pulls a ham-string treyf; the plumed horses prance, knock knees, saddles slip to become leathern udders at which the magician’s bunnies suckle, they trip over each other to crash atop the impersonator and the caricaturist; the midget on stilts falls into the Vienna Table, rises to mime his survival. A glare passes over people shaking it to the silence ensuing: Hanna again, recognizable in reproduction, an embodiment of the eveningwear hangered off the rack in front of them at the front of this lesser hall — she’s busied tying a heliumed balloon within a balloon within a balloon to the back of her chair, while at the same time talking schools and teachers, standardized testing and homework tutors to her neighbor with the nose and portfolio, with the eyes observant, an orient of detail rumored, talented with such unkind acuity of gaze that could feel any face up and identify work, ID plastic surgery of what type and by which doctor at three counties’ remove.

A wide veer into the fray again, the throng: amongst menschs dancing with menschs, this we’ve seen, but now unscreened, with the partition fallen, irreparably, a flimsy, heelholed Oriental divider, it’s also women dancing with women and with menschs, too, at first their sons, then their husbands and then their husbands’ friends and partners, dancing together to silence as if a reproach to all that’s mutual and forbidden; to effect a congaline, an enactment of an earlier reenacted hat dance and chicken dance and grind, encored by a sliding of the body electric, more chairs and most glasses raised, as the toast’s roasted, burnt, there’s smoke from the kitchen and outside the chefs stand and bum cigarettes from the dishwashers and accountants. The elderly sit still, aloof, they dab at their eyes and disapprove, check their reflections in the blades of their knives, test the sharpnesses upon their thinning wrists and throats. An obstructed view, a hollow column faux Hellenistic draped in the colors of the evening, weathered with crepe streamery, the slow snow of confetti thrown, cast banished, fallen from heaven. At the periphery of this the final shot, an ice sculpture of a swan melts slowly: people slip, trip, and fall, doctors are summoned, everyone’s a doctor, everyone’s always a doctor or is always married to one, or else knows someone who is and is a lawyer, too; the rabbi soon enters, to sermonize an argument with the help arguing with the rabbi, who rudely interrupts himself only to nod to the bride’s father who hands him an envelope the rabbi weighs for a moment then pockets, turns himself around and stoops to say a blessing over the slipped, tripped, and fallen body there, the puddled mother of the bride; the bride herself now, it has to be jilting a jolt up to her father, her lips to marry his ear and whisper pained, confide, beseech, help me, save me, I’m a little girl again…she touches his wrist, he withdraws it quickly, looks at his watch, holds it to one ear, looks at it, holds it to his other whispered then looks again, shakes his hand in a frenzy, then shakes hands all around. The film flaps through, reels out onto the floor, and the woman, the one here in this hall and dressed in the clothes Hanna would change into, maybe, tomorrow morning or upon arrival home past worried, handheld twelve, too late for her and with indigestion also, decaf dessert heartburn and its hearthlike, protective warmth for the kinder with the older sisters tonight entrusted instead of Wanda or the regular sitter, unmarried, who’d been invited to this wedding, too, along with her parents who were cousins, don’t ask her how — the matron hurls herself forward as if vomiting, to heap it all in her lap, the memory, vain tradition’s lit command: to consecrate time and space and image if only to their own furtherance, even if it’s just for purposes as obscure as hers, as this…as dark, as evil; the wall beyond is washed in white, deloused into a purity, annulled.

Too early for morning, too late for regret, the air veined in lightning, the sun a clouded clot. Thunder. Gods are being born in the sky.

This is why we left the Garden and moved out to Siburbia, as we’re always explaining, most of all to ourselves.

My boy, look around you, listen, sniff the air and taste the bread your mother bought, you’re sure to understand: this is why we lit out, bringing only the candlesticks with us — why this dispersal to plot, this diaspora of the subdivision, such limitation of the eternal Development.

Our sages say the following:

If you have a house, you are safe. If you have a house with a lawn, you are safer; though a house with a lawn with a fence is still safest, with neighbors all around to tell you what is yours and what is theirs and to affirm that nothing will ever be both of yours, or no one’s. But if you erect a fenced and lawned house on an Island, you have only created another Garden — and so there can only be another Fall. The familytree will be uprooted. Apples will turn to waxen wood, becoming mere ornament atop the table. A chart of the ABCs will burn. Plush dolls will lose their stuff to rage. Limbs torn from toys. And even the toys shall be allotted toys of their own to neglect. The hobbyhorse, thou wilt be lamed. LMNOPee. The crib has been moved against the window to make room for the bed, whose bedding matches the carpet, which is pink, brightened by the sun coming in past the gauzy tongue of curtain. A cedar chair cushioned in a fluff of white by the door, which even if closed is always open. A son who trusts in locks is no son of mine. A woman sits atop the chair, knitting a bootie big enough for the thumb of God; she whispers to her boy, a lullaby for the waking. Benny Cenny Denny Schlaf. If a baby lives in a room, that room is called a nursery, the knob to its door a willing nipple. Suck it in, suck it up, He’s our kaddish. Talcum breath, with hands of cream, clasped in benediction. Keep quiet. Tiptoe an inside voice, He’s sleeping.

Without bells, or their jingling toll — the sleigh that’d brought Ben back from night and forest, its horrid, haunted, enchanted, and terrible wood, it’s a flatbed knockaround workhorse that’d been too rundown to haul a century ago; its wood unvarnished and splintering, it’s parked now in the garage below; its horselike dogs impounded from the pines romping puppy in the backyard, amid the snow of the sandbox overlooking the ice and the fieldstone, the gley and the marsh, the warehouses, the fallen stockyards and trafficlights wavering slow yellow in the wind. Across the ice, dawn rises to a vantage upon Bergen and Communipaw Cove, silence rents to own; a railway terminal with its switches abandoned, the grids of the parkinglot like empty graves stood sentry over by leaning watertowers, the lowing overpass of the holy drainage ditch, baptism by the irradiating verd of sludge — the skyways arching over the fallen industrial gardens of Joysey as if they’re the rainbows of a million different covenants, each fulfilled only at the deadend of the asphalt and its prismatic stains of oil in the miracle that is the city, founded to last any Apocalypse, as secular as steel.

What a view, what a nightmare, Joysey and west, the Palisades; a mountain risen from the receding of the waters below, only to be frozen by those above, that crystalline breathless sustenance of window — glassing the gaping mouth of house and, too, the unspoken dreams of those who live within. Who lived. Understand, this is how we once spoke of dream, both as a visitation of the night and as the mark we hoped to make upon the forehead of the day. Of what did I dream now not a concern of the prophets but of the failures among us, those who would never own to a home. Above the window there’s a banner, cardboard, one end of which hangs low to the sill from a tack that’d lost its dig into wall. Mind it. In retrospect, this banner reads like crank prophecy, as if the first words mumbled after a darkened sleep.

Mazel Tov, it says—It’s A Girl!

As the sun makes her face, the woman rises slowly, failing to countenance a litany of joint ailments from the weakly kneed chair — don’t get up for her sake; no, really — she’ll be fine. His mother, with her dress taken in too tight under the breasts, the wig askew and all too black, makeup smeared as if yet another face fallen from the face she leans to light His own, to kiss Him awake upon the lips.

Come downstairs, the hallway calls in a voice, if not hers then whose — it’s brunch.

Better, it’s that dream Ben’s been having, that’s been having Him: one eye fluttering, one two three then, poof — she’s gone like never was. Only a wisp of skirt, a flash of heel, a taste of tongue, then nothing…His sisters, too, and father, them and their promises made. Any other morning upon waking — to rise an immediate rush down the hallway to their room as if expelled from the Paradise that is sleep, banished forcibly forever from its rest and so condemned to wander an eternity down the deserted halls past the mirrors and windows draped, and the framed photographs, too, and the shoescuffed, handprinted walls whiter than ash being the death of ash, the rooms of His sisters their doors shut, locked even and the carpet between them what’s patterned in stellated hexagons of blue on white down to its other end and the humpbacked trunk that floats there, the treadle sewing machine antique and decoration only aside the top goatskinned, meeklegged table topped with a vitric but plastic vase of baby’sbreath, its icewhite blooms seasonally intermarried with an abundance of lavender hydrangea made in Asia, crowded around with the silence of unread books, a stray shoe this loafer, a pair of His father’s old glasses, wireframed round and without lens, a forgotten, shattersheathed thermometer, a bowl of shells from beaches south…then, a quick last left to the door and He’d open it into another temperature zone, the alternate universe of a thermostat no one was ever allowed to know, let alone touch. It’d be freezing in there; His breath would come like shvitz, to take the air like faces. To lie down at the edge of their bed, which is made and empty, which was always made and always empty, and there on the pillows that still smell of her hair, His mother’s skin’s comforter, too, discomforting, in that it still feels like her legs and arms, to pray for sleep again. This was a week, had been. His sisters would have been up for hours. His parents, forever.

And then to sleep there at the foot of their sleeps between their twin nightstands topped with more books, yearold magazines, and the forfeited frontpage of the newspaper, their wedding photographs and telephones their cords tangled with those of the lamps and the 06 blinking 59 clocks, it’s another dream: to lift the shroud on another night, this different from all other nights…a maid’s wifely sheet, He peeks — and there’s a woman, standing just outside the lone wide window of His parent’s room, this great green monster in the robe His mother mourned the night when she, and that other time that, the once then don’t forget…O to be born too late for memory, waterswaddled, as naked as metal. Liberty’s her name. He stands on His Island next to hers. They match. Are twins. They’re just friends. Good friends. They’ve been married by the moon. Tell the truth, they’ve been forbidden from each other. It wouldn’t work, won’t, not to say it never does.

A love, it’s this…Ben and her, they never touched, they couldn’t have, can’t: His arms are too short and hers, they’re holding stuff. A book. A torch. Commandments. In reward for their keeping, an icecream cone of ten scoops, their flavor’s bronze, and its melt, molten — who knows to ask, who would ask to lick. Anyway, she couldn’t speak, never did. She’s without tongue as if guilty, He can never look her in the eyes. His are shut, He’s sleeping. Still. To be born too late for waking. Sh. He’s pretending. All night, they’ll drift further away from one another, then far beyond the dream. And then one morning — her crown will be the sun. A gloriole. Another day.

To sleep here always, forever in your own bed — your childbed, your deathbed; to rise up and lie down day after night in His own room as if in the very house He’d been born in, on its table a floor below. And that it is. Joysey or near enough, still within its jurisdiction, the judging throw of a stone from a strong hand, of an arm outstretched to Manhattan and its water iced. To wake always and run to Ima, which is what He would’ve called Hanna, to hug at her breasts and kiss upon them nipples, never again. Forget any finding His father already left for the office, Israel in depositions early, high in Midtown, trying every courthouse from Centre Street down to Camden, a dreaded arbitration in Secaucus; out to try a client in Coney Island seeking to sue Berlin for nightmares at midcentury…then, His sisters — never again to tug their hair in a row down the hall: I’ve got your nose, a quarter from His ear. Home is where the heart is, it’s said, and there imprisoned, criminal, beaten. The doors to the outside have been locked. Ben lies in His bedroom, and even sleeping aches. In what seems His house to the final detail, the most thoughtful ornament, the voweled adornment last. Down to the lost sock strewn His room, His nursery’s what they’d called it, His parents, it should be, should’ve been, way back Turnpike to the Parkway south and exits further — a bedroom that’s His and isn’t, relocated a mile or so north of the Great Hall at the edge of the Garden, an Island ringed in ice, with a sheet of freeze paving from here to shore in reflection of the appled lights.

Ben’s slept naked, His Klansmensch uniform’s been washed, bleached of vomit, dreck accumulated, has been dried, pressed, is hung in one of Israel’s garmentbags, draped over the hutch of the desk too crowded with clutter to work: birthcertificate, photos for a miscarried passport — this uniform the only estranging item, the only touch not to be found in the original remade.

All of a sudden, hazily, halfway between eyes shut and up, there’s a hold of alarmclocks, thirteen of them ringing halls at once — and so, finally, to rise Himself to silence. His sisters’ schoolday warning, to begin their waiting for the coldest shower. Ben’s shvitzy, feels like oy. He rolls around, grinds the sheet of a foreskin into the bedsheet, fumbles for the glasses He’d been born with. He finds them, stumbles out the door toward the sirens, hanging a right and into the bathroom first, His and His alone intended, even if His sisters would still be alive and requiring an emergency toilet, in which He proceeds to wipe eighteen minutes from the earth — life’s ritual already, routine. He pisses salutiferously, to greet the day with health, this steaming stream, to foam wild drops on seat and floor the purest white. To shower in an excess of scald, hot water over then lukewarm, to towel Himself; hot water the one true luxury in the Israelien house: how they’d bought a dysfunctional heater from a relation, Hanna’s, an uncle; with fourteen then fifteen before one in the house, pleasurable showers had been miracles, like sunrises — you had to get up early, or else outgrow them. To the mirror, now, to shave the face of its growth. He slices Himself, wads, washes. Adolescence is to remain with Him, a shadow’s shade. Pimples congregate, constellate as acne. He airs His pores to puss then sucks His fingers. No shame in that, no loss — all will have stubbled back by nighttime. He doesn’t yet scrub His teeth, abstains from flossing — that’s left for after brunch. What’s cooking, what’s not: there’s another noise from downstairs, between the smashing rings, the ding ding bells, an oven’s timer’s rattle…

And that burning smelly taste, a crash of tongue in mouth.

In only a robe, His mother’s and her voice, then that ringing still. Ben heads downstairs, stopping on the way in the rooms of His sisters, vacant, and then that of His parents, too, to silence their alarms — rooms all empty now of nothing save them, that that gave these possessions their utility, their use and so, their meaning: personal effects already unpacked, replaced, dusted more inclusively than Wanda ever was able, was ever bothered: their teddybears, who remembered their plush petnames; pillows hugged into the shape of hearts, desktops of plastic dinosaurs, above a shelved abundance of junior encyclopedias, dictionaries; on the walls, their school certificates and diplomas with the signatures of adults responsible, principal, superintendent; posters and playbills from the shows up on Broadway, they loved them; like that spectacle with the cats, and that sad extravaganza, Phantom Fiddler on the Roof of the Opera. A silence totaled with His parent’s and their unit, Hanna’s — Israel never used an alarm, could never sleep; he used a clock to tire not to rouse. Ben makes His way down the hall to the stairs, which darken, why so closed, so much space and claustrophobic — with its windows draped in tarpaulins, no views afforded of outside, He’s kept slept from any vista.

And so with a trepidant hand, Ben lifts a shroud and through its pane below beholds…no, let’s not think about that just yet — hymn, let’s eat first, get a little food in us and, nu, then we might be in a position to think things through, a city…clearly. All the photographs along the stairwell have been draped as well, along with the mirrors, as if in mourning — then that other sound again, which rang itself between the shrilly weltering calls, still rings: on the way down the stairs, that din, the hum, of noises, alarms lesser in volume if more immediate in threat: the sounds of drilling, of hammering, sawsawing…at the foot of the stairs, this team of workers redrilling, rehammering, reawing, some; others resanding, restaining, repainting; in the kitchen as Ben greets them without word, only the mute of a nod unre-turned, them in their overalls, with their muscles and dim, seriously straining faces — rerepainting, as Hanna’d just done it, had had it done what, six months ago, maybe seven; some of them working as high as prosecutable up on the forbidden rungs of stepladders, others taking their breaks with schnapps, cigarettes, and foreign food. That’s that smell, the smoke. He walks along the kitchen edge, past the furthest island counter, the bathroom and its soft cry, a ply of whimper…there’s a rap, stifled — He tries the door, it’s locked.

Who’s there?

It’s a ringing to drown a moan, then at that other door, but which, too many — there’s a knock, knocked sharp and mean. And not at the side or porch, but at the front, which is never and peculiar, and so leaving the handle and the end of that hall, its door down toward the garage, Ben makes to answer through the kitchen, around its unperturbed workers, the long way, the touristic, scenic route…He can’t bear this gettingbearings, but its freedoms are intriguing. Nothing much has changed, though: His house had always been a switchboard, the nexus of all calling. Always strangers getting in touch, checking up and catching. I’m here to install, I’m here to fix, I’m here. Though Ben had only known it for a week, it’s His, this kitchen He’s wandering through, His mother’s Hanna’s open to disarray, the innards of each drawer spilled, exposed if meticulously — scandalous, that there’s nothing much to hide…a quick ragging, a rash of appropriate towel. It feels almost too — what, an excess perfected, of what even the most attentive maternal might accomplish, almost an onscreen test kitchen, like up on the television, now again set high above the livingroom, the den, without signal. I’m here to hook up, I’m here to put you online, I’m not sure why I’m here. Dingdong cable babble. A store display of home appliances, it retails as, and so to make it home again He passes His hands over it, the formica just wet from sponging — sponged by the same brand used exclusively in the Israelien household, endorsed posthumously by Hanna, only ten shekels, and only at Wiltinghills. Then the cabinets, opposite the counters milk, opposite the counters meat, with the middle mediating digestion of the pareve prep marble, once again stocked with sticky wicks with candles at their melt, the spices to the right and left, the Kiddush of the cups — the fourteen of them then the fifteenth, His, to’ve been gifted to Ben though only after that pleonast procedure, graillike lost the bris. As if to say, thanks for letting us cut you kid, here’s a cup for your troubles, as silver as money…a yarmulke, don’t wear it all out in one place — you’re good people, you’re golden, let’s do this again. Arranged as if never moved upon their wedding present tray: the large cup hath His father, His mother’s lesser cup, which’d both come with the set, initialed, dated, then the twelve ones in declining size of His older sisters; guests had drunk their Kiddush from ordinary glasses, impressively fluted within the cabinet next. Israel, he’d make the prayer — would bless the bushels crushed, drink then pour out the wine to His mother, and only then to the cups of His sisters, who’d argue about who’d get poured first, would ambush their father with viney whines, but first was always Hanna; they all wanted the wine that’d touched his lips, needed the exact liquid that’d tasted mouth and then receded, Aba, kvetching with such determination it’d been difficult to second guess, or twelfth.

In reflection, He goes to take His from the shelf, the smallest of them all at rest upon the highest. Just about to reach, there’s again that announcing flurry, a ring of fingers many and funning: dingdong the knockknock of a little fisty joke.

Ben makes His way from the kitchen, past the dishwasher running bum chug and warm, the dryingracks, then the toaster and the breadbin; ignoring the workers as they’re ignoring Him, as they’ve been ordered, not to speak, avert their eyes and mouth — how they’re behind schedule, everything took longer than expected, the plumbing, the wiring, you’re not the only one with problems. Him to stop, too, alongside the pantry, which is having its door hinged on screws gone stripped to nails: with Him old enough already to have favorites, they’re all already stocked, cereal flakes sogproofed, puffed rice and sugared wheat boxed nicely neat, nutritious; a worker’s hauling in the fridge, the upstairs unit, with another following him with two troughs of what was in it, should be still; photographs depicting their arrangements on the shelves mounted due diligence in an album lying open on the stovetop. Milk went bad. And so to mother another carton one percent. He makes His way around the recessed table: salt, pepper, then the holder which sister — Isa, Asa — had made for napkins, baked from the clay from which we all are formed: a worker walks over, around Him, and unobtrusively grabs a handful from a bag, arranges them white and fanned as Ben turns into the hall to the front, finally opens the door unlocked.

The alarm’s been reinstalled but not yet set.

And there beyond the mat that says Shalom, streaming down the stoop and out into the lawn’s snow disturbed only by their shuffling, waiting nervously after their sure troop up the path as if they’re nearly adjusted already, they’re having to be — to the Island, their new boots just broken in and the weather that’s flogging, the death and its memory’s enslavement — there’s a cluster of boys, the oldest of the group of 12-&-unders, about to become barmitzvah, sons of the commandments, give them time. They’ve been woken only to be rescheduled, assembled, then remanded this morning to welcome — they’re dressed appropriately, be sure of that; each of them holds a metal glint, a shovel or a spade.

One of them, he’s the smallest, the littlest of them all with it makes sense the largest, roundest head: he heads the group, his hands in mittens in his pockets, that head a conceit beaked freakishly high…you haven’t been introduced yet, my apologies — then the rest still massing impatiently behind him, so many now, it seems that they’re thousands and more seething from slat to slate up through His frontyard from the fence and its tiny sidewalk strip, the slabs poured only yesterday and already frozen dry: boys uniformed in thick down coats and woolen hats, mittens, gloves, and scarves — they’re here to pay a courtesy call, we were just in the neighborhood.

From them that smallest one steps forward onto the mat, wipes his feet, shakes from himself the fallen snow.

He offers out his mitten with a smile — and Ben, He can’t help it, grips and pumps.

Shalom, he says.

What I mean is, good morning.

Behind him, the boys jape quietly to themselves but together it’s a roar, an avalanche. And soon, they’re heeling up the snow and hissing smoke…yelling Over here louder, each time more willful, dropping flies and pants and pissing from their snips their names and other cursive curses into the whiteness underfoot: the culprits are soon smacked down with shovels to collapse, to make their angels in the day’s light, young and yellow; others, they’re tossing balls and sledding on their shovels back down toward the fence, through its opened gate and further sloping over asphalt toward the Great Hall: a few snowballs hit the siding, spangle windows, around the opened door, and the kid still standing there turns from Ben, glares back at his friends with a yarny finger to his lips, shrieks for quiet, silence; almost immediately, they all turn whispering and sullen mulling: their faces redden, nip blushed, though that might only be the cold. Another moment stilled, and one taller, skinnier kid, him more mature than the others, or only more obeying, respectful of authority, it’s said, or only open to suggestion, he sighs and with its coughing end kicks his shovel down. At this, they all fall in, arrange themselves and with only scattered moans and demonstrative grunts stoop to their first load, tossing the snow to the lawn’s edges, over the picketfence the length of half a block and off the curb, begin their disordered clearing.

I’m Adam, the kid begins again, turning and straining up to face His lean against the scrollmarked jamb, Adam Steinstein…your name I already know, who doesn’t — Israelien, it’s nice to meet you.

Ben waves him come in, come in, what else to do…it’s the birthright of Hanna’s hospitality, an apology for the mess inherited — He leads him inside, asking feel like a bite of brunch?

Thoughtful but no.

Just dropping by to check in, Steinstein begins babbling, how you’re getting along…as if he’s trying to remember how he is himself — that’s wonderful, everything to your liking, and my what a beautiful robe…from down the block, you know, I’m new in town and yadda; it’s painful, this kid trying so hard, and why. Help me out, Ben, I’m supposed to be your friend. He follows Him in through the hall past the coatcloset, then to the kitchen’s nook, the table where Hanna had always received her guests informal, though today more like sloppy, slobby, filthing; them taking their seats opposite each other, across the round — the kid’s still in his coat and boots, has tracked in dirty snow over the mat without wiping, then over the tile to melt the frozen mud in tiny prints, where’s Wanda?

Your friend, Steinstein says again, yours: they asked me to be, last night, then they told me to be, I admit it, damn it…I can’t keep secrets, especially from you — we can’t have any secrets from each other, we’re supposed to be too close. They said: make nice, find out what He likes, baseball, chess, what have you…and as Steinstein talks he takes from a pocket of his pants a fold of shredded white, then removes the lick of paper inside, lays it on the table. Ben scratches Himself in the crotch. Says Steinstein, I’m no good at this, no good…they slipped me an envelope, under my pillow while I was out yesterday at meals. And then a note atop the pillow. It said, check under your pillow. Thanks, I thought, I did. I found this and opened it, no choice. Neither do you, while I’m at it. And I’m curious, no aveyra. I’m no expert at opening envelopes…I don’t unseal, I rip, I tear. Excitable, I guess. I’m not proud. It’s a check. For services rendered. Pay to the order of, it says, zero zero over a hundred and signed…but what I want to know is, how the hell am I supposed to cash it?

Steinstein is small and smart and healthily pale, with a ready receptivity and openness as if the whole world’s his for the having.

Tell me, what are you into, what’s your thing, relevant hobbies, interests, sports and girls, your shteyger…he’s innocent, inexperienced, all that recommends if you’re into it, the openfaced, the openpalmed, have mercy. Quick and happy to be in a house again after a week or so spent bunked. How old are you, and what grade are you in…what’s on teevee, have you recently taken any vacations whether alone or with the family? I’m lonely myself, I miss my mother. Steinstein, where He’d heard that name before He can’t recall…almost impossible that He could’ve, He thinks, as he’s Texas, Steinstein says, and as to exactly where within that enormity he says to everyone from Houston by which everyone should understand a exurb thereof, safe and removed and he knows it, too. Faroff, ranging. In his eyes, which are full plate round, as if headlights, or like those of the wildlife his father’s truck would hit and run and kill: the guileless, alienlike eyes of a boy who’s been allowed to develop an interest in anything, who’s been always encouraged, supported with hugs, kisses, and creditcard, clubbed silver, gold, sky’s limit. His mouth and ears are open only to the speaking and hearing of his own. And his skin, the skin of a boy who’s spent his entire short life inside. Amid the airconditioned. Here, the heating’s pulsing, coming steaming up from baseboard. They sit close to one another with the napkins in the middle and the salt and pepper shakers and the check. Their intimacy the immediate brotherhood bond of the fortunate, that of those bred to be mutually understood, understandable to one another and, also, to their God. It’s obvious, pitifully, that nothing’s ever been denied him, not even his dissatisfaction, not even the forthcoming brag: I’ve never wanted, how I’ve been totally without need until now. Nothing denied him, that is, with the exception of the darkness: the community of those who hate even their own conspiracies of hating, with their Development plans sixmillionpointed, both bulleted and less violently conspired — from lynch murder on down to forbidding you the favor of their sisters. All mostly memory, though, a telling: how my grandfather had found it difficult to find a house, a store; they’d burn crosses on his lawn and pinch his wife. As Steinstein talks, Ben less listens than stares at his teeth, it’s impossible not to: those white perfect drops of bone, like mints to sweeten the tongue and breath. And with his hair perfectly styled, slicked. His nails, pared round, refined. It’s envy, a jealousy they both understand, an animal covet: as Ben’s so obviously special, to Steinstein then to others more powerful than him what with their governments and money. Despite their mutual birthright, because for however short the kid had had a life. What’s it been, thirteen years. And Ben, born only weeks ago. A family loving, or if not that then living, even if Steinstein’s parents had been divorced and his sister she’d married Baptist. Possessions he could break. Relationships and shtum. Steinstein had had other friends before.

Workers are finishing up around them, coiling the cords to drills, folding up their stepladders. A last team’s accomplishing the filling of the final high kitchen cabinets aside those of the finery, the flutes and sacral cups, the pitchers fancy and plain, silver polished only to dull, in the reflection of the vases Sabbath and weekly still awaiting their flowers, always, those for the hallways’s plinths and tables and those of pink plastic for use on the porch, above the webworked, gluehandled mugs for Hanna’s afternoon tea, Israel’s crapulous coffee dawn, rows of them with their handles arranged out displaying wonderful logo to the sides: I Heart My Aba, Wakawaka Securities—His father had gotten that one for free, as a special gift to our valued investors—First International Plenary Session on Lead Insult, which’d been held down in Atlanta, or maybe that was Texas, too, Dallas/Fort Worth, who remembers with Israel dead and nothing remaining save the giveaway junk, ask Steinstein. Two workers left, they’re removing what’s still to be removed from its swaddling, stocking future Kiddush into the cabinets beneath: the bottles, his father’s blood glassed in glass and boxed in wood, his Shabbos wine; Rothschilds, Carmels without bouquet, Herzogs and many Schewitz’s, too many of them red and white and blushing both, watered down, which was Hanna, who didn’t like gouty Israel to indulge, wouldn’t much encourage. Steinstein and Ben try their best to ignore them as they finish up and leave, disappear, some upstairs-upstairs, others to partially unfinish the basement below. All this help and still no brunch, no morning food and drink, it’s unexpected. A perplex. What’s the meaning, the purpose, how we’re both too young for that. Whatever happened to the life that a house like this would’ve promised, should’ve, we were sure. Negligible, perhaps, but it’s no small thing to feel secure. Here this Steinstein sits unknowingly in the seat of His father, Israel if he’d ever make it home from work in time for sitting, Ben in what sister’s He’d never know, them both just waiting to be served, they’ve never served themselves: everything’s always come to them, kept coming, was given, handedover; the placesettings, the where and who ate first and talked and daydescribed, in order, the culinary cosmology of courses and the breakages of silence, of bread and bad news, the table on the floor flooring the basement sunk deep to ballast a house on an Island, now uprooted, dispossessed; how they’re islands themselves, made victims again of splitting water and historical weather — and yet with such knowledge stolen from their brothers dead for sharing amongst they who would survive so chosen all Steinstein can give Him is this I’m lonely shtick, saccharined tea I miss my mother spieling, the coffee creamed and sugary snivelfather…him gesturing with his hands as if this isn’t his native language (this tongue and, too, his giddy innocence within it), asking Him what kind of name’s Israelien, Ben that’s short for what — saying, I’m just so excited about my upcoming barmitzvah…

I’m excellent at math, and once played a solid outfield.

Then Steinstein springs up — he can’t sit still and won’t stand for it, what his mother used to say — to make his way through the kitchen finished since and emptied of workers to pace in place opposite the mirroring fridge at the edge of the hall to the stairs: to open it on his ownsome, the fridge then the freezer adjoining and then the fridge again, there ransacking around for a moment then shutting the door so helpless. You know how it goes…the fridge’s full, and there’s nothing left to eat. He turns to Ben and smiles, blushing, I have to meet the rabbi soon, I’m supposed to be studying. He pauses, thinking: I’m supposed to stop by, supposed to say hello…I’m supposed to do so much of everything that you’d think my parents didn’t die, like everybody else’s. It’s all the rules without inducement, like what’s the benefit of being good anymore, what’s in it for me. I mean, look at the check. Eighteen dollars, can you believe. Cheap schmucks. I’m not a kid anymore, thirteen soon enough though I’ve lost track of days. I was once a Pisces. He turns to the display digitally greened on the panel of the microwave. Is that right? They even set the time? On the wall in the hall above a countertop with the telephone, the pads and pens, the calendar’s still tacked on to December, the twentyfifth is circled Bris; next week’s the dentist for Liv, then the optometrist, or maybe the opthalmolgist what’s the difference they always ask and their parents have to explain even though they’re not quite sure what besides more money and more schooling, with Rubina to head to Florida with friends for the New Year, a friend’s grandmother out in Boca or South Beach, they forget but maybe trust her. Rabbi Schneer, Steinstein’s talking as he flips through the weeks, their ribboned Monday to Sunday days still in their boxes, wrapped in blank for the mourning — you know him, he’s short, like about my height and always with the hat. And fat. Bad teeth. Insists on his ordination, swears he had a mega pulpit, though word is he was only a chaplain; you know, like he prayed for the Army. He has me going over the letters, the words…my speech, he calls them prepared remarks: Welcome one & all, I’m supposed to say, strangers & survivors…he’s quick with the praise, knows to keep it interesting with chocolate candy. Steinstein, a wonder — they gave him God and he goes and finds his own belief, a faith to keep Him going. His mother always said he was a good boy. He’d been the king of the eighth grade.

He stares Ben in the face, searching out His eyes, the watery, venous empathetic.

What do you think’s next — for us, I mean, a future?

We studied this the other day, and he’s twitchy, scratching himself a rash on his neck: that we’re the last of our kind, and that we don’t have any women, not anymore, they didn’t have to tell me that — that our women were what made more of our kind of our kind; they made us, they made us us. Steintstein leans back against the counter. Affiliated, what’s that supposed to mean? What do they expect from me, Affiliation? He turns to wander, not back toward the brunchnook, the lox and capering cranny, but out into the hall and around the house. Forcing himself to perk, don’t forget to smile. Show me your room, he says, your parent’s, everything — him even venturing down into the basement as Ben waits His shame at the stairhead to be told what’s to be found down there, then taunted because He’s afraid though gently. Upstairs again, talked out. Bored already in his mandate, his curiosity thoroughly discharged. Steinstein peeks into the familyroom, pokes into the livingroom, take the given-room, the den, grabbing from its mantel and tables framed photographs of His sisters, feeling them up in his hands and so getting his smudging prints on their glasses as he fills them out, too, in his mind, with his hands, tilting to light up skirts, then facing down as if to pocket waists and shadowed cleavage, to steal their images and so, immortal souls, making rude insinuations with his lips he apologizes for with the flirty lashes of his eyes. His eyes black, with theirs a flashy red. At Ben’s approach, he replaces them disordered but turned to the wall, then settles on a sofa alongside a scatter of last month’s unopened mail to tap a foot and wait.

In time, a telephone rings in the house, all extensions, and Steinstein’s startled, flushes…there’s a far voice — who is it…is it for me, and Ben would answer but the receiver gives only tone.

Steinstein rises to meet Him in the hall hanging up, then the two of them head together toward the door.

Again it’s the front, through which no intimate guest would pass whether in entry or exit.

Steinstein saying it’s been fun…actually, really, I had a good time, great to meet you.

And Ben says thank you and you’re welcome both, He’s not sure which might be appropriate.

He opens the door for him: the stoop’s descent to the lawn and its edging drive before snowedover, now cleared, and cleared of the firstborns, too, who are boys no more though working still. A brotherhood of the frozen, they’re more like white themselves, less boychicks young and healthy than a stranger species of globoid mutant idol: frost babies swaddled in a wasting crystal flak. His new friends, apparently, they’re supposed to be, though He recognizes none of them, why would He: these firstborns turned rolypoly, fattened with freeze, though still laboring with shovels, having saved the stoop and the path of slate and the double driveway of asphalt toward the triple garage from the very substance of which they’re presently made; the tripartite snow that rounds their legs and stomachs and their greatglobed, roughhewn heads…the flurry that holds their arms of gnarled sticks, that steadies them and their wet, tenpronged leafless twigs. Each of them is a making of three huge hunks of weather, all of them piled atop one another then packed hard and dense into a mensch; fraternally frosted golems drifted into animation, they’ve been made and put to work then destroyed, too, then remade again by the wind gusting thickly, pitiless; or else on orders of, maybe, a gesture of goodwill. They’re rolling low to hurriedly heave their last spadefuls, to scoop the final white away while savaging for themselves a handful only, a meager ball, a fruit’s mere clod this modest dig, with which to repack themselves ever tighter to withstand work’s unmaking winter, and to survive, also, the lowing, rolling effort of their shift. To rummage through the plastic inside the rubber, amid the trashcans rowed and stowed under a shingled hutch to the side of the house — in frantic search of button eyes, noses of broken parsnip, turnip ears, a mouth of scrapped tinfoil. The garbage rebagged, recanned. Trash taken out again for another pickup. To shovel the snow to the troughs of the sledges waiting just beyond the fence’s gate, which are then hauled by dogs far out from the Island and onto the ice that’s stilled the vale of Joysey, its hardened wetland rim — there to firm the icy stuff into the forms of other boys, companions: inanimate, whitefaced godlets; survivors made in the image most familiar…to ward off the crows, the flightless boredom, unwinged idle.

Steinstein takes himself down the carefully salted slates and out into the day, whistling as he passes through the fenced gate then greets with a soft Shalom and a tiny wave a small group of the larger, older boys — they once were. Snowmenschs now, working out toward the far rim of the lawn to the west, they’re bending at the knees, which are clumps of ice flexed warm with their effort, exhausting, the melt of falter, their heaving the little strip of Israelien sidewalk naked, their shovels scraping metal on tar giving way with the puddling of self to rubble into gravel: an access road approaching the Great Hall, the frontage of which has already been cleared and kosherly salted, too, to prevent a slip, a broken life. Rain is known: it’d caused the crops to grow as Eden, then Adam sent His widow Lillith out to bring in the sheaves of the harvest. These widows found us in the field and there they married us, and then we were made and grown. And the field became a lawn. But snow. As we are told, there are two kinds of snow. One is pure, it’s said, and the other that’s not. It’s from here that it’s understood, said in the name of forecasters to come. One kind is the stuff of the boys — the firstborns out early on a Sunday and working before brunch; it’s dense, it’s hard. As pure as it is real — an actuality, a world, its presence thorough, round and lasting. As for the other, impure kind — it’s the favorite blanket, the comforting coverlet, the falsifying dust. That both are white is a matter of discernment. Of discrimination. A test of our very soul. From discarnate darkness, a lightning vein, then a shriek of thunder — the entire world is lit. The bunched and bundled boys turn to face the east, the quarter from which weather issues, the womb of the stillborn sun. All glare their whitest purest faces. Ben stands at His door above His lawn, raising His eyes from Steinstein’s cautious path, the gate in the fence, which is little and without latch, the sidewalk then up to the heavens, up to Heaven. West, He’s turned away. To nail a lid to a windblown cloud. A knife cutting flash the furthest dim. Far becomes near, and has always been, or hasn’t: the beaches cold, picnicbaskets blown…the benches overturned, the boarded summer cottages — then, the tankers floating out in the slushy open ocean: their cargo, blood, drained. Liberty stands. Her torch holds the lightning, smoke. From its reach springs a pillar of fire.

We asked the questions — and anything they answered we questioned again and again. And this was how it worked for generations, in every land and in all its languages forever. Call it a parasitic symbiosis, call it Ishmael — just don’t call it late for dinner, was the joke. Some years, some centuries, were better than others. America, for one. The here and now, the recently at least.

For us, no questions were forbidden — they were all our sons, and however they were born to us we loved them; we brought them up without an image, letting them take whatever form they would. As for our firstborn son, we named him Why? In every generation, he’s born beautiful, which is forgivable, and brilliant, which can be forgiven, too, but he’s also born blessed and chosen, and so is hated by the world. As he is pure and peaceful, he’s killed and dies without a thought. In every generation. We are proud, and loud with grief, and so we mourn him by praying his own name.

Though Why? is never asked or answered, only said. Or else it’s both asked and answered, or neither and green, flint as much as diamond. This is where the difficulties begin, when the generations become tangled, ensnared — trippedup on marks of punctuation…interrogatories phrased falsely as pronouncements, prophecy no longer extolled from the mountaintop but whispered from the valleys, without authority, unsure. It’s that we have forgotten how to ask — how to bring into this answering world a boy who is Himself a question. And so what ensures survival is not to search for Why? but instead to search for others who also search for Why? then to embrace them, give them gifts and marry them off to our sisters. This is the only way to peace. In this way, we increase our inheritance, which are our generations — and soon the Why? it’s said, becomes less a search than a limb. And then less a limb than a germ — a gene. Passed down. Flung among. Reactive, it’s been said. In our day, this inheritance has been programmed for extinction. Traits come up for expiration. A breath — expired. Rumors abound. After their death, the world deals only with the second rate, trafficks exclusively amid the middling and managing, the niggling clerks, the bores and the hopeless…gone are the thinkers; remaining are only the losers, the gentile. Unspeakable, thy name is mediocrity. It’s the best they have. We might as well make do.

And did they ever make do! Garden, Inc., its president Der, with the approval then partnership of the Shade Administration selling stock in stock, in the drained blood of the Affliated to anyone who’d afford it; huge banks stored in the holds of those tankers anchored out in flowing water past the freeze, a haul of the consanguine made public, nominally, in concept — not that any of these shareholders would ever come into actual physical possession of so precious a commodity, but — the coffers cough, spit thick gobs of gold. Though the blood it’s just a portion, a peripherally profitable venture, of this government scheme only vaguely privatized within the icicled gates of the Garden to preserve for the powerful the merest assurance of plausible deniability — this project proposing to study the physiological and psychological conditions of the ingathered survivors, which means tests: the laborious filling out of forms by which they sign themselves away, assenting to all manner of invasive procedures not limited to the sampling of everything from everywhere, whenever, intensive patience tries, the trial withholding of approval, hat and shoetightening, protracted submersion within lukewarm water; damningly, the injection of miscellaneous fluids, spuriously saving plasmic transfusions, veined in the hues of the last rainbow ever to be hung sagging over Liberty scorched to the east.

A searching of a newer weather. Another push for Why? What made them die. Was it something I said. Or did something. Or didn’t say. I love you. I renounce and yadda. And all an opinion requires is an opinion observed previously. Experts in quotes. A gene, a genome, which is the congregation of genes — a community of their genomes, a Jnome, say. Expelled from the midst. Researchers with eyes blackened from microscopic squint. Bruised tongue with a funny bone. Selfdestructive encoding from the sixth day of Creation — lies dormant on the seventh, inherited on its night. Late abortion by a rib. One doctor DDS, and probably also disbarred from an earlier career as a lawyer and, though briefly, imprisoned — he thinks it a reaction to whatever they’d sustained themselves on, the kosher, kashering food. Another doctor DPM and moonlighting lately as an accountant, dissents. And so to convene another cenacle of scholars. Then wait. Ideas, the ultimate in waste. Tenured philosophers and metaphysicians of the Continental school feel it wasn’t death, couldn’t be — that they’d only disappeared. Absorption. An assimilation, intractable. Rashed out to another existence plane. Palpated hard to dimension the fourth. Is that the best you can do. Group shrug. Mass Hysteria the foregone conclusion of the Free University of Leiden, stemming from latent fear of insignificance, what’s the term in Latin. University of Chicago cites ideal incest with the air. Who knows. And who cares, decisively. Who can read let alone understand these reports coming in by the hour, might as well be bound in skin and stitched with hair; these journals stretching to an impenetrable six, seven hundred pages, with prettily unfocused pictures and blurry charts to graphs and tables the university presses did up themselves and backward as the printers have just begun converting to a new language right to left what with the multinational publishing houses broke and gone. Speeches are broadcast, but the microphones aren’t turned on. Anything but apathy, that’s the idea, the thinking mensch on the street — apathy the breathless cause, though, and not the effect; that they died of apathy, let’s say, and so the reaction to their death must be the opposite, whatever antipode sanctified: enthusiasm, maybe, for their rituals, for their traditions…initiatives initiated, mantles taken up, causes championed to great effect. Accumulating interest. And verily interest would breed regard, would breed affection, then love, which is the sworn enemy of hate. Theirs a hate that had been a hatred of the self, however, which was only a love that should in theory kill, but paradoxically preserved. If only for a time. Dialecticians having a field day in a new field, which is rutted, smutted — the frontlawn seeded only with morning frost. Each half of any dialectic like one of two vases, blue or white, or both, gifts from who remembers — an uncle’s aunt, though she’d been married to — which Hanna always hated but placed on the table in the diningroom anyway, because something had to go there, anything at all…

A passingover, perhaps…an angel of God forbid to even think of it, death Itself — no Moloching matter. Or so announces the Honorable Meir Meyer, Mayor of New York, on the basis of information supplied by his staff, interns and unpaid. A thesis if you’re feeling generous, we’re just putting it out there, giving gnosis. That, and a collective allergic reaction amid the greater congregation. Bad milk; mutated poison secreted in the previous generation’s lacteal unmissables. And then, it’s gossiped, that the firstborns, they might have been the first to claim their chosenness, but they’re not firstborns. Impostors. Stand in proxies. The latest generation of secundogeniture. Seekers of fortune, profiteers. Opiners opine. Public intellectuals publicize. A malfunction in the mechanism of infridge units of water purification, another. Tampering down at the plant, etc. A reaction theory advances a week, half a lunation, a triggering agent hidden somewhere molecular or other, rendering it innocuous for drink to pass the lips of those for whom the Law’s without cause. Dribble. Mere chin music. Then, a Section A’s last page retraction of an entire moon’s worth of coverage, letting the metro area know they can’t believe everything they read. Tabloid advertorials headlining mass starvation. Overconsumption. To burn like a bush. Or a parasite’s parasite. Autopsies reveal nothing. Milkmuscled meatus. Shrinks analyze the dead upon metal sofas. It looks like a Rorschach to me. Now close both eyes and tell me what you see. A panel of mediums flown in from Anywhere That Sounds Good. Only to find that the Affiliated — they’re still around, why shouldn’t they be; that they’d only transcended human form, went on to exist in a galaxy popularly referred to as Memory (subsequently identified as dwarf spheroidal 3600, type dE0, though disputed). Under the crust of the earth, alternatively, secreted deep in its core, waiting out their day. Talkingheads and yesmensching no. And always with those suits: drycleaners must be making a fortune; salesmenschs, distributors, suppliers. Still, what of selfdestruction. Hardwired martyrdom. Mutation of the urge to submit. Give in, give up, relinquish or relent. An adapted strain of abnegation, anyone. Ritual mass suicide — this the thesis advanced in a private, independent study matchingly funded by the undeniably patronizing sponsorship of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. All of them just transmigrating into the ocean at once to drown, holding their yarmulkes down on their heads against the tides. Though, what’s most revealing is this: that not one authority has the media audacity to suggest sin. Who’d the nerve; anyway, it’s called chutzpah now. And on primetime, publicized to an audience of fearmouthed, willing millions. Punishment. As in, Divine Retribution. Deserving. Wanting, needing. Had it coming, then it came. Ask for death, and thou shalt receive only death — and cards you can’t see to read, prayers and sympathy you can’t hear to thank, flowers you can’t smell, and brunch spreads you can’t taste, then a grave that will give you no rest.

Initial tests come up negative for nearly everything — except when a positive false or not would more effectively frustrate any effort to know, to put in perspective. Across the board for those who’ve failed their boards — levels are levels, the counts count, nothing’s found out of the recent reinterpretation of the ordinary. Livers are functioning, urea, uric acid…mensch goes to the doctor, doctor gives him six months to live, you know this, don’t you, mensch can’t pay the bill, doctor gives him another six months is how it goes. RH’s factored in, age, height, and weight, how much you need a name for your problem, too, how syllabically badly you want to be wronged. Another round of injections are prescribed: thinners, thickeners, transalphabetical vitamins, middles, downers and ups; pressurelowering meds are administered; gel’s smeared on nipples, hearts thump away. FB test subjects — initially a sample of thirtysix — are prevailed upon to urinate into a cup, one cup plastic for everyone that no one wants to hold, understandably, as they’re all going to go at once; they drool their warm piss all over their hands, each other’s. Prostates are groped, they give cough all at the same time then gag swabbed, their only culture that of the throat and unbecoming, without feeling; they’re poked, prodded, their fettles are fondled, levels leveraged…saliva samples are taken, and that of their colloidal, colluding sperm; the walls of their tushes each the lower and upper the hairily lipped are scraped for the petri, as fungi’s selectively tweezered out from under finger and toenails, then laid flat atop altars of glass for the sacrifice of institutional money, time, and effort; test after test, more tests than Abram ever had to pass to become Abraham, than ever Jabob had to endure to make us Israel if only in name and more trying, without thicketed rams, no angels stilling hands or laming limbs to save. Ratnosed, roachfingered goyim in white labcoats that’ve been tagged with more initials than God has names, paperputschers, pawing keyslaves, buttonclawers, they’re consulting their charts, a flow veining throughout the evidential body, illuminating only the black mass of ectoplasmic night: testing fresh FB samples, every six hours, three, then retesting again why not, those of the living to be compared with those of the dead, all in an attempt, but how, to fix that strange date in this, the strangest land. Idea is, they couldn’t live forever, could they; naturally or not, they as a people would die out, the thought. And then, let’s say they lived, wishful for argument’s sake or hope’s survival: they could intermarry, they could reproduce with us, meaning with others, and then what Lawwise. Attention, executively ordered, is being given to Xmas Eve of this year; Year 0 A.I. it’s been proposed to call it, After Israel or Israelien, depends (studies have been commissioned: how can we ever count again?) — but they’re too optimistic…Unaffiliated. As forecasts are at odds for the upcoming eve of Passover, and when not at odds then just odd, unrelenting in their manifold predictions: such obscuring fronts and systems, ever colder dates calculated for contrast, timetables and stats, too many numbers serving not to clarify but to darken with cloud, with spilled ink; with the government, Garden, Inc., and not to forget the people, too, the firstborns themselves whose inheritance however imaginary is, in the end, what’s funding this Island endeavor, attempting to ensure that their investment remains protected, tasking Der and the Administration behind him to ensure this never happens again; and that, as the President privately asserts, if it does, which might be inevitable, when it does, then they know not how to prevent fatalities, which might prove impossible, but how best to exploit a survivor, if any survivor there’ll be.

If one needed in order to satisfy an unimaginable impulse, or wanted out of some derangement or another, I’m sure a term exists, to diagnose the office, the physical plant — I have the address somewhere out on Long Island — of the twin Doctors Tweiss, dispensing their office and its forsaken environs a dose of their own medicine, transferring temperament, displacing aims and verbiage in an inevitably misguided attempt to describe, preliminary examination would result in recommendation for the immediate destruction of the facility entire, on second opinion along with its parkinglot, too, and with dynamite. It’s squat stucco with not enough windows; altogether against the human — in no way a place of healing, better interested in hurt. Before they’d moved in, it’d been a funeralhome.

As if to say, Aesculapius, I don’t know. Never heard of him. Aesculapius, think I took his sister out once.

An office a mere block away by carpool from their home, in which they’ve lived ever since a disproportionately protracted birth resulting in the death of their mother and, aggrieved, as if in response, in the eventual feminization of their father, beginning with a regimen of hormonal therapy and then, ultimately, a surgical procedure necessitating a second mortgage — a vaginoplasty in which his testes had been severed to form a labia with the remnant, the shaft of his penis, inverted to manifest the hollow of a shallow vagina. Their office, it’s situated across a meridian from a takeout, drivethru concrete box, at the far end of an icy asphalt lot rented at a nominal monthly fee from that once promiment, national fastfoood purveyor just beginning bankruptcy proceedings, its paving recently annexed into adjacency with the mediating island homeopathically weeded, untended, disused — a tar openness providing ample space for the parking of their modest twin sedans, with the smaller, otherwise zoned expanse just past the island made unofficially available to their patients, too, and to any other visitor to this facility of which their practice, or practices, are at present the only two tenants. Here there used to be seven lawyers, six accountants, five actuaries, four insurance firms, three dentists, two dermatologists, and that lone funeralhome, groundfloor fronting the one pear tree, now barren, stripped by wind of partridges and bark. All of whose space is theirs as of last moon, an expansion from their previously tiny office that had been approximately one street, one address, one suite number too far to the west, which is already Queens. This ever since their official retention, an agreement to diagnose exclusively for Garden, Inc., from the aborted bris on to remain oncall; though they still, if guiltily and with a semblance of quiet, are willing do a number of things, grudging favors, for friends and friends of friends, too, for hard money on the side: accepting diamonds, gold, and other precious gems and metals, free meals, drinks, and High Holiday tickets in return, you didn’t hear it from me, for circumcisions and the mental health counseling their effect would subsequently require, both procedures always ritually performed. If with a handful of weird personal touches: as Doctor Tweiss the plasticsurgeon never uses anesthesia, whereas his twin the psychoanalyst always does, explain that; both having practiced for performance upon Ben, they’re thinking, why not put their work to abuse on a person truly grateful and willing — the general paying public. All at the Garden tolerate it, they have to, it’s too lucrative for them not to, and so they take their cuts both sharp and blunt, and look the other way — at their shoes, on the advice of their counsel.

The doctors, they’re booked for moons.

Through the door to the office that’s wide enough for a gurney, a prehumous coffin and its two medically fit pallbearers — this to facilitate the twins’ coming and going, the two of them at once through the lobby — there’s a sign: The Tweiss Group. One to the left and one to the right, then they meet in the middle. A lobby that also serves as the first waitingroom, as the initial station of a series of rooms that would test the commitment to recovery of each individual patient: however long they’re willing to be kept waiting indicative of how badly they’re in want, or need, of healing. Ratty pornographic periodicals they’ve recovered from the trash of a lawyer vacated or dead, facsimiles of transcribed testimonials provided by, if extorted from, patients former and present, promotional materials for ever newer prescription narcotics designed to alleviate the aftereffects of elective surgical procedures, too, fanned out atop little rickety, unmatching endtables, the nicest of them hardwoods topped in fauxmarble. A scattering of vases with even their cracks chipped, their fill a handling of left umbrellas, corrupt caducei. Antiquities behind frames that once held glass, stationed on both sides of the door, cabinets of rare fragiles shuddering with the entrance of every patient, never exit — and so their shattered statuettes with the heads of dogs and Gods, their idols in shards and showy halfamphoræ. Against that wall an analysand’s settee forbidden for sitting, at its sides two armchairs dermatologist’s purchases smokedamaged, tossed out, then divested by the brothers from a temporarily neighboring dumpster; the other wall hosts the receptiondesk, which is splintering, set on shapely legs — set on highheels — forbiddingly high.

As the firstborns are put through their battery of tests, subject to the painful whim of any government granting or other ostensibly official disbursement, many, though, private and so privately festishistic, insane, Ben’s kept waiting, shifting in one of the waitingroom’s armchairs, sloppily womblike, leaking its stuffing. His appointment scheduled for a lifetime ago, hours, an hour. Reduced to the abject, demeaned by each knifing lick of the clock above, He’s become its lowly ward, and that of the desk below it, too, not to forget behind the desk its girl, sitting low as if unaware of her power. All the waitingrooms, and there are many, as many of them as there are hells, even as many as there are ways and means by which to earn your hell, to become cursed and damned, to deserve it here on earth — all are the domain of this young woman, the offices’ shared receptionist and sole fulltime employee; according to the nameplate her employers would often fantasize nailing to her forehead, her name’s Minnie Tung de Presser.

No, I have Misses Abernathy down for three this afternoon.

Yes, she says, she dialed me frantic from work and I just managed to squeeze her in…squeezes herself, then realizes the telephone’s disconnected, plugs its jack back into the wall. What did she do, what didn’t she do: she’d settle disputes in case of scheduling conflicts, though often she’d be the one responsible for scheduling the conflicts, in an effort to assert her dominance over the doctors who’d woo her, this hourglass shiksa maybe a few grains shy of legal age. Domineering, like she’s making double what she makes, with spoiled ascension pretensions though of trashy stock, a Midwest import, eightfathered Bible Beltbeaten provenance, this who does she thinks she is requiring no analysis and even less anatomical enhancement. The Doctors Tweiss, they’d both been trying to bed her for years, to no avail, though they’ve become quite successful at their fantasy, wetdaydreaming of penetrating her small, pinch-veined, hairless, O so tight nostrils with what they think, they hope, passes for professional abandon; straddling her face, their testes dumbly smacking like tonsils her soft lips glossed in red, then leaving their seed there, shooting it deep and up to store, gunking her septum, behind her eyes then to her brain, giving her recurring sinus headaches they’d surely charge her to cure, deduct it from her minimum wage. They give her no insurance; they pay her in cash only when they don’t miser her in coin. To sit with her breasts rising from the fall of her halter uniform, midnight pleather; her chair’s retrofitted with a dildo, its modification to her feeling natural, the ultimate in cervical comfort, and a bonus to her employers, too, who for relaxation would sniff and lick it after hours: she’d sit impaled on it all day, her legs dangling for the floor, their feet nude, vanillapale and perfect. If perhaps indicative, or so the doctors would only wish, of the laterlife lymphatic — edema, a swelling from pregnant idle. If only she’d let them inseminate; if only impotence wasn’t physiological, too — then, they couldn’t have cared less. Dominatrix pleather except for the naked feet with their toes tapping to the rhythmlessness of her altogether tuneless hum, both accomplished at a volume enervatingly low amid the loud of her lipchewing, gumclacking, and the sucking of her sweets, which are ostensibly sugarfree, a panoply of red and green lozenges she’d enjoy herself while denying them to the uninitiated impatient from a jar atop her desk; rationing them in return for humiliation, to be perpetrated only during breaks from her work of all break, which is nothing more than losing things, not limited to files and office supplies. Abutting the jar, a holder hosts a single businesscard, lonely, its corners crumpled stale — that of the funeralhome director, having long required his own services.

As for the doctors, they’ve recently begun specializing in two disjunctive disciplines: rhinoplastics, specifically the physical enlargment and psychological encouragement of human noses, their exaggeration in all cardinalities and dimensions, imparting to them a particular aspect that can only be described as Mosaic — a nip of counseling and a Prophet’s tuck, as if the nose were a spindle of the scrolling Law; you know it when you see it, you feel it from within: elongating and bumping the rhinion to the supratip is what, which forms the downward sloping ridge of the organ, then restructuring the columella and its dissolution in the philtrum up to the nasion and its ascent to the glabella, is the term, the terminus, which is the root of the nose to be found embedded between the brows of the wondering eyes, the stupefied mind behind their incredulity ever widening; their other late specialty being penile reconstruction, specifically the surgical detachment of the foreskin, and, also, the severance of the primitive imagination’s attachment to that flesh, a process known to most as circumcision, which the people dead and soon usurped had once ritually performed to perfect their babies at the age of eight days, in an attempt to renew perpetually the covenant of their forefather, Abraham — a procedure continued now if not improved with only a sip of fruity schnapps, a quick and sure knife and a concomitant minimum of hygienic pain.

Today, which is of the new moon prepped if it isn’t tomorrow already what with this senseless sitting around, is to be, since birth, Ben’s first checkup, then down and all around — initially an examination septic, deep into the very nature of proboscine protuberance, its nostrils both actual and mindful: an otoscope is what it is, a slight light up the schnozz and, as if that isn’t enough, a brief if free consultation regarding the continuous shed and regrowth of His foreskin — a followup concerning the tender length below: perhaps a sample’ll be taken, maybe a test or ten again, whatever it is the doctors ask of Him, in truth whatever operation their backers, bosses, and peers have ordered them to perform, medical mercenary tactics on order of the Administration as actioned through the auspices of Garden, Inc., just a little too into this stuff, as it’s rumored, overmuch obsessed with it, His thing, He says, Hanna said thingie, down there, Israel would have said His putz, the Israelien member, apparently a most unusual specimen; operations President Shade would perhaps perpetrate himself, it’s gossiped, if just for the experience or pleasure, if only he’d be assured of, then insured against, not losing the valued patient in the process. Idea is, if Ben’s endowment keeps secreting skin, keeps growing a foreskin then flaking, shedding, regenerationally then growing and shedding itself again and again, not what do we do to arrest or perhaps moderate the pain it might cause and it does, but instead — how can a profit be made in its exploitation: with many prominent secularists to suggest an exhibition of His remnants to be opened at the Metropolitan or at the Museum of Natural History stuffed and mounted Uptown just off the Park, perhaps a sensational display of the actual regenerative process to be commenced in a public place, a spectacle to be appended with appropriate admission fee, think an amphitheater of GrecoRoman proportions, or the Rose Garden of the White House with all the presscorps corpsed in attendance and the President himself with the thorn of a pointer, explaining away for the media masses: tissue repair as a metaphor for survival, the recent regrowth of God’s science in every sector, a resurgence of interest in the divine mysteries of human life; the mystics to suggest, however, the pursuit of a fate far more secret and as such, more holy, namely the collecting of His foreskins solely for the purpose of further creation: the assembling of them into the form most familiar — once serviced by the appropriate incantation, of course, and the setting of a magical shem beneath the flat flap that would serve as a tongue — the making of a golem is what they’re talking, a mensch made exclusively of this sheath: a savior, though immortally soulless, uninspired and voicelessly dumb.

Nurse, how she insists on the qualification, despite having failed the entrance exam to every New York nursing school seventeen times or so, even those less discriminating accredited upon islands Long and Staten, that and she hasn’t yet begun reviewing for her next attempt, if there’s to be one — de Presser, she rises with a moan in her mouth and a crop in her hand, makes her way up to Him loosely, to escort Ben with a nod through the opposite door, which she unlocks with a key affixed to her uniform’s zipper, then over that threshold revealed, a glaringly bright uncleanliness, a pitiless fluorescence hovering in a dull buzz over the uncarpeted linoleum grime: here another waitingroom, this the second containment in an apparently infinite circuit of waitingrooms that in truth number three and only seem that way, eternal as without span, each furnished more and more sparsely, with less thought given in each instance and every area to patient experience, the conditions of comfort physical and psychological both, a deductible factor of welcome: the periodicals get older, more out of date, more and more specialized (Journal of Panamanian Gastroenterology, for example, Confronting Asian Identity Through Cosmetic Surgery, for another), with more pages from them ripped out, holding together from wet, pamphlets, catalogs and brochures, leaflets and flyers; the idyllically stilled lives hanging graven on the walls cracked, crumbling, prefab, massproduced, purchased in their frames from which pricetags still hang their half off, reproductions of images that if they ever existed shouldn’t have, needn’t have, the hideously landscaped pastoral, hills rolling dales, burbling brooks set with trees put out to pasture; diplomas onsite financed, and mailordered, or xeroxed, stolen and forged, their fields not yet filled in, unsealed and unsigned and unframed, held to the walls encrusted in mold with deformed, defective nails, tacks and swaths of tape, which are peeling to trap the flies swarming. Nurse de Presser leaves Him to an armchair utterly depleted, falling apart even more than the armchair wrecked previously; they’ll blame Him for its damage, the Garden will be billed. Of all the designs of this waitingroom, its appointments particular and that of its others, progressively, regressively, dilapidated, the trouble taken for welter, their worthless use, worn, lorn, and fray, He’s most interested in whatever that is opposite Him, whether furnishing or human. Nothing else but to wait for its revelation — calm in knowing that it can’t know Him, though, as it’s sitting slumped in what feels like a diaper, its head bandaged if head it is, a nose if that bound in mounding gauze.

It says from out of nowhere in a voice that’s a rubbing, a rustling sputter, how’s it hanging? then laughs, bandagebitten — anyone there? and so it’s probably a person, and suffering, with hurt evident in a laughing groan shifting its entire form toward Ben, its diaper, painful diapers, noising like parchment ripping dry.

I’m sorry?

Hard to resist, I know…mine’s hanging when it’s warm out just a little to the left. Today, it comes off — not all of it, you understand, just the crown, you know of what I’m talking.

You still there? I can’t see or nothing, it’s the nose…your head’s only this bulb to me, forgive.

A nose swelled with a pride so false as to occlude sight — no, only overly prepared: this thing’s entire hook has been iced at home, then wrapped for outsourcing to specialists, a mess professionally marked down the middle thickly with a greasy, waxy substance that represents to Him like ash; it smears at the apparitional pick, this large line demarcated down the spine of the proboscis, hatched with smaller lines, diagonally, and purposefully irregular xs where a wart, mole, or miscellaneous growth’s to be implanted, according to the whim the goy’s saying now of his wife, her expectations of him and his physicality not as difficult as they are embarrassingly tedious to adumbrate at present, and to a stranger in a waitingroom at that. Must be uncomfortable, like the flaming expected from his swaddled groin: this suffering a mere idea of the symbolic, a small portion of the distress it’s intended to provoke, not only within but also without, amid the greater world and its nosy, invasive demands — not yet fully understood, hardly articulated at so early a phase — for a people, new or renewed it’s no matter; and, too, for a specific Messiah, perfected: both looking the part and feeling it in equal measure, whose faces and Whose Face just have to have a certain character for credibility’s sake — and so this going under, the undergoing of this forever sit and wait.

I’ll admit it, he says to Ben…I’m a late arrival, what of it — that Xmas, the night they all…you know, that just destroyed me.

What if it had been me, I was thinking…what’s my responsibility to the dead and why — provoking questions, know what I mean?

I was crushed, wasn’t comfortable with who I was anymore.

It’s guilt, insecurity, those old feelings of inadequacy, and so I’m having these procedures…the nose — it’s a solidarity thing; identification, status; and then I’m getting sliced, too, ritually snipped.

Nature’s raw law, the more primitive, the primal, the animal, that’s on the outs says the wife; she’s been after me day and night. I told her what they told me, that there might be considerable detriment to, nu, sensitivity, occasional hymn difficulty, you understand — a bit of impotence at first, nothing medication won’t remedy, I’m assured.

She’ll love it, I’ll live with it, we’ll deal. I’m the last in my office to have this done; the doctors’ve come highly recommended — I’m told they have a heavy hand; apparently, it shakes.

Nurse de Presser enters the room again, and escorts Ben through the door opposite, which gives out onto a room even smaller and dirtier — a closet’s custodianship of a bathroom, maybe, converted to dinge as if for the accommodation of a solitary and reflective wait with the preservation, or installation, of a plumbingless porcelain toilet upon which He sits with its seat down amid the intricate webbing and egglings of tiny spiders, and the lonely motes stuck for their sucking, fat fluffs of dust to be leeched of their defilement. He faces Himself in the dim — the wall’s lone hanging, a mirror unframed in which’s reflected only shadow. He tugs the chain to the bulb above, no luck. If there’s anything else here it would be only a form, derelict, forgotten: a mop, thinhandled, or a broom bristlehairy, gunked thickly with sopping sweep, leaned up against the wall at corner.

I’m next, it says, and so it, too, seems a person, but standing on his head. And no way you’re getting in front of me, no matter what, won’t let you…I’m sorry, pleased to meet you.

Ben reaches out to the foot offered and shakes it lightly bare in shvitzy greeting.

People don’t respect the old order anymore — you know, they never did.

Patience, patience, patience, a bissel calm?

By the time I get in to the doctors, I want to be sick enough to merit their full attention, that’s the goal, I’m talking totally out of it, some days I even wish I were dead…he sighs, knocks knees. I want to give them something to work with, wouldn’t presume to waste their talents and their time.

I’ve been standing like this for a while now; they say it’s good for you, for your head, helps with the memory, brings back whatever’s repressed.

Nurse de Presser returns, escorts Ben through the barren’s backdoor, on their way stepping on the goy upsidedown, giving him in his howl a leer to her legs, the darkred wounding between them; the door opening into the vivisection of a hallway, still unheated, and again travestied, the paint, paper, paste of its near walls hopelessly torn at as if with nails grown teeth; a hall labeled opposite the door with two signs shaped like arrows…what are their points, opposing — one declaring Doctor Tweiss and the other the same, though not evidencing that to the right’s the psychoanalyst, and to the left the plasticsurgeon, if and only if it’s not the other way around. Throughout this lowceilinged, linoleumfloored hall, people in multiple stagings of an evident distress (being clinical), or derangement (becoming pathological), pace a placebic back and forth, slip on slickshod poolings of their own urgent wastes, only to rise relapsed through the ambit between the two closed, and probably locked, doors, one at either end.

They’re confused, says the nurse in a tone that’s been memorized though not quite as well as that that she’s employing such to confide: her briefing, closenosed introductory remarks — not sure as to which of the doctors they’re here to see, and for what they’re here to see which of them about. I’ll make it quick, pay attention.

Those who arrive for psychological treatment, seeking help let’s say with a relationship or sexual issue, often enter the wrong office and emerge two, even three days later pregnant, or else with a larger bust or smaller chin; sometimes this solves their particular problem, whatever they’d thought that was, other times not; though not a few of the cases you’ll find have changed their minds on their own: headed for one, they turn right around and head for the other, which I don’t need to tell you would necessitate another appointment, requiring yet another wait; some cases, as I’ve said, are confused — noncompos, maybe, whether from a preexisting condition or not; but others, the poor wretches, are merely forgetful, meaning their memories aren’t what they used to be — and whatever they used to be, that they’ve forgotten, too; and then there are many just waiting for their insurance to be approved: they’re one form short, perhaps, a missed premium, it’s tragic.

You should be grateful, she says, you’ve been fasttracked, straight to the top. No one’s gotten so far, so quickly.

A hallway, a glorified madward, an asylum transplanted like a canker from the dimly far, catarrhcoughing past, to bloom here in a wintering of institutional white amid the the tubercular exurban; the asphalt just a block too far to be boroughed. People checking off their listless, a life too inconsequential to register on the Xrays on which they sit; a goy standing to piss through an eyelet ripped into the tip of his bandage, wetting the floor and its median rug opposite the entrance door, its purples and gold dampening richer with his wail: a rug the foreskin of a vast endangered animal, the doctoring brothers would often boast (a whale, the Leviathan, lion, bear, or just a costly imitation), luxuriantly soft, stretched as a welcome mat, wipe your feet split then nailed; translucently dark motifed with veins, rumor has it that if you stand on it long enough, it’ll become a carpet, wall-to-wall. You’ll have to excuse me, the nurse says over her shoulder as she escorts out the disturbance micturating still. Just a moment, for her to think of the appropriate delay: the doctors are now occupied treating each other.

A woman who’s known better days though her eyes seem to ask, but haven’t we all, approaches Ben as Nurse de Presser and her cropped charge disappear with a twitch behind the door, which is locked again, the goy’s urine foaming in from under the draft. I’m looking for Doctor Tweiss, she’s staring down to the puddling warm and her only in her slippers; would you be so kind as to point me in the right direction? What left to do but shrug. I was referred to Doctor Tweiss by a Doctor Tweiss — smiling half a tooth — and he, such a nice boy and single, can you believe, referred me to this Doctor Tweiss for a second opinion, who then referred me back to Doctor Tweiss for unspecified tests, and now that Doctor Tweiss, he must make a comfortable living, you think, such a wonderful soul that one he’s referred me to a specialist, a certain Doctor Tweiss whom I’m trying to find now, and I’m afraid I’m lost, and quite late for my appointment.

About to give a grin in response when another younger woman, only a girl spasms between them and asks loudly of Ben, Tell me about your father!

Myoclonic. Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a sigh?

Her hair is in her face, but those on second inspection are wrinkles.

Enough, she yells, so tell me about my father, will you?

All the patience of the hall turns at this noise, makes to mob the arrival, this whomever hunk promoted past them, unremembered from the haven of earlier rooms — thinking, here the potential for new information. Husbands and wives in for counseling and couples you can’t tell which they’re in for, in declining health whether psychological, physical, psychosomatical, psychophysiological, or only hypochondrial, hysteria termed as mere suggestion; their clothes as if their insides turned out, an airing messy, ravaged with aliment; their faces haggard, cheeks sucked shallow to image as if idolatrously the hollowness lately experienced within: neglected, they survive on nothing more than dust, which is both sustenance and an experimental drug, as a palliative unsurpassed, a universal prescription the ingestion of which — by salivaswallowing, snorting, fingering on the gums, the thumbing of which up the tush — induces a nostalgic quiescence, a wistful longing for the unknown or possibly never extant past; the doctors have it imported from overseas, a treatment intended especially for the edification of their longest lasting patients, at an expense said to be significant both financially and, too, for the mind and body; its only effect whether side or frontally lobed being a particular thirst, which as its specificity’s not yet been identified is impossible to quench.

Across from Ben leaning against a wall of the hall — another later clock.

Tick, tick.

Just a wristwatch tacked — a tock.

Waiting, it’s an exam of time and money, a test they’ll never pass — specifically, how precious is a life? It’s always the same, this waiting, amid ghostly gowned, suspended patience — shrouded in the fusc and noise of incomplete or false report — the expectation day after day, after moon, and in every line, in every office hour, the prison of the calendar box in which the appointment’s set down, as if scribbled into stone: it passes monstrously slowly, sacrificing its people to patients, its patients to victims, monotony deferred to nullity, a void, this grave for entitlement, an afterlife of modest proportions, attended to by the biting of nails, by unwarranted hunger, and that perpetually unparticular thirst. Without even the promise of Purgatory — it’s the purgatory of purgatory, which would find you finally guilty only if innocent of shuffle, fidget, twitch. An extension to be granted to boredom, indecision, to seek leave only for a rest — though if they sleep, Him or any of them, they might miss their name when called, or if (no one knows, though, upon which pad that disclaimer might be scribed); that is, if names are still theirs to have and speak and hear amid such desperation — the aim of which, as implemented from above, from below, can only be to depersonalize, to victimize human not into animal but worse, turned to mere number, into order, into slave. All names to become, after this, the wait itself, named Wait — after this assimilation into oblivious system, this initiation into nothingness, misfiled. It’s the latest in destructive: how the one solace He’s expected to derive from this is that of His own suffering, and that of others, expectant, too; there’s enough to go around and dizzying around and yet beyond Him, nauseous, a sensation worse than suspicion’s comfort, or the consolation of His fear; Him by now mature enough to know that all the kvetch in the world won’t hasten fate, thanks Israel, which Hanna never understood, how our noodgy push is fated to nil, no avail.

The office’s patients are joined throughout the following days and weeks by older wards of the Garden — terminals, causes lost to corpse — tapping last toes, pulling final fine hairs, teething the lip then a tongue to suck the dust and, also, to postpone, putoff, keep waiting every urge — waiting for Doctor Tweiss or his twin, for both of them or their receptionist she thinks she’s a nurse if she’s not too busy, to belch them out upon the Belt Parkway, beached; as if prophets spit from the innards of a Leviathan sustained on watery time, sundered upon a brutal clock — an end to office hours, when. A doctor heals but time does, too, depending on how devoted that doctor is to the treatment. It follows that this is how one remunerates the brothers for their work; this very waste their payment, earned in the professional discharge of a gross neglect. Waiting for an hour is good for a consultation of ten minutes, wasting three days away will get you a fullbody checkup — in the perfection of this transaction there being no insurance information to give, no forms to fill out, or checks to cut; them paying the outstanding balance in their deaths; the wait being the end of them as individuals, as people; accounted animals, counted breaths. Or else, in another interpretation: as no soul ever dies, they’ll transcend themselves upon the reckoning, taking leave of their ordinal, regularly scheduled forms, to become the wait itself, a reincarnation to total waste. With all the days of their lives and their nights, too, sentenced to the time that must be waited out by their generations ensuing, until their own demise, then that of theirs and onward, which becoming is and would be perpetual, forever — humble contributions to a charity eternal.

Enough, enough to say — it springs. Dayeinu. An explosion, we will be swallowed by the earth. Our core comes apart, a bomb up from the Apple’s bowels — islands its shards, the city a broken vessel. Repair, whether mend or heal, you do what you can, your best.

A new life seeps up from the void within…disperses out, under the permafrost — in veins, a straining snarl. Our foundations are rocked; smoky tufts, dusky mold; buds shiver into silvery crowns; ices crack westerly, wrack the Island in a jarring purge: spring, the season of crying, kicking rebirth…spring, the season of sprung quickly, cold stillbirth — their mother is the same. Their father, he’s late — we’re waiting on him still.

Nothing’s thawed, only shattered. The verdant’s humbled under the freeze, as not much more than a sign, foretelling of symbol…a future down and dormant, entombed in ice, season’s promise without warming to fulfillment. If promise is the redemption, then fulfillment is the Law; this is our tradition. In the clock that is its cycle, it’s the season of Exodus — in a more obliging time, the season that would stream dew down to the valley of the faithful, to flow its flight past blackened cataracts of spoiled manna, then over and around the desert winding itself its clay bed as serpentine as sin, to pool at the foot of Sinai, shining like a star under a latter moon; summer’s slow absorption of the wetted, wetting season: the weather and the Law, inseparable, of the same womb, that of Hanna’s Hanna. As a babe borne to His first spring atop this ancient rush, in a basket woven of His eyelashes floated atop a river of His tears — so early in life that everything’s a first, a fresh discovery, a blessing lying in the waiting, twophrased at the crossroads: first face toward the Great Hall, then bow, and then toward His house above the ice, to bow again at its path of slate, its driveway of tar, freshly shoveled daily…to holy every revelation’s what’s required, if not for Ben’s survival then to make their deaths more real — no matter how meager, no matter the futility involved. He divines the smoke from the fire, and differences the earth from the unappealable ice. And so He knows, as much, this season for what it is, for what it’s become, and so for what’s forsaken — this spring isn’t about rejuvenation, regeneration, a new compact, or covenant renewed: this disillusioning moon, it marks only a season more, another loneliness starmocked, shone deeper into the empty soul of life.

A last twinkling, then darkness.

As it will never be written: when cycles are stilled, their memories go on with their turning, overturning; then what was of this world is called inside, is locked indoors, sent to its room, to toss diurnal in colorful, too clowny sheets. Know this — that we live despite the season, its weather, the wasteful, wasting time. That we live because we stay inside — that only with roof and walls are our lives saved; on the lawn and behind its fence, the car parked, the gutters blooming, there we erect our truest Temple. As courses are made ritual, the rise and set of sun get timed to the face of a higher clock; its hands of rays spin, realigned, to tick away our time…until — an emergence…revelation, an inspired sensing. As a mensch more than any otherness is both a part in a mechanism and an individual, a mechanism unto himself, both the cog of the clock and the clock itself with its two gnarled hands: one shorter to pull toward, opposite one longer to push away, that and the feet of a lion and with the tail of a viper, the time Ben spends in the Garden is made other from any hour known, is off the daily schedule. His are days sat out in this house alone He’s trashing, destroying, bringing it to the collapse of ruin: a house adrift on an Island floating in an ocean set in His sink, in the kitchen His mother once ruled as queen, out from under the timing scepter of her king — the third hand of the clock, pointing time independent and so perhaps to us erratically, but no less regulated, still within the same system, rooted to the same immaculacy and intellection, its floating face…squared by the lower tennis courts, their balls starring lazily over the nets windfallen, in the division of armies for snowball wars; the slides have been repurposed; the seesaws reeducated into catapults of frost; though the bases be stolen, no one has it in them to escape.

Indoors quick — and hide.

We have been warned, and warned again. Tonight, the only obliging outward sign, the lone telltale, is the newest moon returned. There are no more fillings of the sky, than usual. This moon filling itself with light, which is our essence, then this waning moon, waxing tidal death — the month the bodies, which had sunk then risen then sunk again, are consumed in full, the last one of them swellswallowed; treyf fishes stuffed to the gills freezing up onshore at the edge of the ice’s lap into open water, sharks with frost for fins skittering on the slick, flopping whales their flukes encased in hoar. As for the waters above, they’re drowning the stars — the dark to constellate the breaching of the astral ship, Argo Navis sinking, the ark of Noah, the vessel of Isis and Osiris…in our tradition, another New Year yet again. Vernal, and so unleavened. Unseeded, the spring of spring. Ahead into redemption. Nothing to sneeze at. A season of libels and of passings. And dadadadada. Of the seder, too, which is the order: wine, wash then green; wash and nosh. Fress your ess on nothing. But before, the streets split open, wheat that’s also ice springs up from the ground. A feather is plucked from its hide. A candle’s rolled. All that’s leavened becomes involved in an arcane exodus of sorts, sold to this goy hustling out of state for maybe less than nothing. A promise. Only a word. Equinox schquinox — what else could be its meaning, how to question winter still? Once each crumb is counted. Once each bread is broke. Swallow your tongue. Eat your teeth. Speak up.

It’ll be a fast plague. Swift, without mercy, a cold bloodless slaughter. As always, all will come too quick — is there any plague worth its lot of salt that doesn’t, that won’t, that just stands there like a pillar? Questions again, this being the season — the most pressing of which the least passing, the questions silent, implied, innumerable and so, numinous. As we sit at the Passover table topped with the yomtov tablecloth as yet unstained and the polished silver and the plate with the bone and the egg boiled hard in its mother’s own water, observe, the youngest among us should ask the oldest the following: how is this night different from all other nights? And how, for that matter, are nights different from Night? Not anymore they’re not. Have you been outside lately, you better believe it for yourself.

Then, the oldest should ask the youngest thusly: which son are you, and which not? I don’t know, all of them, none. Never again a time for resolutions. Never to begin anew. They should ask the youngest Him, which son will you be…and then — are you the One who doesn’t even know how to ask…what is a question? How to answer. Will you be at all. Or will you opt out. Don’t you want to be. When you’re all grown up to dead. Their seder to be interrupted — libelous, the matzah weeps blood. The seat at the head of the table is empty and will be forever, you’ll get used to it, I’m hoping. Think on it, Ben, my boy, my boychick, knowing that to think’s to remember, just as much. In the beginning, they died, them and their questions with them, and now they’re to begin dying again. When does it end? How? Never why. Who’s able to answer let alone think anymore with such moony racket? Remember me kindly when I’m gone.

It’s a spring in which nothing’s in season. Plant the ice, reap a frost. Unless we hoard hope, we’ll go hungry come the winter of winter. Ravenously, we’ll eat crow. Then God shall drink the air from thy mouth. A going within to go without drash…that’s the best we can expect: an exhortation to introspection, an offer soulsearching, tasked to the spirit; a custom, a commandment, a mitzvah…a recipe even, we’ll take what we’re given, we’re served — to go down into the barest cupboard in the deepest recess of the emptiest heart, to slop around for what, for mealy meaning, a pareve purpose hosted under this willfull, whirlwind moon; this lunation of denial, of limitation, waxed with worshipful privation, waned of empty reflection, empty of reflection…and so, where does that leave us?

Tonight, it’s the first of the first month, or of the seventh, depends on how you keep up, if and to what end. As this season features the fast of the firstborns, in memory of the dead kinder of Mitzraim, which was Egypt, and so of its Pharaoh and his sun, one day and its night in memoriam, tenthplagued, the FBs — young and old as if they still have a survival to prove; stepspooked, careful around the mirrored corners, migrained desperate, weak already, emptied — they fast almost the entire month, though not alone: in flagrantly mundane disregard of the law prohibiting excessive fasting, which archaic rabbinic ruling holds that such action serves only to lessen the holy, a new law is proposed, a ruling terrestrially lesser voted upon and approved with astonishing haste, which in its unanimity and the rarity of its passing speed seems as if made with the tacit approval of the Divine in us all; every day this month — which is known by the name of Nisan, meaning First Fruits in a language lost — is designated as a national fast day, as optional as life, as proclaimed by President Shade in an address from the Capitol to a joint session of Congress, which is now per an earlier ruling to be referred to as the Sanhedrin, exclusively and with all due respect: Der at one flank, the Doctors Tweiss become the Soygens General behind; this in support of UN (United Nudniks, it’s witzed) Resolution number doesn’t matter, appreciatively drafted then proposed by one Mohammed Arbas, the new delegate from the reformed State of Palestein, and cousin to its ruling class, the usurping Abulafias; a fast to be observed as per tradition inherited, in deference to religious precedent, from sundown to sunset, with those underage, pregnant, and/or suffering from medical conditions too agonizingly tedious to address personally, those abstaining acting on the advice of their personal physicians on the dole, and those who just don’t want to go hungry the whole month exempted, of course, forbidden from the option of indulging in the restrictive holy. Supermarkets are swept, mopped, then shuttered, themerestaurants shut, their burners cooled, fryers shushed; lonesome servicestations and truckstops since last moon their windows festooned with grabs of plastic grapes infused with Xmas lights aglow, darkened; everything’s unplugged, the water turned off or frozen in the pipes to explode; many take the opportunity to go out of business, invoke for themselves the broke of hope Chapter numbered Eleventh, go boardedup, condemned, especially if not kosher — the price for appropriate certification, a hechsher, being prohibitive due to current lack of a rabbinic council or other administrative body, that and the bribery involved; most everyone wanting to keep up with their friends the Joneses now the Jabotinskys, to look good for the neighbors, setting an example for the Development and their kind, they stay indoors, lock their cabinets, nail up their crannies and nooks, knot up their fridges, chain and bolt ovens and stoves, to feast on this fasting that — as we’re reminded in an address by President Shade, as scripted by Der and Doctor Abuya with the Nachmachen consulting — directs us away from the wants of the body, all those functions corporeal, to focus instead on the needs of the soul; though the knifesharp, teethsharp pangs the President feels later this first day, around 1700, wedgewoodtime, fineboned chinatime, serve only to remind him how famished he truly is, and, too, of the surplus stock hidden amid the basement cubs of his mansion: the store in its recesses, overwebbed like the manifested back of a bill outdated — enough foods, flashfrozen at outlandish taxpayer expense, to last any Shade and his First Family consecutive terms bounteously in excess of the old legal limit.

O, do you feel it — there’ll be bodies on the golfcourse tonight (nine holes)! and heaped upon the diamonds, there to mark the fifty yard line…corpses benched in the piano practicerooms, piled into stacks in the dim of the library’s gym — to be winged away by women in white, first response angels, armandlegging their flock into the backs of covered sleighs, makeshift hearses; blinders on their ferocious horses, icehooved stallions stumbling insatiably across the dark face of the moon. In the Meat Commissary, a few boychicks getting their fill on the eve of the month, piling their plates high in anticipation of a first privation dawn morning, liningup miraculously to their mothers had they been alive for seconds at the saladbar, their imitation bacon bits spilling to the floor in an arrangement that can offer no interpretation…sniveling, pitfisted, prunemouthed and mucosal brats going under and blue then white in the heated pool during Free Swim — at meal, at prayer, at stool, asleep and awake, the Garden’s to be emptied, to be given over to the silent Edenic, a Paradise unpeopled; the Island to be purged of its natives, left for profanation, and that only by memory, a single lit house, the home of His heart. This month, Ben’s not allowed to leave without permission. Housearrest. Domestic murmur. With locks locked from the outside, alarm heavily armed. As of today, no more of His morning wanders, dawn spent rimming the shoreline, His prescribed perimeter exercises to keep down the weight; occasionally testing the ice: two, three tiny tentative steps out to wickworn melt, further, a bow then a crack, a brittle give…arm-in-arm with Steinstein, arm-in-arm their quick retreat. No more afternoon drives, putputt in carts for golf, two friends tempting the dusted roads, skidding into petrified underbrush, lowlying marcescence — ice the skeleton of trees, cage of bush, bone of shrub. No more evening sledding, piggybacked fast into roseate drifts. Smash. Draft. Snow lit from within. Inside seems always so inviting. Though cocoa’s left out hot on the table no longer. Thanks, Ima, same to you. The couches rest on the laps of the sofas. The carpets are the hides of clouds. Homebound, then, and with support staff otherwise occupied, Ben’ll keep the lights blazing past Curfew, candles rendered from the very fat of His boredom…

Illumination the sweep of a lighthouse, the diffuse hoots of tankers…an island of light atop an island of dark. Imposed. Two islands, two dials of a clock, telling the same different times. Trapped within, unable to escape, Ben’s Himself frozen, ossified in youth — as if spring for Him hasn’t yet arrived, and will never, as if He’s been ordered to gestate, remanded to the safety of hibernation, winterized torpor, the otiose sloth. On the radio, they’re airing prayers. And there’s nothing on the screen anymore quite worth it. Electrostatics. Name every flake, from the comfort of the blanket and the sill. Reflect in windowglass. Make to stroke the sky. The fridge, snowwhite, has been emptied, scooped; emergency numbers are still chalked on a blackboard propped against the kitchen wall, leaning away from the phone: sisters exts. 1 through 12, His mother the # key, His father unavailable; when He dials Israel, pressing * for speed, He gets his office message; there’s always a meeting, a mediation, arbitration or deps in the offing — should you have any questions or concerns, please call me, or my paralegal…alongside a calendar, the two ordering nights of the holiday upcoming circled big and dumb in marker, black. Then, a visit to the dentist, a return to the Doctors Tweiss. Occupied. All alone, and still He’s scheduled. Peace now, peace never.

As no God Who would allow a tragedy such as this can exist without a creation to believe in Him, and this despite the ferocity of His wrath; as no mensch can exist and can love without the love of those before him and their women, their salaries and time, they wouldn’t hurt, too; as today is inconceivable without a yesterday whose sins we must suffer the worst for only surviving — for there to be a last, it follows that there must first be a first: those seated in the back, those seated in the front, those standing, those who don’t want to sit, those without any seats left to their urge…the eve of this moon, this the uncovered Rosh Chodesh, which means the Head of the Month in a language no one speaks but everyone’s studying, this year fallen on a Friday night, a Shabbos going unobserved by one Abel Steinstein, cousin to Adam and brother to history, unformed young, smiley and slow — as he’s dead; as persuasive a defense against dereliction as any we’ve known.

Abel who, though? As the news asks around on the questioning wind: whether to bundleup, or stay inside and under the covers — everyone wants to know; they tug coats, they pull ears, beg favors of their connections. They invent, against the polysemic Semitic. Give them pause. Given a chance, they’ll choose fictions over patience if just to keep hold of their sanity, the firstborn of verity and honor. Swaddled in a hat. Suckling bald. Bow your head, particularly. Asking in a whisper, who is this schmuck; importantly, who does he think he is — this usurper, this attentionhog, Abel this singular Steinstein?

O, okay, sure, Ben’ll eventually relent…give Him a cup of coffee, He’s about to break. Sugar in the teeth, jam at the dregs. He knows Abel through Adam, there’s no harm to admit it — on the advice of bunkmate counselors, a parttime mallcop, his partner by day a stayathome broker — knew him through His Steinstein, Adam, you know him…who you sent my way, whom I should hasten to say never liked to spend time with family. Abel wasn’t around much, don’t know if Steinstein ever wanted him around and, anyway, the two of them they look the same around the eyes, especially through Ben’s, poor as they are, they looked, and, let’s be honest for a moment — hope that’s not too much to ask — isn’t one Steinstein enough? Abel this evening the first of the month to end all months, the last night of food to sate them through the difficult fast, this last even on the Shabbos indulgence, seated and as always behaving himself in his assigned seat at his assigned table in the midst of the Meat Commissary (the Dairy’s for the day’s earlier meals) — a squared portion of black bench marked off and stenciled with number in warning yellow paint; Abel just a young, always smiling kid (in the obits and their nightly discussion of them, it’s always mentioned, this smiling, one of those defining details required to humanize, and at the same time, to distance, bury amid the ultimate back page), you never knew what he was thinking, if, with blond hair and twinkling blue ices for eyes and a nose scrunched to mischief, a tinkling laugh, huge ears like wings as if any praise overheard would send him flying to the sky, only after an acknowledgement given from a mouth shaped like a kiss; sitting erect and at attention throughout the initial prayers, that business with the wine and bread, the two loaves of challah, Gardenbaked never enough for the table, his silverware held aloft, how he’s ready to be served and eat, familystyle, the tradition of the Garden; the table’s “father”—rabinically rachitic, a gruff, glassesed mensch with a whitened scrofulous scruff about the taut cheeks and recessive chin — serving first the table’s “mother,” a younger, preternaturally gray mensch, slight, suited and tied, corporately consumptive, made sick through idleness, he can’t digest a thing; then serving the kinder of the table: FBs ranging in age from twentysix to six, Abel one of ten middle kinder, at thirteen the kind most middle, and so used to being passed over in favor of the shining eldest or most demanding youngest, angelic in his stupid patience, old beyond his years; ladled and scooped, fork and knife dripping with sublimated urge, as if the tine and blade are both made mouths connected as continuation of his throat; then, juicy gravy swathing the brute constancy of that smile, bubbly baubles of grease, glistening oil as if planets stilled to slime out of orbit then dribble off into void; his head servedup atop the starved plate, garnished in round whiteness, a newest specialty: a dead, embarrassing grin; “father” collapses in a faint, “mother” throws himself upon his own fork; then the Angels — those matrons wimpled formless in white sheets, with little ineffectual wings attached; flightlessly old and unmarried, lately redeemed from Upstate nunneries found default on their mortgages, ingathered then trained for this very contingency — come quickly, in through the illuminated emergency doors at the end of the unified entrance hallway before the screened part into commissary meat and commissary milk: a rush of booties and rustling habits, without the rattle of harps or distracting halo of sirens.

At the whiny cry of the boy, those in the overheated, underventilated, monthold mayonnaisestained hall drop their soupspoons, their metals falling in a massed tinny skitter to the filth of the oilclothed floor lumped toward the walls in mounds of stale air; clattering dully, silvery rivers winding amid dusky hillocks of industrial blue, then silence. The meal’s evacuated, food’s adjourned, and all are remanded to barracks still hours until Curfew. In the morning the lasting first, rumor’s leaked; gossip’s net hairing down from heads on high, with their gloved hands serving up only the usual expected: that Abel’s only ill, but when he isn’t anywhere around the next day, which is the restless host of Shabbos, by its stars with their shiny palms held to the spiced fire, the constellating cup of inflammatory wine, and the staff of the Infirmary — baldheaded, baldfaced collaborators, is the suspicion — won’t give his next of kin Steinstein, Adam, any information, no indication, visitation rights forget about it, only office redirection of his heartrending, goggleeyed, and altogether trusting inquiry, then last name, first name, middle initial forms to fill out in triplicate, crossed complete with dotted lines upon which to sign away the permission of all meager hope — everyone suspects the truth; though many are sick, fall ill themselves, having without thinking picked up from the filthy, unswept, nevermopped floor the wrong spoons, those of their neighbors and others’, the spoons of their enemies and ever sicker friends, then verily souped and scooped with them the wandering dumplings, the balls of mealed matzah and flotsam of flanken, the jetsam of parsley, and so becoming infected with alien germs, the stock of the foreign, just as their real mothers would’ve warned them, had their womenfolk still lived.

Though initially, the first days of Nisan set in chaos, in crisis, the revelation isn’t so on — sophistication takes its time, its toll; the world might’ve been created in seven days, but who wants to live without electricity or shoes: three, four moons of the same moon into this recreated Garden, only a few fingered months however paradisiacal onIsland — made collaborative to this resurrected refuge experiment, complicit in this solution proposed anew — and not everyone’s accounted for yet: the who, where, when not yet established, made record; the problem, not everyone’s been ID’d. Passions settle themselves, by name and number into an agenda, the minutes of their meeting a wayfarer along the low road to the west. A tongue reigns from the heavens, a meteor’s gloss. By night, an inquiry’s established: a chamber not of torture but the throne of the already painfully confessed, not barebulbed but luxuriously outfitted with every amenity to be desired by even the most outlandish of imaginations; impaneled in panels, beset by committees, resounding with oversight, how perceptive. Unspun, unedited, unasked to sit down first before being broken the news recently made in headlines that would strangle a God, a scar lamed upon the neck of the leg — truth is, one of them’s died again, made familial to the future, cousin to the world to come, allow me to extend my condolences but not myself, not by much. An order’s given to mourn — officially, on condition of the anonymous record — while behind the chambers’ doors, which are never entirely opened and yet never entirely closed, only perpetually drafted, left halfwise if only to suspect the air of transparency, accountability with its paranoid pointed fingers and gnawedupon nails, the order’s to question, to ask; to flap the lips as if doors themselves, wavering from any gust that might answer. Which Abel was Abel? To establish the identity of the decedent beyond any measure of shadowing doubt. Who’s able to identify which Abel this Abel was? Having no distinguishing marks, no tracking implants, collars or bracelets that beep (early on, those measures had been nixed by these very powers inquiring as too extremely unfree — not too invasive, merely an unwarranted expense), it’s a process of reduction, winnowing, the chaff from the chaff, of taking and examining testimony, crossexamining, then striking both, instructing to ignore. To begin all over again, it keeps them afraid. On their toes if still seated. All rise. Place a hand on your — Bible, and repeat after me. Let your other hand be its commentary. Sign over your mouth. I don’t swear to God, it’s against my tradition. Speak up, please, we can’t hear you.

For the Record, then: this dead Abel isn’t Abel Bernstein (alias “Feel the Burnstein,” AKA “The Burnt Teen”); no, he’s still among us, still sniffling around, waiting for his father of blessed assets to come back to life, to resurrect his reputation from the vault that’s the grave for the sole purpose of helping his son make headway into the business, as he’d always promised; that indefinite media career: publishing, music, or film — he’d had the contacts, you name it, he’ll make it, facetime, a conference call with the dead; the kid always thought opportunity like weather fell from the sky, that money grew evergreen on trees; if not that, then still waiting for his inheritance to come through, to get processed, always, tied up in litigation’s the delusion maintained — cheap chintz visor stuck on his head even when sunset permits eating and at stool, leaving the bared to premature bald for the yarmulke he’s forced to — enumerating his windfall, accounting wildly, fingering the interest and dividends, even in his satisfied sleep oblivious, dreaming through every denial; unable to admit to himself and his bunkmates who once they find him alive continue to rib him, to haze and harass, that Der had, or is, already spent or spending it all — the whole bubonic cancerous lump sum of it on his own room and board, along with its waste upon a host of other if they’re necessarily more clandestine interests, offshore investments the particulars of which, even their most vague sheltering structures, Garden, Inc.’s accounting would never divulge: imminent Messiah perks, (re)Affiliated infrastructure (privatizing the public schools, revising curricula, contracting, too, with dispersed hospitals and clinics), securing the oil reserves, the water supply — just name it, it’s true. Many think it’s Abel Eckstein, until they realize he’s not dead, just introspective, reflective, modest, quiet and sad, still mourning his mother who’d always said she loved him so much she could die, which she eventually did, leaving her son to slink around the Garden, spending idle mooning hours in the showering facility (known as the Shof, if you’re a regular, winkwinking), gutter-to-gutter, hopping its drains on one foot in an attempt to cope or cop a mope; consecrating his mornings to the sin of Onan, which is masturbation, spilling seed, lathering his nether putz when he doesn’t suspect anyone’s spying, hundreds of FBs at a time shoved in together too close to know, to want to know his hard as slippery as wetted soap. And then the rumor has it as Abel Nagstein, which is ridiculous if you asked around, an eminence of thinking wishful: the Nag’s always shtepping everyone as to his presence; taking up space, precious air, exploiting, too, his position as a disgraced lab employee slash janitor, trying to sell premium fresh urine that’d pass any test to anyone who’d offer their favor, lording his gainful over the unemployed mass of FBprofessionals: lifeinsurance salesmenschs finding no takers for their policies offered in monthly installments growing easier and more affordable by the day, letting them go for less than a kiss, a hug’s discount embrace, or only a word in kind; lawyers mourning their billables ticking by, plotting late night tort suits v. Garden, Inc. and its CEO Der if we could just remember his former, Unaffiliated name; codefendants in a class of actionable all to themselves, they’re naming everyone: the government, higherups in the Administration, President Shade, even God It or Himself, despite being an unknowable entity, if existing, surely One of a limitless liability; doctors pining away for their bonebroke skichalets, half paidoff, shedding tears to freeze in the eye of the mind into virgin slopes trickled down the nose; moguls without moguls, briefs without a leg to stand on; architects and developers dreaming what they’d do were this Island to be privatized to any of their own concerns, what they’d put up here and why; remember the malls, like irradiant jewels in settings of parkinglot tar…the Great Hall a rejuvenating lifestyle spa, with residential space up top past the sun, or a hotel pent above three stars, lavish barracks through the clouds — luxurious condominiums ranging higher than a heaven in which none of them can still believe.

No, as Adam Steinstein reminds everyone — in his rage ennobled, matured, barmitzvah or no a mensch already, canny and strong, he’s toughened — it’s me who’s suffering, it’s me who’s down and out, left all alone, me and not you…that the Abel who died had been his cousin, his and not yours, yours and not theirs: Abel obituaried and eulogized, who’d enjoyed the sport of princes, which is pingpong, and the sport of kings, too, which is pinball, an A student who’d hoped one day earlier to find the cure for the cancer that’d killed his grandparents before his parents would’ve died of it themselves, only to die from what at the peak of their health, at the height of that late and perpetually latening winter — to find that cure perhaps under the fluff of his pillow, vialed alongside the fallen blood of a pearly tooth; Abel who’d left no parent behind to be proud of his prodigious intelligence — you’ll excuse, please, a schmeck of exaggeration postmortem, won’t you, hab rachmones, pity, pity, shalt thou pursue. Abel who’s dead, which is sure, that much can be said, through the wind and snow and the dark and ice that freezes in the air the echoes of familial howl; the calls in and warm, the calls home, officially motherly exhortations, ostensibly fatherly threats; inscrutable Cain the distanced shadow of the deceased, beckoned through the wilderness of the city to the Island to meet his brother, to become there his murderer and his heir. Abel’s face smote down in his meat his plated anger, a sacrifice atop an altar of brisketcuts, the table’s least desirable, the most fatty of them their tips welldone, overcooked dry, brisket blacked to char in its own blood that no one here will ever eat again, you can’t hold it against them — blutbeef sopped with a gravy the organic aspirations of which are, let’s be honest, fooling no one; served up with the plump of dumplings, alongside just defrosted, coldcored mixed vegetables, which are harder than teeth though just as filling. Eat up. Fast down.

With no news of infirmity let alone of recovery, of survival, with no news at all, an impromptu vigil’s candlelit into mass mourning, barefoot on concrete around Steinstein’s — Adam’s — stripped mattress hundreds of beds bunked south of his cousin’s, empty now forever; a Shiva extended, FBs flocking to the appropriate barracks to pay their respects, their tribute though who knows him — to pay memorial donations of sweater lint and good will to a fund established in anyone’s name; there to trip through the formulas of condolence, offer sentiment, apologize; Nilesized baskets arrive at all hours from without, cosigned cards and wreathes and cooperative gifts: Mail Call’s siren signaling the arrival of carepackages sent by interests wholly charitable and only partially specialinterested, concerned not with wellbeing or appetite but with the states of their forsaken souls; the FBs showing with weeds thawed and tied with grass into bouquets, a bulrush on cattails to wrap, papyrus; foods stolen from the commissaries, pocketed for a present to the bereaved: forget this fasting; you’ve already been punished, might as well go forth and sin. A gathering staying up late, refusing to disperse at Curfew, don’t mind me stands in the dark. Steinstein sleeps under the sag of his bunk, on the floor, which is barren, cement clumped with dust, a position mandated by tradition for those in mourning, those who find themselves exhausted while down on their knees, praying their search for a lost pair of shoes. A rabbinate in attendance, a few thousand of them resident from Rabbi to Rebbe on down to fallen Rav — everydenominational like the mint they would’ve been charging had this tragedy been graven upon the past, a prior season; ordained up to their ears, their solicitous eyes, their lips pursed in an Amen before their mourner blesses grief — here to assist Steinstein with whatever his spirit’s unable to bear. Since his upper bunkmate native to Moscow, or Odessa maybe he’s saying, doesn’t speak his language yet, this tongue native to and predominant in the Garden (rather, the earhaired, nattily suited mensch knows his Russian, a mouthful of scatological Yiddish), he’s rotated out, switched the second night of Shiva, which means To sit with a rabbi who’d known — by his own admission, perhaps a bintel briefed too forthcoming especially when in front of the microphones and cameras — a friend of Steinstein’s, Adam’s, father’s roommate through two years of medicalschool from which the rabbi then not yet had been expelled for worrying experimentation, try offprescription abuse, trying out a host of psychopharmacologic solutions upon the person of his future wife, the rebbetzin. Rabbi and Steinstein sleep near one another on the floor, freshface buried in beard — late night struggling, early morning tensed, limbs aching, with toes exposed freezing, they’re shivering but nervously, too; hot, wandering palms stroking shush…

Witness, too, the perhaps anapocryphal Powers that Are sitting around a table topped in glass, rung with the orbits of sloshing coffee cups, water glasses, and the dew of their pitcher, scattered with stray tobacco, ashtrays overflowing with gray; overtired, occipitally headached and parched, they’re ringing galaxies of smoke around this room underground through the night into morning: Der and the Doctors Tweiss, seated alongside the theological legation of Abuya and the Nachmachen, a rowdy gang of insourced maturation experts, too, adjustment authorities, enablement profs, armchaired academicians roused from their laureate sleep, tenured doze, summoned away from tomes or midnight weaknesses for string quartets, pipe tamps, and whiskey snifts, vaunted pundits syndicated out the mouth, payper politicos, image consultants, brand managers, then an entire jury of Goldenberg Esq.s their dictaphones infundibularized in the flowers of their lapels, a stenographer and a notary public; they’re desperate to be anything but desperate, how now anything goes: gaudily attired gypsies, lisping mediums, psychics, séancers, crystalballers, and tablerappers…Ben’s at home still, sleepless in His bed and alone again after His nightly sister’s left, left Him and herself as His sister — too shockdistracted, onedge at threshold, wasted afraid with the door halfopened, halfshut and with the nightlight glowworm on; nothing to do but keep awake, which means you’re alive, living to grieve again another day. At who knows when too early, redrimmed moon the morning, a hulkingly anachronistic darkness enters the house, a trespass intruder with its own set of starry keys — it has to be a golem, it’s silent. It’s palming a flashlight, he is, its taped shem of a nametag indicating ownership, Steinstein; its small spot of light comes sweeping over the kitchen, illuminating scurried forms, the escape of loosed household pests, roaches on the tails of mice being swallowed by rats, imported from Manhattan…the tables, the chairs, the blinding door of the fridge, the breakable junk, the broken; a viscous mountain of trashbags not yet curbed to the enclosure to the west of the house. He makes his deliberate way to the stairs, past the dim footlockers arranged at the foot: Hanna’s packingcrates, with dishes never to basement; then up the stairs, down the halls with their mirrors still draped past the sisterly rooms their doors shut and locked, sidestepping the mudtaint, soiled snow tracked in without wiping feet, desquamated foreskins and scaly foodwrappers and single sheets of toiletpaper trailing to the end to ply its door, Ben’s, which could’ve been shut and locked, too — though not to them, nothing is.

Hamm taps the flashlight on His head and says it sounds something like downstairs, softly, get dressed…at least put on some pants.

I won’t beg — you’re coming with me.

A rousing, rustling later with Hamm waiting downstairs out of respect for modesty and even that that’s naked shame, atop a couch with his legs held apart widely and the flashlight between them ranging idly over the brick of the fireplace and the formica of the kitchen’s overhanging counters — a messmassive clattering of feet atop foil, snared on wrappers with a swish and a crunch, Ben hulking down the hall to the stairhead, trippingover the wash folded and stacked into its hamper thanks to He thinks Rubina, wasn’t there this morning…Him tumbling tush over head down the stairs, which are slotted, aired and so He’s rolling almost deliberately down them, His girth sticking Him in the spaces between each step, to bulge out from the slots, bringing Him to landing slowly, as if a gear turned upon the tooth of its paunch — clockwork, any mechanism of the darkened house, or yet another nightly appliance who knows what it does, reset. Landing reached, He raises a hand and gropes at the newel for support, misses and so leans on air to fall the descending remainder. Aright, Ben stands, tucks Himself in under His shirt, cinches His robe, which was His mother’s, over the bump, to face Hamm risen to stand at the foot.

About time, he’s holding out to Him His shoes, then dropping them on the floor and kneeling to His, genug.

I’ll help you with the laces.

What we’re really getting at is this…to Ben still a stranger now doing the talking, in an interrogation room of the Great Hall to which His escort’s been firm, but anxiously kind — a weird wrinkly shrivel of a monkey, and an egghead uncle to as well, at this hour of night marshaled in the appropriate constellations of clank, all these honors and that of his acquaintance, too, this goy whose bland and bald face He would meet in framed and encouragingly unretouched reproductions hung upon, now that He’s reminded, every available wall, and whose voice He would sleep through every morning, greeting reveille in windy echo over the PA. What exactly — he’s saying, Der — was your relationship to the deceased, with him, this Abel boy, I mean? Think hard. Take your time. Answer only when you’re sure.

Here they’re buried graves underground, strata down, amid a network dug from bedrock, retiform tunnels once used for the store of munitions, back when this Island had been a fort for the protection of those already alive and busy living in the city; an area still kept official, Gardenmaintained secure and offlimits, for emergency use only, as evacuation, escape, bunkers for the salvation of only essential personnel, vital support staff plus One, contingency adjoining the rumor of a Treasury — this hallway hewed and lit in trim leading under the ice and out into Midtown, the rising Temple-in-the-Park. What I mean is, Der squints, what’s the nature? and he knuckles his head. How would you define it? Acquaintanceship. Casual. Bestfriend forever. Closer even. Don’t tell me. I’m not sure I want to know.

Postmortems, interrogations about interrogations, investigations of investigations regarding, follows up and through, therapists to ask their own questions about the questions Der asks and the answers He on His own recognizance provides, which have been, as it’s suspected, in turn, provided to Him, but by whom — surveillance from within, an affair of the utmost internal, heartsick, spleeny. Below the hosting clock at table, amid the chairs, the glasses and pitcher (water only, though anything else can be requested, they tell Ben, in return for answers they want to hear, those they don’t yet know they want to hear — here they are, already), the Doctors Tweiss lean in to listen; their collars unbuttoned, same with their pants, with both sets of cuffs rolled up; they wipe their hands on their neckties undone, lick their nibs, flip blank pages on sloppy legal tablets, begin again. To stick their pens into their wrists, suck in a measure of blood. Weak ink, even ichor would be. The Nachmachen crosses his legs, Abuya uncrosses his. And then, the Nachmachen crosses to the other. How to know this would be so serious. His mother would’ve said, would’ve been right. He should’ve put on a suit, at least a jacket and matching slacks she’d called them.

Abel? Ben says, I’d have to think about that. Officially hard to place, I’m getting a name but no face. Off the record, I’m not quite sure. On the record, I’m even less. Better to keep quiet, which is the best ignorance. Maintain silence, hold fast. Open your mouth only to ask for a lawyer, a loan of a Goldenberg, Esq. O to have retained His father as counsel! Showtrial and error then purge, which is to say, to lie, to perjure: “I don’t know Him from Adam,” and so they go ahead and give Him His options — Adam Arnofski or Adam Arnofsky, Adam Borowitz or Borovitz, Cohen or Cahn? Whoski, Whatsky, Wherenik, Whenwitz, Whykrantz, & Howfarb, Attorneys-At-Law?

Maybe a hint. Sounds like, perhaps.

Steinstein — alright, He says, sitting in a foldingchair uncomfortably un-cushioned, Abel’s a friend of mine. Was. More like an acquaintance. How’s that you called him, casual. Just this kid I knew from around. When you live on an Island, who has the luxury of being estranged? He was cousins with Adam, first cousins, I think, and Adam’s a friend, a good friend, but — he’d been seated a table down from Abel when he passed, or so he told me, and when Abel hit the plate, this I heard from…you know, I’m still eating at home.

Apparently, Adam got a little gravy splash on the one shirt he has for Shabbos. Veggie stains on his good pants. Wanted me to ask when they’re back from the cleaners.

Yes, says Der, we’ve already spoken with your Adam…

He stands alongside sitting Ben, almost tonguing His ear — whispers being the encryption of memory; the softer he’s speaking’s the thought, the better lies He’ll calm down to tell.

But you can’t think why anyone would want to hurt him, can you? Did Abel have any enemies, anyone with a pretext, even the merest inkless inkle of a text — did he leave you a note, I’m saying, or a letter with Adam? Anyone with a bitter chip, a grudge. Held against. A hatred, seething. You hear anything, you see anything? unstoppable Der’s shrieking. As if to say, it’s fine by us to fink, to inform, to rat and rodent around — after all, we’re all old friends here, aren’t we? Chaverim, habibi. Ben springs from His chair. Metal clatters to the floor, uneven concrete, negligently poured.

I don’t know anything! He’s yelling, nothing. What are you talking about? I wasn’t there, Adam was, and he’s my friend, mine and not yours, you wanted him to be, for us, I mean…mumbling, bends over His gut to retrieve the chair, unfolds the rust to sit down again, tilting the metal against the rocky wall — and as long as we’re here, I should ask you about my mother’s cooking; it’s gone downhill, and fast. If it’s not being poisoned, it’s either horrible or humbling.

Don’t avoid! and Der paces, strokes at his lip with a gunkgorged nail. What have we told you, Ben, haven’t we warned you? They haven’t. And anyway, who’s we is what He wants to say. Friends, Der says, they’re probably not the best idea. Especially now, what with the…he hesitates, this incident.

He adjusts an epaulet hanging askew; his medals clink like chains, binding him to his tone, his speech, this public life; he squints, always squinting, as if this incomprehension’s the fault of the without, not the failure of his within, anyone but him; then, making sure his chin’s still around to think with, to think from the mouth above, he exhaustedly sighs, begins in on Ben again.

Contradiction, babble, tripletalk.

Keep your distance, hold your tongue. Rub your stomach then pat your head.

It’ll make it easier for everyone, dismissed.

A referendum has been held, the table has been readied. Places have been laid. The guests have yet to be chosen. Our diningroom, the room with the longest and widest table, is still. Our island sinks deeper into borrowed creation, other time. As the fixed becomes unfixed, is given over to the fixed again, as one life in death is usurped by another, its mourning, the comfort found in concentration recedes — what once was community now is cramped, brotherhood gives way to resentment. Mistrust. Furtive eyes, with hands in pockets often not their own they stand apart. Picking them and noses. Against this insanity of existence, the exigencies of a situation out of all pockets and out of all hands, the clock still ticks — the sun’s face, blank and cold, setting behind the Great Hall, between immovable porticoes. Against the mystic absolute, the mundane must be strengthened. Despite death, it’s life we’re after. Its necessities. Becoming amenities. The schedule reigns. There’s work to be done. There is no chair at the head of the table, and so there is no head. To be left alone, one must first become oriented.

To the north, dim puffy women, former prostitutes and the metropolitan destitute dressed in tarnished overalls of pigskin emerge slowly from their lowslung, falling down cabins of corrugated tin, heaps, impediments to wind held up by the luck of a miracle; with hands gloved they wield their axes handled in bone, their blades sharpened on the sky. They’ve fallen the last trees of Staten Island, its Greenbelt, Moses Mountain high above the dump, having already deforested much of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan’s Park in advance of the Temple, for its timber hard and dead, too frozen to degrade. Then, with measuringsticks held between their teeth, one holds the nails the other hammers, banging slabs into coffins, sixpointed, sixsided, skidding them out onto the ice offIsland, where they’re stacked for future use: stored empty, topless; filling up with the burial of snow.

To the south, workers are bound, constrained; the Garden’s tailors turning out piecework, new uniforms to be grown into, to death; needle and thread-folk sewn themselves into excessive bolts of cloth as protection from the elements: straightjacketed against the wind and fall, they’re swathed totally, windingsheets wound of sheet and human — they’re completely enshrouded, restrained, except for their hands, which have been left bare, exposed, to tailor free from any distraction, to work without the diversion of the other senses. They work in a tented gallery of burlap patched to canvas, stretched tightly just over the larval stoop of their forms, pegged with rope to spikes frozen to the ground. Beyond the flaps laps a fire (without a chimney, there are no other slits in the cloth, which is impenetrable; the smoke gathers, bellows, chokes), over which hunch their odd, shadowy forms, at their whirring machines, with panting foot ridiculously pedaling out their stitching, trimming and hemming, their taking in and letting out — shrouded themselves, they’re making shrouds, each monogrammed at the nape of the neck. They pile their finished products, as light and white as a whisper, in hulking bins of weathered hailresounding metal quartered at the edge of their encampment, once emptied of coal for inside heating — without the hindrance of meals or peers, bundled together against the cold in the warm they’ll eventually die in.

To the sanctifying east, which is the cardinality most consecrated, the olden orientation of the holy — down the singlelane, twoway access road rearing the Great Hall with its turreted vistas offering glary views over the ice to Governor’s, clear past the freeze as if one eye goes slipping as the other eye goes sliding across the slick to Red Hook, then north to Fort Greene, which like this Island is no longer a fort but only a plot of earth left indefensible as named; and between, the taut sinews of the Brooklyn Bridge, the delicate intestinal suspended to waver over the water, white and high and alone — there’s a tremendous cavern, secreted in a mound of ice, carved out roughly, its entrance blocked by a boulder that has to be rolled away every morning, an ordeal requiring the work of three of them, or that of any number with the strength altogether of three. It’s ritual by now; each to their own task: one mops pools stagnant to ice inside that first have to be pulverized with the handle of the broom used to sweep the floor littered with slop, old newspapers and plain brownpaper wrap, while another hoses down then wipes with rag the lavers clean, as yet another is tasked with the sacred office of examining then sharpening the knives kept stowed overhead, sharpdown amid a rash of bulbous and cankered tenderizing stones hung in their slings from racks and hooks, rusted, resembling to many of their visitors — the kashrut inspectors, assorted efficiency experts, the Commissary chefs — nothing less than the timeworn utensils of unenlightened torture. Then, to begin with the work of the day, which is slaughtering, the killing of meat, the knifing of it into product, into cuts as numerously diverse as appetites, and as grossly disarticulated, irreconcilable: these eyes of round allseeing, beeves in crosscuts, sirloins and tender-loins, rear rounds, roasts of flank and shank, brisket and chuck, butterflychops flitting through the dim, evading the chop of blades swung high to scalp, held as long and disjointedly sharp as the teeth of a starveling God; they’d cater also with chicken, with turkey, and innocent lamb: leg and rack, buffetworthy centerloin, neck slices alongside wings hacked flightless, breasts, thighs, legs and wholes, seething raw, porged, trabored, then soaked with salt — the carcasses even seeming to breathe and pant with the exhaustion of being sectioned and sold here, in the whirlwindy din of their slaughterhouse out at the edge of the Garden with a view from the top of its mound to the Battery and Brooklyn Herself; its partially underground vault a sepulcher of shrieks, snorts, and staggering animals with their throats slit lolling a roll of heads to death, its echoic expanse tolling thickly with the pitiless procedure of fast, mass execution; cleavers dull on meat, shattering to bone, to spew into the heavy moist air ringlings of sinew and vein as if the made flesh last gasp of an unfortunate fatling, death throes these scraps of gristle to garnish silence — the noise, though, stored within this facility as hermetically as if within one of the oversized masonjars stacked on the shelves that line the space, stocked with organs and glands.

These faithful surviving, they’re the staff butchers, the Garden’s onsite ritual slaughterers, their profession in their olden lives as well as that in these their new, not for long — though Shochets is the term they prefer, just as their fathers had preferred it and their fathers before them, on forever. Strictly glatt, lately they’ve been slaughtering as never before, in a blind and crazy, heedless, needless rage, as if their work, which is never finished — there will always be carcasses to carve — would serve, but how, to postpone the imminence of their own death; as if by providing sustenance to their kind, they themselves would be sustained, would outlive those they’ve lived to feed. As if by exacting the punishment that is the animal, they would be spared its fate. As if by killing, they would not be killed. Here in their matching aprons, retrieved on arrival from an unlaundered drape on hanger steaks, their paunches swaddled underneath them, hanging from the ribs like swollen tears, they work in a frenzied lust. Despite the fast — meat their life, the making of meat from death their only purpose: trimming fat stored upon the soul for lean years until last Xmas, its ingathering to the Island and this, their privileged employment, their slitting of throats to painless end. Butchers as their fathers before them were butchers, they might be brothers, too — fraternal in their flaw, which is only the quorum of their flaws, a bloody congregation. And though it’s impossible to ascertain just how many of them there are: they’re always coming and going, schlepping and slicing and slitting and bestially blooding — our sages hold that it takes all of them, however many of them there are, or were, to constitute what we would regard as one whole, intact person: as each is deformed, if grossly, lamentably, is mutilated, if only slightly, in his or its own way, uniquely and that, it’s interpreted, it might be this very mutilation that makes them family, that renders relationship to loss, conferring kinship upon such senseless blemish. Unsightly, but they can’t hear you. One’s missing a thumb, another a forefinger, another a middle, another a ring, yet another a pinkie; a knife dropped from up on high severs a thumb toe, a cleaver fallen middle toes, a band or circular saw deprives the foot of pinkies; one’s missing a right hand entire, another still a left, both hackedoff at the wrists, scarred purple and without hair. Occupational hazards. Condolence them not, though, they’re suitably insured. One’s missing an arm to the elbow, the stump of a stub, another to the nubby shoulder, a missing arm entire; one’s without a nose, in the way of risen sever, another lacks an upper lip to lick in concentration on the following blow, his other then, poorer a lower; two have eyes poked out in the disposition of one and one, workplace sacrifices, spurts over the low counters and cases hewn from ice. Know, also, our scholars say, that they cooperate, make do. That the one who’s missing his righthand works alongside the other that’s missing his left; that that other without an ear works alongside another lacking the ear opposite — more than each compensating for the other, for yet another, collaborative in their sin. It’s that they work, ultimately, as one organ, as a unified entity, a mass of single mind and purpose: a huge monstrous slaughterer, murdering away for the sake of the multitude; working despite the horror and hurt as routinely, as placidly, as the carcasses hang from their pitiless hooks, as if pendulums to clocks, swinging their bloods out of the bursting walkthrough — outside: an overflow freezer laid to leak its hold onto the Hudson’s ice, red currents flowing out to slake the bay.

And then, to the west, which is the secular directional, the way of the fallen, out at the furthest edge of the Island, marking the nearest, anchoring preserve of our float from the vale of Joysey and its rim of oncegreenery — the State Park blanketed by ash, hacked picnictables scavenged by locals for their wood: the fuel of Hoboken the fences of Weehawken…portapotties toppled, swingsets mournfully rusted, the playgrounds’ hanging ropes noosed, twisted into hideous knots, their worn tires the nests of malevolent storks — the view from Ben’s house, His parent’s, His bedroom above.

On the third of the newest month, Feigenbaum sits, downstairs still, has survived.

On the toilet, in its spare bathroom down the hall to the door to the garage and subsisting this entire time on breath. Only groans. Noises that hallway to Ben on the wind…these singly plyed moans being questions, how to answer: Dad, where are you, how are you, Israel, Yisroel, Aba Aleichem. He resists, and is silent, makes instead to follow the origin of the echo, its whispering that ends in the blackened brick of the fake fireplace with shuttered flue, in the familyroom, unknobbed from the speakers of the screen; a voice in the livingroom, from the den, as if the words spoken — words that sound to Him like names, His Aba’s, Ima, sisters, PopPop, DadDad, Zeyde, Saba — are only the manifestation of prophetic delusion; as if they’re the words and names and memories only these links in weedy, rusted chains, sent out to bind, tongued to noose around His neck and legs and arms to drag Him down, submission — don’t look for me, an origin, a source…the chain says hissing its way around His waist and around again to knot at navel, as navel, you’d better not if you know what’s good.

Are you God? He asks.

Are you?

To be drug by the voice out of the kitchen then to the stairs, hesitation whether up to the bedrooms, or down to the basement: how Ben fears being taken down there, despite the assurance of any bind, curiosity’s hogtie — down there who wants to know. It’s always beyond, though, this mourning, as if otherly dimensional, a hidden call coming from the stairs and further left past the porch with its brittle wicker, two rockingchairs without cushion out of season, a low table topped with shells Liv’d found at the beach that summer once, and a sofa, which now all seem made of braided strands of flowingly immobile ice, screens for the windows to be put up to give air to spring still propped against the furniture as if windows in the negative, unyielding nothingnesses, hard voids as black as holes; then, at the end of the hallway the door stripped of stain, the welcome mat, Shalom, the entrance to the triplewide garage. Three doors along the hallway to the right. To open one a linen closet, the folded cloths, the deaths of moth, clean and bright and fresh. Another, further along the hall the closet of dirty linens, balled placemats and coverings, heaps of messy drools. And then, to try the door to the last right against the wall and the end of the hall with its descent three steps down to parking. A static shock, it’s locked. Jigglejiggle, knockknockknock.

It’s not my fault, the voice says as if softer and further away than ever…I’m sorry.

I asked to stay here…I told them, it’s better for my condition.

First floor last bathroom, his accidental discovery that Sabbath, that Shabbos, the last and just in time, tenks Gott…an emergency, and to think of what could have been: a trickly blush upon his crotch, Felice his wife Israel’d always forget her name would have said a shame, he’d have said a Shanda; an embarrassment: to have spilled his filial fill to further arabesque a plush rug of the Orient warming the tiles of the hall. Here, Feigenbaum lives as if he’d asked for it. Too late for remorse, turned to rage in the full flush of his senility: possibly depressed, though lacking clinical confirmation, he squats. Woodpaneled, lilymirrored, hung with a kitschily antiquarian map of Jerusalem framed in metal, purchased by Hanna at an auction to benefit charity, the synagogue: kinder without stomachs, cancer of the conscience, the birth defect that is guilt, converted to regret. Feigenbaum, he hadn’t even wanted to accept the invitation, standing, the welcome openarmed, but didn’t know how to say No, which naming word was first spoken on the eighth day of Creation — Eve to Adam, God to…

I was born, came over here, you wouldn’t understand, no one ever does…worked selling luggage, suitcases, trunks out on Orchard Street, I made what I made then married and got old. After I smashed my hips, my wife moved us down here to a facility, relocated was what she’d say. I went to a shul, I went there to daven, you say synagogue and pray; Shalom’s its name I forget, Anshei Bergen County, my wife liked to sit up front where she could see the rabbi, hear the cantor, the chazzan I’d’ve said if he hadn’t been so terrible, but me I stood in back. One night, this stranger comes over to me and asks if I have a meal, I say no but he insists. I come, I sit, I go to the toilet, the bathroom, here…an intention just to visit, to stop in, say Shabbat Shalom then quiet, let his wife do all the talking. His wife, if he couldn’t please her better to become a chair and die of splinter. From her, how he became habituated to keeping not only the seat down but the lid as well, his head. Felice, she’s the one they came to like — the Israeliens inviting her back week in week out with him lugged along as baggage, furniture delivery. Felice, the one they liked to ess a fress with, to talk hands with and to; the one they always asked to stay later whenever he would ask to leave. And how every day here since has felt like Shabbos, this bathroom more and more like home. His last how he knows it, feels it deep among his issues both various and vascular. A sit eternal, with the feet already dead: ten corpses cold in ragged socks heavied with his shvitz. A rack of tortured washcloths, a counter with a sink, brightened with flowers, who knows what brand they’re called; a mirror draped in towels. To find nothing new under the overhead light: floors are white, shoescuffled. In appearance, he thinks, this bathroom the same as it’d been previous to its recreation, its resurrection, always, though how different in its feel: othered, unsettling. It’s not the fanned air, the pressure required to relieve; neither the worry for an emergency of tissue — amply stocked under the sink, twoply as if earth and sky, like waters; anyway, there’s nothing yet to clean, no need for Ben to haul down to the basement for any rolls of more, chaperoned only by His fear — the hum of the ventilation as sudbued as ever, pitched as dulcetly as its previous whirr; the same gurgle of the tank; the light, unobtrusive. It’s that he’s been revealed, or so it appears, a voice, a visitation — whoever that is with the footsteps flatly thudding. Feigenbaum sits with his elbows on his knees. Mortification, a birthright — and such a pain in his bowels, his head lapped in his hands.

O Felice! how fare the toilets of thy heaven; enlighten me as to the quality of the thrones of my Father — are they not warmed by the breath of stillborn babes? is the paper not pressed of the wings of angels? is their flush not the flow of the rivers of Eden — the Pishon and Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Hudson and the East? Why not accustomed to such by now, this life lived in hide, a locking squat, this hurt on pain of passing, the unsettled intestinal of his punished gut, the lower glower the inheritance of generations of persecutory kashrut since wiped from the tush of the earth. That and he’s hemorrhoidal, too, yet another intolerance (impotence), incontinence once even, never again, you name it, ever since he’d been weaned from his mother — out of the womb and into the toilet, a stallguest, to become an intimate of a leftover world. But it’s more than that or revelation by unnamed others, the rebuke of footsteps, and their thumping voice — it’s what they have to say: hot air up from under the draft of door, word whispered around of a plague returned, more virulent than ever, and adapted to resistance, and so resistant to resistance, strained into power, mutated beyond all conscience, made only to destroy; the gossip of a Steinstein dead, corroborated by the loud cries and whimperings of a lately disconsolate host — enough worry to rip a hole in the silvery lining of even the ironmost stomach, tract life through then grunt. Heavy figs of hairy branch and bough dangle over the edge of the seat. Feigenbaum scratches at what itches. He shifts, restless, unease, a tense, and almost…there are limits, breathe there must be. To think — a thing this large through a thing this small, this you didn’t have to tell Ben’s mother, you don’t have to tell his wife, they know from passing, dead down below: forget heaven and follow the pipes. Almost…but why still this pishy push and pull, what could be left inside: empty, he feels, he’s nothing, the ash of ash and tired, sustained only upon the shoedust and that overhead light. Partibirth. Stale air. Stillshat. He’s passing his innards, must be — his drecky, wasteworn soul.

Promise me…it’s the mumbling fan, you’ll never seek me out.

Promise, humbling, and I’ll remember to you whatever you want.

Ben sits on a sofa in a room His mother called one room and His father another, couched alongside the telephone set atop its table of wood legged fickly ever since He’d stood on it to rip the intercom’s unit from the face of the wall. At the sound now — she knew how to cook, how to compliment, she loved you very much, Feigenbaum says, I want you to know we all did — He knows not to answer, to provoke; give the voice its privacy, a room of its own, the gut of the house and the hallway, it’s a throat. Where’s the head, it knows what a week it’s been…Feigenbaum unsteady, lubricated from the shvitz of his sit, cracks toes, uncomfortable upon this dumb tooth of bowl, chomping him, consuming. A stack of magazines to his left on the ledge, having been blown under the door by way of looser lips, and so a sister to thank, a drafty girl who might’ve called him uncle, alongside yellowing, wetmoldy newspapers, expanded editions for Shabbos, featuring the Arts and Stocks, now with full death statistics, please turn to page D1: a record skimmed for the past, scanned for the present, headlines at his feet he hasn’t yet lived down but through; pages upon pages wetted to harden thick into tablets kicked to the corner to crumble into kibble. Fluffy seatcover itches, a poor pillow. To scratch, to sleep deep in the wounds he itches out, there to never wake, to live within your hurt is to never be hurt again…it’s that as much as frightened. Old enough to know better, old enough not to care he does, or that he should, it’s this insanity, also, this mania recurring when it’s not a fixation, perpetual, digestively always; having been trained to the toilet late, in that flat waterheated, a tenement smokewindowed, shared with a hundred others, a hundred hundred, an entire family encamped in a crack of the bowl, urging him to pish, to get done soon, get it over; the night of his tush, eclipsing the day of his flush — all the days and nights of his sit, unrisen. It wasn’t a family down there, it’d been the apples his mother had sold, or his father, the apples his mother would sell to his father who’d then sell them out on the streets for rent and heat and light and water; bobbing, kept cold in the tank, corefresh. And then the snake, it would slither up the pipes, the pipe, winding up and through the crumbling bowels, three, four, five walkupflights stooped up the plumbing up past the rust and rot; shedding skin as it surfaces, half submerged, to coil in the bowl, which is so white and gleamingly pure that it feels, now, to be made of bone, jointed to his squat; this serpent swallowing itself, tightly, coldblooded and yet warmly, a scaly quivering turd, just waiting, to bite him in the tush as he sits himself to lighten, two marks, one for each cheek turned, poisons, or even worse: to crawl up into him, corkscrewy the hisser to wriggle up Feigenbaum’s puckered hole, to eat his fever from the inside out; intestines as a newest, shedless skin, to poison his vitals then out again, trailing from its tail his bile through any convenient membrane, maybe its head forking a tongue out one nostril, its tail flailing out the other; with his failing breath Feigenbaum to grasp at the never spooled, never started, and yet almost finished roll, to poorly wipe away the venous venom: his two hands wrapped in tissue as if they’re bandaged, absorbent wounds incurred in the intensity of his grip; an iron vise holding fast the ring of the seat, steadying the spin of the planet diseased within, his own stormy dungheaped heart.

To die, then, atop this modest throne, the toilet of the bathroom he’d chanced upon that mortal night, firstfloor. Return to seat, to bony sit, with even his discomposed decomposing now, the only thing left such cobble from his cheeks. He faces the mirror sprayed with errant soap and mold, green oxidate, takes in the hurt flushed deep amid the black basement septic of his eyes: bowlfleck, basinfilth; the wrinkles of his age twisted into horrible bolts: a burn of lightning, though the thunder comes up from the gut, a great whirring racket, his innards wheezingly wracked as if an obsolete technology. His hunch, too, and that he’s still in his hat. Even his nipples have fallen asleep. In the mirror he mouths to his mouth — a hallway desecrated, intestines rawthroated, hoarse. To go beyond the cry, nothing else to say. Borborygmus, borborygmi. Feigenbaum leans to open the cabinet under the sink: emergency rolls stored damply, ten of them he counts, once replenished by Wanda by the week, contingency for the pants caught down. Each square, a shroud for a soul. As if the page of the prayer required, he unfurls a quiet ply.

I’m sick in here, he thinks a sus, a murm.

He rocks himself, the baby of his pain, sets teeth, bites tongue and what…I’m sick, in bathroom or in body.

A moment of scrotal tingle, gastric fizz — his teeth tear lips, loosing proliferant perforations in his flesh…Felice, honey, his wife long dead unkaddished, I’ll be out, assurance, any moment now and then, another onslaught: gnash gulp hic and, finally — there’s a give, a slow slip, it’s first a rumbling, then a slick licking of insides clean, the bared mirror of the soul. Feigenbaum mouths a tongue of dreck, snakes himself a distended turd out from the tightwad of his pucker, passing whole as if — fear — it’s his own tongue he’d bitten without chewing, then swallowed down the throat, as the throat and out, digestion forsaken; this bullock’s tongue, bulrushed past reeds of pubic hair, in a stream hissing steam — his water turned to blood.

Can you keep it down in there?

A shout from the sofa.

Maybe I can’t — who wants to know?

Ben’s questioning voice, intercoming distant over the squeak of Feigenbaum’s shoes on tile, which won’t be shattered, no matter the footing. A lull, as flakes accumulate, a dusting of paper pills, dead skin, to go searching for coins under the cushions, worthless anymore. To make all our eyes into knees, then knuckle. Clasp and bow for prayer. Feigenbaum righting himself into a gag, then grubbing at the tank as his other hand armed with dignity — which are fingers kept with nails that’ve kept their neatness, despite attempts to fist himself to pure — gathers in the crumpled tissue desperate wisps of blood; stinging, lancinate…still seated, trembles, then with last honor unbends himself upright to gather his slacks to belt, cinches pinching — blood gushes down his chin, rushing out the hole, to gather thick amid the stubble. As if he’d cut himself from shaving, bum a wipe to wad it up. With a heave, he throws himself against the tank, flushes with his elbow, with his shoulder jiggles once the handle, twice; it’s locked…it’s clogged, he plunges with a shimmy of his sit, then with his fallen head; tosses his body entire into the bowl of waste, up and down again and up the suction, to flail again at flushing; it won’t, not yet; hurls himself full upon the mess, his face and mouths what word, what name, deep into that rising filth, the font fouled, a rabid stoup. He tries to say but can’t, his own mouth clogged, blood and gums and what teeth left are only dentures loosed: hardened hunks to texture stool, as if to solidify, to make material while around his head, what manner of watery dispersal; showered pissy and soglogged paper: fills his ears, his nose, and eyes, overflows his form, which is erected now with the force of plunge and suck — is finally stuffed up then straight down into the toilet’s hole, his feet kicking for the fixture, the sconce a step above his shoe; to dim discomfiture, the mothflown, heelsnapped glass. His mouth sucks blood, suckles bone…and then, an impossible mass floods up, erupts him from his shallow, to spit him out limp to the tile, grouted amid waves of putrescent wake rolling out and under the crack, to crash a floor beyond the threshold — the draft, its door, then out onto the parquet and down the hallway just polished by a sister, which…down all halls and all stairs leaky through their slots; out the doors and windows and the drains of the sinks onto, then, the scurryrattling rodents’ tail gutters, to foul the Island proper; to come, soon, to a calming tide, lapping gently at the sewered edge of the Hudson’s ice, which hardens it to death.

Feigenbaum lies small on the floor. Withered trees around His house shake, shiver, then still, their roots soaking in the rippled, dreckdappled reek…life renewing always; trunks wrapped a waste in leafy paper stained with fruit, moldy, spoiled. Feigenbaum, their shriveled fig, left sprawled for the avid plucking in an ocean of his juice, a dark milk without a wake: flooding past the closets for winter clothes and past the closets for spring clothes and the closets, the parquet to the rug, Hanna’s favorite, absorbent blue, colorfast and manufactured stainresistant, or so holds its hidden tag; flowing ambit to the frontdoor, then out it, engulfing the mat that says Shalom, down the stoop, down Nitz’s walk then, to pool around the slate islands of that path, past the dead grass and frozen sprinklerheads, the little stretch of sidewalk poured and its tiny curb of one block long if that, the limits of His recreation; up the halls to the familyroom, the halls to the livingroom, and the halls to rooms, for laundry, for guests, for company and brunch — up to lap His toes; Ben ensconced atop a couch, its cushions drenched to stuffing — to float the furnishings amid the room that would have been the den, at the height of the middle mullion of the windows. He reaches a worried hand over to the bobbing, wetly creaking endtable, to gather up the phone from its cradle; to rock to a reassuring tone; the sympathy of the directline…what to say, He dials nothing — the only call He can make, guess who pays the bills.

To report, what now…a disaster in progress, natural or not, a flood fatidic, another postdiluvial deluge: not the tenth plague, but the first before the first, Ur unnumbered because unknown as plague to now — ten generations after the Adam before His Adam, with the world begun already destroyed; no rainbow shall assuage. Then, days and nights to soften…the furniture soggy, sagging, broken: credenza floating tchotchkes, snoglobes and mugs, glasses and lamps of glass, coffeetable buoy sloshing with milk and sugar and coffee, books of photographs, albums, and books; oceanically unpaid bills, appliance warranties and instruction sheets, catalogs and magalogs; an operator’s His mother onduty, holds the unit from her ear, to save herself from the whispered fearsome kvetch — pitching into a scold’s geshray; then, informing Him with excessive patience, forced maternal reassurance, that assistance should be arriving momentarily, that grownups are on their way she means and, maybe, He should attempt to find a mop. Like it would be helpful. That, or perhaps you could bail yourself out with your mouth. But where would a mop be. If I were a mop. Ben flails across the room in thought. A broomcloset, or laundryroom, apparently. Who would’ve thought, which hall. Though such situation requires plumbing not a polish. His sisters arrive shortly thereafter — just here to cleanup, don’t mind us — which is discombobulatingly risky because all this’d been Wanda’s job. Her responsibility, this swabbing, and would’ve been this bailing with buckets out windows. Angels arrive a wing’s breath later, to remove the body; floating the corpse, in a wet procession, each to a steering limb and then, his head, guiding Feigenbaum out the opened door, and with them every sip of filth remaining, stopped, to tide: their fall down the stoop, to drain the house to dry.

And so it might be appropriate, with everything relative and all Einsteins now dead, to engage in what’s been called the pilpulistic: to pull on our beards, to tug at our locks, to split hairs as befitting us lesser creations, sundering God Himself, Who parted the Sea of Reeds only for us to cross over into the wilderness, still barren of our freedom. They’ve begun their dying, their relentless death, of all days on the Sabbath, the first day of this the first moon, which is known to us as Nisan, the moon of the night of the death of Abel Steinstein: a night different from all other nights, as it’s said, and yet, at least according to official Garden recommendations, to be kept distinct from Night, too, which is the capitalized end of Creation, dawning upon the destruction of the entire darkened world. Over the mornings ensuing, the issue of days as generations stillborn from the womb that is Shabbos, the toll rises to the rarified pitch of the sky, a hollow bell that is the sky, resounding its storm across the ice — crescent-tongued the moon, then convex, gibbous — as death echoes in the last words and loves of families, ingathers in sighs whole dynasties and denominations, hoards entire congregations and communities, Landsmannschaften, landsleit, kretchma, klaus and klatsch, neighborhood groups, benevolent societies and synagogue boards; their lives pile up, are piled, a copse of corpses, menschs with their kinder stacked a perch higher than the stripped remains of the Garden’s last orchards, its appletrees only bare boughs become so thoroughly diseased they’ve been rejected for use even as coffin stock, which frozen, freezing malady, as if Scriptural, too old to be known, hasn’t spared them from being uprooted anyway, sawed then snapped, suitable for kindling, firewood only, landscaped in neat rows at the westernmost perimeter of the Garden, in the Island’s backyard of His house atop the grave of the sandbox, amid the rusted remnants of the swingset, and the twisted knotted slide.

A final flush, then, and the bathroom’s left empty…its door shut, locked forever forgotten, struck from the blueprints, forbidden from memory: offlimits, closed for the cleaning, slippery when even thought of, if — Feigenbaum among the one’s too many lost upon the altared third of the month, those thousands of them, these tens, the hundreds losing their daily shadows and with them, their nightly lives, to the lighting then darkening of this moon passing through, this moon passing over, waxwaning its judgment, as if a selfeclipse; the remnant crescent of his body remanded first to the (easterly) Morgue, for processing: the cataloging of his personals, not much, blood drained and body cleaned to corpse, his photograph’s taken, his prints inked, and name entered into a ledger; only then, he’s hauled over the ice for commendation to the waters below. Feigenbaum, Fink, Finkel, Fischel, Fishl, Freud, Freund, and Friedland…

But before our loss can be massed, given one face and voice, any name representation, an inviolate symbol — we’re asking you, wait up, langsam just a moment, will you, shtum: we all must stand ourselves, alive, aware, out on the far ice to reflect above the tide. Namely, that it’s the destiny of every individual, of even the symbol, even the ultimate, to think their time the end, to think their world the last — and this especially today, especially fastdeadly, with everything In the beginning again at the already begun, history eternally returning as always, as eternally as ever but rather quickly, evermore and more quickly now, with a precipitate urgency, an Apocalyptic insistence. Now the time in which you live the time to end all times and Time; now the Never again. In mourning, standing atop the furthest spur of frost above the deep, they mourn themselves, a little soon: their failure, their ill luck, the ruinous stars above with their frustrated mazel. It’s understood, which means it’s itself mourned, our knowing hope, our dreaming: how we can’t all be prophets, we can’t all be priests, we can’t all be kings; that despite what the scholars once believed, there’s only one Moses; that despite what the sages once bowed down to, there’s only our God; thinking, too, if everyone’s their own Messiah, what’s that worth, what’s in it for me. Better to unify, best to hold One indivisible. Nowadays, there’s no why to wonder who, admit it, who’ll make it, whose testimony, whose witness — that’s been long worked out and over, it’s suspected; already taken care of, chosen long before any of us were ever born to live down any death. A statement is forthcoming.

Officially, anything still undecided is beyond any notion of help, of emergency response, beyond even a call to account. Rather, it’s an attempt to define innocence, to safeguard assets from liability, to prevent position, meaning Authority, from assault, that being held responsible narrischkeit, this blood on whose hands mishegas — the Administration to vouch for the water supply, the air quality, middlemanager magi seers at the National Weather Service through an order from President Shade reporting directly to the Garden, which issues its own releases on every bandwith unsunned, givingout the assurance of what lately passes for expected: only the cold and the coldly dark, a steel frost, an iron ice; but there’s a break on the horizon, they’re sure to be assured…there’s bound to be, promised, a covenant fulfilled, just don’t ask us date or time. Nail what down — it’s excruciating, this call for exactitude, not a pleasant cross to bear. Though it’s important to remember, at least the FBs do, are reminding each other on their wandering whispering walks back from ice’s edge to the bunks of their barracks for Curfew, that of all people, organizations, or governments, Der has the most to gain from their loss, from ours of us; Garden, Inc., the very venture that ostensibly protects them, the party that would stand to make the most from their annihilation, as a total loss would make official, perpetually irrevocable, the reversion of assets, the manifold increase of the Island’s holdings in a wax: from obscurity, the mere lighting of a moon; an inheritance disinherited, to inheritance again. Not that any Authority more mortal is pleased, not at all, at least not publicly confirmed. No comment. As gossip becomes rumor becomes rule of Law, then eventually discredited, dismissed, overturned, it’s difficult to know what to do besides stand aside, sleep our dreams, wake, walk, and whisper, monger our gossip into rumors, while letting the course of events inhuman enact whatever punishment it is that might appease the anger of a God; render unto and all that — let the Lord exact the Almighty’s retribution, take enough suffering to satisfy them both, then make wing for day.

A mensch long of age, he seems older than three fathers and their fores. Brownsville, he’d been a Pitkin Avenue boy. He’d sold shoes, first as an assistant, as an employee of his own father, then, after his father’s death from being stepped on then walked all over one too many times by the local women and their creditor sons, as a small business owner — a prominent member of the local community, who’d had his own seat at the shul. A congregation. If you wanted decent shoes, you went to him. And when he said they were good, they were good. He was good to his wife, and he always thought he would live long because he gave to charity. If you gave to charity you would live a long life, because it says so in the books. But he never made the time to read them; his eyes were always tired, now the color of the cold. Seeking only a semblance of routine, the unexceptionally daily, he’s sitting a respite from the death of late, having his last pair of overstock salvaged shined by the new cobbler here who only last wax had been the lowly shiner, an assistant of sorts, an employee, if unsalaried, to the old cobbler recently dead who just a wane ago had reconditioned for this mensch the left heel on his issued pair, a limp. They both enjoyed whitefish sandwiches with coffee. Demoted. Left alone. How the polish is smeared, rubbed, elbowgreased, a shoulder’s put into it; the rag snaps, pops, the mensch slumps, the menschs — what’s reflected in the sheen of tongues are just their empty eyes. One gray the other dead, white and red and glasses. Another sits just as patriarchally, high up in the barbering chair, his cheeks receive a shave, he’s snipped, scissors’ tips to root around in the ears and up the upturned nose; locks are strengths, curls are bonds; a brush bristles his Adam’s apple, the stropped blade’s brought to neck, but even before the flick of wrist the mensch can give no blood — and neither can the barber, who until his promotion yesterday once swept the floors here, occasionally answered the phone, scheduled appointments, was allowed to work the register when slow. And yet another, this mensch nothing but a boy, a boychick he’s called, chubby, fat: wenwambly purses hanging from his limbs, sullenly pale suffused everywhere with a rosy rash, blushy in front of his bunkmates even in the sleeping dark he strips for the night and instead of wadding up his clothes as usual is reminded by the loneliness of his mother, their maid, then goes to fold his shirt and slacks, and before he can place them in his cubby — again and again, and the boy’s father, too, who’d been firstborn and had died before his own firstborn, three nights before, it’d been in the middle of a story for his bedtime. Once upon a, forgotten. Against tradition, against the Law, they’re using pyres once the coffins bottom out. In this weather, a lame and flailing flame. Millions shorn to hundreds of thousands, tens, tons then thousands on their own, fleshing out the world beyond, cremation’s cinder darkening, shadowing clouds to seed new storms. Witness strength given over to numbers, abated to dates, left as scraps of fact and figure for the gleaning of our widows dead, and yet on the wind, inconsolable; life left over to history, the inexorable future of posterity, inherited to memorious record, revelation of a mission they’ll force Him to accept, an identity we’ll force Him to force back on us, Ben, down our throats: talk and popularize, please, yak it up and smile, will you…go all God on them, on us, the whole Job job, prophetmode, jeremiad from the Rocky mountaintop, to the valley of dry bones and silicon clay, promote, protest, debunk, decry, anathematize and, Jeez; may you bless when you intend to curse, and may you curse if you intend to bless; always, though, be in the world, be of the world, be sure of that, be warned; remain in an orbit of sorts, in a perpetual flee, fleeing even from flight, to be a refugee from refugees from self, a survivor, a testimony, a witness to all this made so loud and so fervent, so vehement and righteous that your witness becomes this, that your witness becomes itself the tragedy, which then must be forever itself witnessed by your generations, if any, that ensue.

Midnight, the house’s second floor. Upstairs-upstairs, Ben’s standing on the deck. In a robe, with nothing underneath, and slippers, His mother’s. He’s facing the ice, toward the flame, a fiery pillar, a piling pyre. He feels at the rickety railing: a suicide, He’s thinking, up and over the edge, why not…dayeinu, which means Enough, His father would say, I’ve had enough, throwing up his hands, I’ve had it up to here, His mother would have said, then she’d raise a palm to her neck as if to slit herself to peace, a knife she’d been halving recipes with, a stirring spoon with which to scoop out the pregnancy of her stomach: suicide…an idea, He’s thinking nights now the only idea, like Masada, that windowless mountain out across the ocean, a last stand against the unsighted; the Island pushed up by tectonic pressure, tidal force, risen to a rock towering above the barren city; Ben atop, the FBs, too, waiting out their day a breath below the sun, a last gasp below the blade of the moon…days casting the lots of an earlier season, sharpening their own daggers on the summit, fasting themselves into heart, and sleepless, they’re starving, thirsty, lonelier than dead; the stars toll, the PA sounds from behind the clouds, the house’s intercom quakes the foundations of the sky: Curfew…them to plummet down the slope, to break the fast of their bones. Atop the deck opposite Liberty, one of two givingout from the room of His parents high above the house and the Island, He’s fixated on the flaming horizon, and there on an assembly of forms in every color never His: black, brown, beige, yellow a migrant red, the Kush just following their orders, as always, but now issuing them, as well, as if a Law given over to themselves in a million languages echoing equally to Him as they all mean the same, which is nothing — work; they’re rolling the dead out over the freeze, gathering them into shrouds of massive white, snowballing corpses turned over and around again in a wheelingly reeling processional over the ice thin and thinning thanks to their fire out to melt the furthest shore, a flame of bodies cracking the freeze under its heat, the funereal weight, crushed under the gigantically cyclical, cycling roll of disposal, to fall them hard into sharding spring, dispersing, down into the depths.

A slight splash — call it a clock, a serving plate once kindergarten art & crafted by Judith with hands and with twelve numerals, then hung upon the wall of the one and only kitchen; a clepsydra, the hollow drip of His parent’s whirpool Israel said as Hanna’d said jacuzzi: each hour, every minute, twice a second a burned body’s dropped through the ice as ash, its noiseless plash marking a slight on time…call it a calendar: the bodies daily stacked in a bonfire like the blackened boxes on the page of the month hung on the kitchen’s wall below that white plate’s shadow, which is round and without end. As has become tradition, an official count will be given come morning: a mechanically whistling voice, distorted, distorting; what souls remain stumble to inspection, of themselves, by themselves, from awake nights worrisome to fumbling to feet, with a pretense to having slept an optimistic dream — for appearances, their own sanities, calm, what sake not or better; they try to wake their neighbors, their bunkmates, the stricken barracks. Sons and stepsons and grandsons, SonSons, halfbrothers and nephewcousins. Attention, good morning, there are now X of you left. Why. Zzz. Have a nice day, you thousands, you hundreds, you holy tens. Pleasanries, don’t mention. Attention, there are now only a handful of your kind left alive. A thumb that makes a mensch. A prophesizing finger pointing fault down the throat, to belch up a burning answer: who didn’t know me, who wouldn’t. Have a great weekend. Shabbat Shalom.

With death returned and all the preparations that accompany it like a mother that follows guardingly, witnessing, a step behind her son only to outlive him (to wash his body, to keep watch over the corpse, the smashing of a wombgrave, into the warmly unfathomed ice), Garden employees and Island staff, many of them insourced into this insanity—Mishegas, again, being the term currently preferred, though the Nachmachen might hold by Narrischkeit—from municipal jobs sectored private and exclusive in the wake of the disaster, they’re spending so much time burning and burying that things begin falling apart, melting, giving way, incredulously’s the joke, even more than they already are; the Schedule erodes, though in implementation only, as nothing can banish the record, the rule: security becomes lax; journalists infiltrate the perimeter under the passage of night, toss the gloss of their magazines and the folds and Shabbos inserts of their newspapers up and over the fences, the wires, and climb on over, crawl through tunnels dug through the frozen dirt with their pens, muddydulled nibs, flashbulb smoke the gathering clouds, the zooming lens of the moon; what they report back to the mainland makes no matter, it’s all entertainment: death as distraction, diversion, from more lasting change, meaningful purpose, the future’s promise of evermore destructive upheaval; sentries have abandoned their posts, guardtowers forsaken, circumcised without barb; the patrols late on their sweeps if they make them at all; nightly meals are even served irregularly, often pass skipped by the staff, never by the survivors, who wait whole hours for their feed, only to go hungry again at the appropriate time; unofficially forgotten about, their beds lie unmade, without maid, their linen dirty, shvitzed to filth; their laundry’s never taken out, if taken out then never returned; the FBs are eventually allowed to sleep in; soon, lights are never turned off, if turned off then never turned on; the Schedule still exists if only as idea, idealized but not implemented, extant but only as concept, countenanced only, recognized, to be sure, but within that recognizance lying only the negation of any power it’d had: this Law imposed now just a way to live, another imposition, one of many, merely a way to die, something we once knew, and occasionally remember, another world, that, theirs, another desert and its generation dead, deserted. Those who aren’t burying are already buried, or are burned and burying themselves, weather permitting: everyone from the longtoothed, shortorder cooks to the shippingclerks, the nurses and pursers to the valets of the latter, those who’d once been conscripted to care for the living, to indulge them — repurposed, made complicit with the cause’s discard, occupied with hiding not the evidence (as there is none: only healthy, successful people, provided for and pleasured, happified and fat), which as it doesn’t exist cannot be kept secret even from their God, but with hiding the evidence of the evidence inextant, the fallen, droppeddead rational, the then alive, now burnt, unexplained — all of them, that is, save the high staff, led by Doctor Abuya and the Nachmachen, who’ve been charged with taking care of PR: sounding out what this means, why it’s not bad because divine. Understand, there will always be those serious people — goys placid, imperturbable, without pleasures, kept around to take care of business, to make arrangements, organize futures; the lots cast delayed from last season to covert the plans, preparations, massing, assemblage, underground, in the tunnels, amid the earth revulsed and gray…President Shade and partners striking ironclad deals, hot and molten, plotting spin for when the globe holds its own.

And then there are seventytwo, then fifty of them, and then only thirtysix of them left living: it’s that fast, death, and that remorseless…three minyans they make, six menschs just hanging around, wondering what you want with them. Hope not much, may ye expect even less. A legacy: each of the lasting survivors now has effectually unlimited resources, all to themselves…more beds than bedheads than sleeping nights, mattresses numbering into the tens of thousands per survivor, a surplus supplied with hundreds of thousands of pillows, each having been stuffed with the dreams of and fluffed to a head slumbering elsewhere, eternally if they so believe, and they don’t, generally speaking (Garden psychologists have decided not to relocate the FBs any closer to one another, have decided not to allow them to relocate themselves — their beds are their beds, to remain in their areas, disheveled and empty once departed, never remade). As always, routine, the survivors wake to wash in the Shof, in the thousands of sinks made available, under thousands of faucets steeped deep in a million rituals of leak; this perpetual gaseous drip throughout morning and night, its sound the only noising, to be clouded over by a mass of flatulent snoring come Curfew; hundreds of thousands of towels per head hang like flayed skins from their racks, each monogrammed for the Garden, an initial tattoo; then, once showered, groomed and perfumed, it’s out into day: to their meals, if they’re served, activities, if they haven’t been cancelled, to their prayers preempting, which are still foreign to most but becoming less and less fervently doubted with each passing service; thanks to the laundry, clothes are claimed ever newer; never to be caught dead in the same outfit twice, is what; designers are traded, accessories are bargained for, namebrands coveted at premium theft; once neatly arranged, folded and stacked within the cubbies of the departed, any forfeiture’s heaped around the barracks in wrinkling mounds, each article still individually labeled. It’s these labels that prove the most disturbing; names, last name first — as if in answer to the writing on the stalls, the wallscrawl, the questioning messages, disembodied echoes of the graffiti that’d accumulated on their cubbies, also, and on their bedframes, amid the rafters, where not: nicknames, endearments and obscenities dead, Sascha, nie vergessen, demain, Someone wuz here, Someone luvs another, NAC, TAC, AUS, SCH, the initials on excess undergarments, boxerbriefs not quite clean, not quite white, the wrong size; on garments freshly washed and pressed to the unmitigated approval of any mother, though never worn due to lack of proper occasion, or a looting of irregular cut: labels tugged from tags on swimwear elastic, tongued from the mouths of undershirt collars, on bright polyester pullovers, on fleece and flannel, on woolen sweaters infested with moth and lint, elbows as bald as an uncle emeritus, on threadbare cardigans the color of dog vomit, on promotional clothing courtesy of insurance concerns and pharmaceutical companies defunct, their fluorescent logos fading, faded, on pants with bare crotches, suitslacks with frayed cuffs, crusty socks, shoes without soles; these labels personalizing a universe of their private tchotchkes as well, on the little they’ve been allowed to keep, small stakes they’ve managed to secrete and preserve: on the inside covers of books reread and on radios alleared, on cups and mugs and on bowls mouthed and lipped a spoon, on sunscreen, on insect repellent and on medications prescription and non, on lamps lit and unlit and on violins who knows how to play those clarinets, on housekeys, carkeys, on wives’ brooches and breastyjeweled rings — slopped atop to bunk the beds of the departed in vast junked pyramids, falling to the floor overnight, to be scavenged by any who’ll wake to know morning.

Here, in the blocks of barracks, an exhaustion sprawls itself over time, a silence snores oppression…anything uttered, maybe only thought, echoes for what wastes like forever, longer than they’d ever have: maunders and murmurs, invocations and prayers, bargaining begged of rage, incriminations, passing through the emptying wings, the connecting classrooms and clinics, canteen, and mail depot; even the lounges vacant except for the puttering of a mensch his name’s Abe, or so he says, thinlipped, deepdimpled, and grave, he’s in a shiny vest and pants to a powder blue suit never his, a shtikel of black necktie, his hair’s parted in the middle; he’s stacking the roomful of foldingchairs to pass the time, foldingup battered cardtables to while away the hours; never a line anymore for pingpong, never a wait for pinball that’s the line that’s passed around — the other survivors remain in their designated areas, not laughing. And these are those thirtysix that remain: a butcher, who would sell meat to a baker, who would sell two challahs weekly to a chandelier salesmensch who did door-to-door, who was neighbors nextdoor in Forest Hills if you know it with a retired professor of history, who was uncle to nothing more than a pizza deliverer, who was boyfriend though to a daughter of a mailorder magnate, who was brother-inlaw to a woman who was the cousin of a maid to a lighting fixtures wholesaler, who once for fraud had to go in front of a judge here, who had once presided over the proceedings of a plaintiff here and a defendant here, too (though in separate cases), who was a brother to a mensch who he once worked for a producer here, who had an accountant here, whose mother knew a woman who was sister to three menschs here who’re no longer holding out to become accountants, one of whom was the husband of a daughter of a hotelier here, whose other son-inlaw’s friend was an HR representative here, who once had an uncle whose rabbi had fathered three attorneys here, one of whose secretaries had been friends with a maid who’d slept with two doctors here, one of whose mothers had a friend whose son was both a doctor and a lawyer here, his own, whose son’s friend’s friend’s squashpartner here had once failed both the bar and the boards on seven occasions under five identities (not all of them) different, whose uncle’s exwife’s new husband now widowed here was a stayathome father, whose third cousin once removed was roommates in college NYU with the son of the bridgepartner of a mother of a stockbroker broke here, whose proctologist had a dermatologist here, whose lawyer had an accountant here, whose accountant’s brother’s friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s father was a disgraced pharmacist here, who had an acquaintance of his father’s sister’s exhusband’s brother here who’d gone into hock for his numismatic obsession, whose father had grown up with this mensch who once ten years ago now though he doesn’t remember it had Shabbos dinner by the Friedmans the Roslyn Friedmans if you know them with a funeralhome director here, who once buried the sister of a friend of the thirdgrade teacher of a jeweler here, whose cousin’s boss once bought a car off a car dealer who also sold a van to the wife of a mensch whose mistress was also the lover of a realestate agent here, whose brother and sister-inlaw’s travelagent once met at the Mintz wedding the pilot here, whose plane once brought the family of Steinstein here to an uncle’s Panamanian funeral two years ago I think it was on a flight for them complaining blacked out from bereavement fare…Steinstein whose mother’s Hadassah President’s cancer support group leader’s integral yoga instructor’s cousin twice removed had one considered buying either the lot below or house above that Ben here was born into, which was then uprooted and removed here, recreated and kept locked now with Him inside to protect Him from this plague — Ben relieved only by hourly visits by the butcher here, to daub a bit more blood upon the door, until he doesn’t visit one morning with Ben waiting for him inside, and the jamb runs dry, and the stain remains.

And, too, the mezuzah.

And then there are twelve, as it’s announced loudly to sound above the civic mass mourning, Wall Street north to Union Square and furthered Manhattan, the outtagrave boroughs…a proclamation accompanied by a great galvanic gnashing of teeth, Tweisswhitened (because they’ll do that, too, anything) — Mada and Hamm fresh from supervising the rending of hundreds no thousands of garments, shrinkwrapped blue & white warehoused shrouds (extra blankets from a defunct Palesteinian aeroline, it’s said), intended for those who’d died too quickly to be scheduled into the ritual of burial, no time for the fitting and so, abandoned. Robbed of a hole. As for Der, he’s mostly kept from the statistics — preventing him from tearing out what hair he has left, which isn’t much around the ears and nose, slight brows bowed above the mouthoff, dreckdead eyes; instead, he’s focusing himself on the aftermath, what’s next; how to spend the money that’ll revert, how to exploit a survivor if any. Different commissions, Shadesponsored from out of the Library’s welfared minions, he has to do something, show some signs of interest, governance, I’m on top of it shtick are hauled in hebdomadally, arranged up on old YMHA daises, nameplated, glasses of water to soothe the throat, their microphones antennæ topped with huge foaming tumors. Independent experts anything but either of those epithets, they have their questions to ask: survivors are seated with nervous feet, numbed in hardbacked chairs, after having been interrogated earlier, individually, before this event that’s open to all media, in windowless reportedly subterranean rooms mauve halls off the taupe hall, the main passageway underneath the Great Hall, whitewashed cells soon bespattered, scuffed and bled and bare, if only on the initiative of those voluntarily sequestered there against their better counsel, physicians’ sought advice: again if chambers of torture then torture of a neurotic, indifferent kind, its survivors ignobly, though unintentionally, deprived of hot food and that icewater infused with lemon for whole quarterhours, barkeddown by overtimed detectives losing their faces, goys with no minds to spare; frowsed in cheap black suits and loosened doubleknit neckwear, they’re pacing the floors, with their coffee concussions and donut guts, ash on their pants, their sleeves rolled up to raw elbows, they’re screaming at the assembled under bare bulbs of extreme wattage. Not just them, though, it’s the public, too, that wants to know, needs to, demanding it, especially as they’ve been forbidden, regrettably, by decree both official and ostensibly divine, from the selection of personal survivors, those or One Whom they’d like to have emerge from this mess, a chosen representation, a symbol to call their very own; if not made for them then at least of them, by them for Shabbos, a known. And so as much to identify as to bide time their profiles are commissioned, interviews come on the heels of debriefings: who exactly are the twelve, being the question?

Are they selfappointed evangelists, selfevangelized appointees, selfanointed anointers, anointed selfanointers, apostate apostles, apostle apostates, pathologically agnostic, atheists or just lazy? Are they eating, we all want to know, and/or are they feeling well, please, eating and/or feeling enough is it, just; were they overmothered and underfathered, or maybe it’s the other way around; how do they like their odds; have any regrets; who are your heroes; favorite book, color, or food…do they like their crusts sliced just right and how, are they given or refused milk, do they want it or no; answer me, goddamn it; what occurred prior to their permanent records; you’re gonna answer me; if you survive, what are your plans, your platform; one of us is gonna leave here with a mild headache, and it ain’t gonna be me, friend; what marks them save nothing special; what makes you think you have what it takes; you suffering from a bad case of silence, son, tardiloquence and yadda; what do you think of the President, what do you think of your fame…every outlet officially conceivable, from national radio to periodicals of record and note and of none or both, wiring in their requests, tap tap tactlessly tapping wanting to know who, needling we’re on deadline here; priests possible, to-be’s in-training; datelining the GARDEN (Rooters), you wanna talk deadline…

Auslander, Dattelstrauch, Hymen-Slutsky, Israelien, Jakov-Jablovsky, Lipschitz, Osterthal, de Quadros, Rothweißblau, Steinstein, Witznitz, ben Zona; Levitansky, McJohnson, Normal, Oppenstrauss, Putzl (though those answering aren’t the twelve answerable, not most of the time, anyway; rather, they’re impostors employed to provide a semblance of reassurance to the public, hand-holding while the real waste away, counting days on the calendars of their fingers, sequestered in Tweisstwinning psychological interviews ideationally intended to mitigate the trauma of Shade’s inquiry, subsequent interrogations, really interrogations about interrogations, dumped to the Garden’s files; their representatives, presented to the public as wistful, nostalgic, resigned, having been ordered to a certain number of responses created to ensure satisfactory variance among them: yes, no, black, white, anything but gray; I was a father of three, a restaurateur, a farmer, a famous television personality myself, if you don’t remember); of them, then, how many can most accurately be described as far-shtink-en-er, merely fer-shlug-gin-er; are you terrified or just settling; ready or not; please keep your answers as brief as possible, as briefed; are they up to the job, talk to me here — we want qualifications, a program, resume and references, too; all questions though in truth One, which would be the twin father of any survivor: are they prepared, any of them, to assume the mantle, to bear the crown — constitutionally; able to direct the maternally heavy flows of power, to overlord the hierarchies of delegating angels, arrayed beneath the thronewomb, birthwrought of living fame: supplication arriving on the Friday late, put off until next Monday, late afternoon at that, winged lazily around the meeting room that is Heaven, which is stocked with a hundred different salvations, alphabetized how in portfolios iconoclastically embossed with amulets, accessible only to those who know how to invoke the proper memoranda prayer; and we all say, let there be strategy, and there is, and it’s damn — passable. Leave it be.

And then there are ten…who — in the spirit of the season, it’s said — are to be destroyed by the Angel of Death, that killed the butchers that slew the ox, that drank the water that quenched the fire, that burned the stick that beat the dog, that bit the cat that ate the kid our Father the Holy One Blessed Be He had bought for two zuzim, the first zuz and the last zuz as it’s been said, then drunkly sung since for lifetimes…a quorum in wild ferment, a destroyed slain drunk wet and burnt beaten bitten eaten then bought minyan, survivors barking and clawing their prayer now unto the Holy One Whosoever He is, or was, praying for their lives in nasalized whinnies and whines, without words, as they’re unknown to them, have been forgotten, but it’s the thought that has to matter in this mess, isn’t it, is the matter, the alephbet stammer, the heartword beginning with yod hey vav hey…only the most superlative of intentions — to make peace with ignorance; settling down on coffin pews to daven their mincha, silently, a ma’ariv for the night of their souls oseh shalom to you, too. Ten menschs, full grown almost to death, tripping over the straps of their phylacteries, tangling in the filigreed knots of their fringes, tying more out of superstition, worry, holding their siddurim upside down then holding them right side up but opening from the wrong end to mispronounce their words if only in their mindful hope left to right to left, with blind fingers and mute palms destroying the spines of the books, and their own, too, in their abject, groveling shuckle; mourning to themselves that there’s not even a rabbi among them, none to slam shtender, keep order, no more; as if they would have listened to one had he been still, even she. Auslander, Dattelstrauch, Israelien, Jakov-Jablovsky, Lipschitz, de Quadros, Rothweißblau, Steinstein, Witznitz, ben Zona; Babel, Masterson, Nitzwitz, Yarmolinsky…

And then there are nine, and then the nine of them are not: Abe Weisenheimer who he owned his own business selling socks, a mensch who rented office space to the mensch who owned his own business selling socks, a mensch who ran the company that employed the mensch who rented officespace and storagespace to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose conglomerate owned the company that employed the mensch who rented officespace and storagespace and even furniture to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose bank gave a loan to the mensch whose conglomerate that it also had interests in footwear and ladies’ hosiery owned the company that employed the mensch who rented officespace and storagespace and furniture and other equipment/supplies to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose bank owned the bank and other banks too it took over that gave a loan at low interest to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats owned the rental company that employed the mensch on commission who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose governmental organization bailed out the mensch whose bank owned the bank and other banks too it took over and investment firms and brokerage houses that gave a loan at the lowest possible interest rate to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats and plastic toys made in Asia and various electronic hygienic devices owned the rent to own company that employed the mensch on low commission who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers and maintenance illegals to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose governmental department confirmed the appointment of the mensch whose governmental organization bailed out the mensch whose bank owned the bank and many other banks too it took over and investment firms and brokerage houses and a company that affiliated a consortium of independent traders that gave an enormous loan at the lowest possible interest rate to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats and tiny plastic toys made in Asia and various electronic hygienic devices and kitchen bathroom closetarrangement solutions owned the rent to own company that employed the mensch on no salary and the lowest commission who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers and maintenance illegals and tech support too to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose wife was sleeping with the mensch whose governmental department confirmed the appointment of the mensch whose governmental organization bailed out the mensch whose bank owned the bank and many other banks too it took over and investment firms and brokerage houses and a company that affiliated a consortium of independent traders to limit risk in speculation in India that gave an enormous loan at the lowest possible interest to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats and little tiny plastic toys made in Asia and various electronic hygienic devices and kitchen bathroom closetarrangement solutions and replacement car parts and sheet metal and pitabaking and even seltzerwater bottling owned the rent to own company that employed the mensch on no salary and the lowest commission and without a phone or office of his own who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers and maintenance illegals and tech support and his daughter as a cashier too to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, who had employed in addition to that daughter as cashier, inefficient, possibly dishonest, two poor, perpetually underpaid when they’re not just unpaid salesmenschs dead, too, one of them known as Hill, the other as Shy of whom it’s been said he was anything but, waiting, just waiting…and then there are seven: a baubiologist and a color healer, then five in a developer of condops, and four his two copreneurs, an equalops equitizer and the poet who’d witnessed his postnup. And then there are three: Steinstein and, his name’s ben Zona…a stale, seedyeyed, bald marketing some hold second others hold third vicepresident for a munitions multinational once headquartered outside Tel Aviv. In the midst of this angst, they’ve given up, surrendered — their kibitzing, kibboshing; inspirational sermons, annulled; with no language in common communicating across the floor of their shared barrack, now the Registry of the Great Hall they’ve commandeered as their own as if in protest of their being avoided, ignored, by way of gestures, stroked hands, thrust fingers; then, forsaking their own beds hauled to opposite quarters of the Registry, ingathering the two together into one bedding down in the middle of the spanse, tucking themselves, each other, in under the same sheets, starched, staunching; then, the next night, which is three from the beginning of Passover they’re forsaking, too, for the comfort of only their blanket laid above the floor, and then the night after that, sleeping on the floor itself, naked without blanket: the other beds and their bedding having been auctioned off to other concerns — the Abulafias’ Palesteinian hotels, fivestarred it’s said as to rates they’re astronomical — have to make out, get out with as little loss as possible; they’re bundled near, lying far from the radiators, the thrones of warmth and the footstools of heat, exposed free from recreant shadows in the very middle of the Registry’s hulking arch, to huddle, tucked around one another, limbs intertwining, they’re moaning gums, problematic sinuses, sand on the tongue, stillborn dreams, until dawn, when only one’s woken. Attention! in an explosionary fuzz, and the boy turns over, farts his own announcement; feels his companion’s not there, that he’s alone and Godless with his mazel — which is to be consoled only in the company of guilt.

Ben, the son of a friend. Of the family.

And then there are two. Here to pay His respects, this a mitzvah in an hour of need. As much that binds them, cleaves; there’s an entire liturgy between the two, underspoken, unspoken, an understanding tacit, granted, taken; what’s to say, who would listen, who else would know to understand…and so they waste themselves and air and time, slinging shtick about girls, women, mnema, allowing the little history they have in common, the shared of the last couple moons: they tell jokes, kid, share boasts and bull. As would satisfy any justice, these witnesses are opposites (or it’s easier to represent them to be, now that it’s just them): one skinny and hairless, the other’s fatty and haired; one serious, relatively good with the manners, the other named petty or mean, though the word’s also loquacious; one of them intelligent, and the other not not, just uninspired, unmade or unfinished, not yet healed. Time, there’s still time, there’s stilled time in which to air. A repast reclined but underdone. It’s two days prior to Passover, two settings until Redemption, one for emptied each: they’ve been left alone; the guards have been withdrawn, perhaps on orders of, perhaps negligence, perhaps. Now’s a winged moment of facetime, a scheduled recess peace: a grave shaped like an ear, dug alongside a grave shaped like a mouth…they sit across from one another, fixed to the floor, as if already mourning themselves, what they had

And then the next morning, there are two of them again.

One is Moses and the other’s his brother — to stand at the throne of their Pharaoh, at the footstool and grovel for redemption, though silently, though disinherited again…the staff ’s lost, the tongue’s lamed: there are plagues, there is blood and there is black; nine of them would pass, to reveal the tenth, in which the firstborn are killed, sacrificed upon the altar of a People: the blood, the frogs, the lice, the flies, the hail and locusts and dark and death. Today’s the day all firstborns fast, though it’s only them along with nonessential personnel; and though required on pain of threat, of guilt, the public joins in, too: as the darkness settles in, to fill, to slake, to sate, and finally — to open your mouths, you two, get talking…If you die I get your shoes, if you die I get your hat, if you die I get your socks, if you, if you, your memory. All ears is still two. Remember the time we, once I, do you remember, one time I, and the time we, and then that time. I wasn’t a good friend, I wasn’t a friend, I never was, you were, what’s expected, who expects, what I always wanted was, what you never had was, who I wanted to, always — and, who I’ve become…Steinstein asks, what would your parents be doing right now, and yours, your sisters, how many you had, what did she look like, think I’d have a chance, any I’d’ve had — your brothers, what about them, what would you, wouldn’t you, we’d go to the, we’d sit on the, we’d stand at the, and just, and just, be together — the way Aba he used to, the way Ima she’d, how’d she look, think I’d have had a chance…we used to, would or should have, trips to Theme Parks, State Parks, Historic Battlegrounds, and the movietheater mall, the pretzeljar shoestore, summercamp sissy kissy and Sundayschool sickday blahs with the thermometer dipped into the pits to fever, it would’ve been, what would’ve been, what’s it to you, what’s not. I should have loved my parents more, I should have told them I loved them, more I should’ve more…why’d they die, why get a divorce if you’re just going to die, he worked too much, she worked too hard, I would’ve worked, too: why, if you’re just going to…what I’m saying is — what do you want to hear?

Two witnesses, only one of whom will live to sanctify the new moon: Steinstein across His lap, Ben as if a mother to a son, installed in the Registry’s midst, absolved of illuminated exits. They sit nosing. A heaven either awaits or doesn’t, don’t get me started, already have. Begun, and duly begged. In case of emergency, break the glass of sky.

You have a wonderful lap, Steinstein says to say anything, and what a sense of humor…I’m dying, I’m hungry, I’m thirstily tired — though he’s without suffering, they’re without pain; Steinstein’s only kvetch that of the holy imminent, the though sacred obviousness of oblivion. How I wish there were an afterlife after life, that I could believe. Me, too, like sign me up, put me down for one. Know any newer jokes. Setups. Punchlines with a swine kick to the gut. Or efficacious prayers. Then, a silence they attempt to eternalize by withholding from it breath. And from without, a thunderous whine.

You won, Steinstein finally says, gasping his face lit, no longer the son but the ram that inherited his fire.

His eyes ask, how’s it feel?

No one won, you stupid mamzer.

Don’t give me that stuff everyone’s a winner — that you can save for your fans: it’s crazy, you’re smarter than that, even you…without guards, without guns, no rental medical, no beeping blinking disturbance.

God, he says, the deals, the fame and the Name, anything for the asking, it’s yours, and you get to live—love you, hate you, lucky schmuck, it’s impossible not to…

They rock, until Ben to tell the truth wants to stop, wants to give up on this shuckling but He keeps on despite, goes on in spite, and so they sway together even faster, as if davening in unison, as One — as if in an attempt to merge, through singularity to save themselves from fire, the fiery ice, the Angel of Death…then, tiring and slowing, making lips, lying to eventually sleep, neck lain over neck and wounding with a kiss — to be sundered apart just past midnight. Paschal silence, lightning from the furthest white of the eye. Outside there are stormings of glass. As has become the practice of every eve plagued with their survival, the blood of imported lambs has been daubed upon the doorjambs, dripping a redemptive red from the mezuzahs why not, who’s it hurting. The welcomemat a puddle.

Ben’s borne through the fence’s gate, up the winding slates to His house, on an Infirmary stretcher turned litter, sagging overhead; carried away by the Kush in a leaving difficult for all involved save the left for dead. Steinstein’s Angeled away to Tweiss autopsy then storage, iced in the overflow easterly Morgue, the afterlived warehouse of his Father as its only son. Fullup of recent stock, the bodies of the last week or so, inventoried, ritually prepared, have been cleaned out toward a clearing adjacent to the further dock, twelve bodies frozen southward to the tottering shed of the drivingrange, northward to the ravaged putting green, flagged offlimits, limitlessly: body after body atop body, glommed along the fence of His property at Island’s western edge, just inland from the ice’s slip to the shattered hole, its water and the oceanfloor, the fundament of shadows — the descent of the last before the last, the first before the last, the birthing of an end: spring’s, winter’s, winter’s winter, theirs and as theirs, ours; even panic having been displaced, with Ben left alone in, of all rooms and voiding spaces, the basement no longer to be feared.

To need a rooting now, this firmness, to know His place at the footing of things, with nothing left to dread. Quickpoured black concrete. And so His mooning around these left boxes and trunks, these tapes and unscissored twines: Hanna’s forks shedding tines, knives dulling mirrors, spoons bearing bowls flattened to tables, handles rooting out so far as to become unknowable in whatever their useful, drawerward ends; heirloom sederplate emptied of egg and shank, of green and salt dipped twice, an order confused in this exodus, this exile to the Pharaohnic storehouse, Ramses’ granary holding as its only ware the sand of our Joseph’s dream; the World to Come up from the basement to save us from famine, from desert’s thirst, the privations of this, our latest diaspora, failed in that it was only temporary, seasonal though skimped on light and heat — the sun’s illumination coming in through the windows set at the rise of the earth’s backyard lighting the beneath from its always dark into a dim known that can only disappoint, a worrying mundane…this Passover also bringing the last guests of the Island’s guests to crowd the sky: their cold smoke from daytime’s cremains, from the snuffing of an ever stranger night.

O spring! on whose unfledged leaves it is verily writteneth, ribbed on rib this prayer: All who art hungry, I forget — let them eat us, maybe; let them come and sit and belch and bench upon nothingness both savory and sweet; the table uprooted, the candlesticks barren, spare chairs down here the waterlogged lees of huge diseased cedars; the whole room — basement unfinished, partially unfinished perpetually, diningroom of the forgotten, recliningroom of the unreclinable and unimaged, the subterranean Heaven of heavens — revealed to Ben in mold, maggoty shag, walls mossed luminously, goatbearded, in iridescent filaments of morning…the entire house, even halflit, wildly en-gardened; strangled in vines as wide as halls, seeping reaches of rooms of one dew’s duration, to be effaced by clouds on the evening, wisped away, rustled forgotten, everything to be gotten rid of, junked, yarded and sold, storage unsorted, cycled to waste: cupboards to be bared to space upstairs, pantry left annulled…Ben bereaved. No different set of dishes wreathed in season, breakables and chipware, to be hauled in from the oilroiling air of the garage, down from the attic encrusted in barnacles to gather breath, entombed in their trunks and boxes of board, nailed and ducttaped, at the dawned rug of the stairhead, atop the carpet, wall-to-wall verdure of dust and mold for Hanna to vacuum no more: the rumbling in the distance the motor, the units of the baseboard heating, the basement’s hotwater heater, more like the final echo of the final storm — for today; a tumult of noise, of life woken and doing, a whirr all around, preparation’s stir gathering its pitch at the vault of the sky that arches, restless, never resting…His house itself now a vacuum, a limit of nothingness, a container of nullity, containment of the nil; the bag of the dispossessed to be gathered up at middle night with death at the door, knocking fists; His sole dispossessed possession, a mound of His father’s old briefcases here in a heap, along with Hanna’s purses, brokenclasped, out of favor, without the succor of candy or coin — essential inheritances, emptied of essentials. A stomach, a mind. Expectations of death dead themselves, voided, though their loss, which is the loss of their promise, is not quite as saddening; to be mourned, but mourned humbly: the idea that ritual couldn’t quite make it conscious enough, or explicit, that a year from winter to winter no divine would ever allow or oblige; anniversary desecrated, deprived in advance; the holy random reaffirming its faith in fate while destroying, debasing, our own; how the cycle couldn’t quite get the packaging right — not a bag, calfskin briefcase, or purse, but a nice neat little bundle of empty, wrapped in skin and tied with hair, left forgotten in a basement corner…Him turning the place upsidedown, insideout, and for nothing; Him searching, setting aside, in a fit, a maddened raising of heirloom dust. This basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished — its lowliest beetles and spiders and worms, its annelids dumb, search through the abandoned for meaning, night and day; day and night, making their ways through whatever remains. To seek out any prophecy left to rot by the rotted — to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death.

O God of Mercy, God of Joysey, Protector of the stopsigns, Maintainer of the sidewalks, Guardian of the dumps, we commend ourselves to the charity of Thy asphalt, that Thou shalt grant us rest amid the rarest emissions of Thy firmament; and now let us open wide and say A then let us say Men, and then shut our mouth and its dark globe and be gone from this earth as were Thou those thousands of years ago upon its first Friday and our making. A funeral’s held at the eastern edge of the Island, the rim of the ice backlit with ocean, tainted by city: the cruciferous spires of the Church of Wall Street, the irreligious iron surrounding the hush of the Battery, there a thin slip of trafficked gray, a glimpse unremarkable, you’ll miss it if not careful: Whitehall Street, site of the first settlement of the Affiliated upon these shores…a swath of flowers, irises and roses still tastefully arranged but wilting their dyes, albescent purples, and blues hued whiter; wreathes are sulking, plasticine hollies and firs, evergreen like money, twisted then bent into hearts and circling circular voids, their silence; the sun with its moon the ghost of a ghost to the west and the birds, which fly low and sated, circle overhead lazily and heavied lower in the bowel, preparing to swoop down and peck Him to weeping. As the only one who might officiate, Ben officially demurs, has been advised to, then ordered; leave this to the professionals, son, and get busy regretting, crank out those tears.

In a bad yarmulke, Ben nods His head along with the Service, under His veil under the veil of the sky, dully gray and webbed in fog — to trap the clouds to be sucked of their wet, then left for empty, a sunset’s clearing. As for the veil, it’s not for the stench of death, which has been frozen, but for the mystery, for the delectation of the assembled, the coverage columns fallen wide, a tumbled pantheon of typefaces jumbled, an edifice imposing of hype to raze; and to discourage invited paparazzi kept penned to the rear. Him, He’s perfunctory, disengaged. It hasn’t yet sunk in, and neither them. Without doubt, something must have been offered, some eulogy delivered, memories shared, a sermon, a drash, remarks if not extemporaneous then just scripted to sound; all have agreed, a Kaddish must’ve been said. V’imru, a new translation. Doctor Abuya stands unbowed atop the pulpit of piled coffins, comforted by the Nachmachen armbanded, hooded in black. Der mourns to their left, alongside the Mayor and the President and their wives and the swollen lips of their mistress’ eyes. Ben nods through the lull, the incessant lapping of the wake on the ice, the slow dumb thud thud dulling insensate thud, then the fierce rabid white withdrawal back into the swelled body to flow on amid floes and on further, among the floating glaciers and bluewhite golden bergs that don’t seem to receive or take the light of heaven but hold it, or emanate it, as if they’re but the fallen cooling and cooled flesh of the sun on a flank of the moon. Against this restless ebb, this wake endless, endlessly hazarded with icicled sharps, a slough of badeggy, brownblack pickleweed and sick saltgrass, decomposed phragmite, starvelimbed spartina, and trash above the enabling sink of the previous dead, two Kush attired in the deceased’s ripped, tattered black judges’ robes arise from their chairs, which are seats that’ve been hewed from ice by workers wielding picks at the dawn, and proceed to the bier of coffins stacked low before the coffined pulpit, stoop together toward the white, bend at the knees to bow, to lift the topmost casket: Steinstein small in a cold cocoon. A band plays on a barge far out freed in the open water, so southerly gone that no one hears its music, which has been programmed funereal, joyously sad: accordionwind, flutefog, sounding brass, timbrel with tinkling cymbal. A mandolin plink, the call of birds without sky. That’s no butterfly, He thinks, that’s only winded trash. A leaflet engraved by weather, denoting the agenda of the morning. Rest assured, there will be memorials. Blown city trash. An invitation to a light buffet. This is no metamorphosis. There will be no emergence. This, for however long, is an end.

Dark servants uniformed in old law robes blacker than a blotting sentence struck without names and proceeding somberly, the Kush in lockstep, lock and step, lockstep, flagbearers follow raising their standards, then the drums and fifes with which to taunt the gulls that whirl above in their own private, griefstruck revolutions: each, they test each step, every weighted forward, fraught, to test the ice whether it’ll hold their fall heading out by south, over the veining, the ice crackling like locusts underfoot and on fire, extinguished by the boot; they walk the body out, to freeze; then, at giving edge, the sinking vale, they go to heave, to throw this poor huddled Steinstein in an arc, like a white wished coin to plash down deep, to plop atop the sunken flesh, the last body atop this mass of limbs and hearts and minds, bobbing then bobbing then sinking forever sinking down, never to decay. A great clap, a crack and crumble, a final fall — the ice gives way, hot floes are let out loose and the Kush, they’re separated, the two flagbearers, each to their own floating island, iceislands enough for one; a wailing, then silent gesturing, as they float out beyond the ceremony’s appeal, their black robes billowing as if sails set for nowhere, if only off, far beyond the crusty barge, the marshy glut, their flags to merge with the horizon into a band of color colorless below the flag of dawning night. And then as if intended, too, He follows, as if pulled out, tuggingly towed who knows, Ben making His way seemingly somnambulant, a vessel Himself, out to the newest holding edge. As ordered, to honor tradition, He digs in the lone slit pocket of His new funeral suit for a handful of dirt, crystalline with frost, to toss to float atop the bare skin of the ocean — to scar. And then, when He turns around from His husky fling, the entire crowd’s dispersed; their backs are turned to Him, they’re making for the press conference already, for its warm buffet of unleavened bread, which is matzah, and boiled eggs and shank, bitterherbs to dip in water made bitter with their tears; the funerary sleigh’s retired to blocks of ice; the pulpit’s disassembled for future use; in an Islandround queue to the Great Hall, the invitees — as if on cue — stand mute, and bored; as they wait they use their programs to mop their icy shvitz, wring out print, headlines lined to forehead, Gothic wrinkles; they consult their watches unwound, hands clasped in pity then wrung in shame. He turns from them toward the ocean again and untucks His shirt, which is white and dressy and replete with a million, starnumbered tiny buttons too small for the bumble of His clumsy thumbs, exposes His navel, the proof of His humanity and the little stone He’s stored there. A lower, harder heart. A solitary island of floating ice; a lone white square of the ocean’s game; a souvenir yarmulke gusted from the head of a visitor then turned loose as litter upon the face of the deep; a tombstone estranged from its Steinstein, just one Stein of many lately, too many latter days. Pinching His pants at the knee, stooping over the open atop the thinning wick, then tweaking the stone from the gape of His navel, a mute name, an empty filling. Palming the pebble, the gravelet, He sets it gently atop the ice, purses lips and cherubically exhales, to blow the tiny island out, passing an offering to the horizon, eventually of the horizon, on this day passing over, this night — this Exodusk. A kiss as if in thanks for His fortune, the wetted recompense of lips. How He’s been saved, redeemed, what have you. On a merit He cannot claim, in favor of the dead who was a friend. Deal with it, why so sad. It’s that I maybe wasn’t worthy. Am not, perhaps. Condemned, to have been freed.

Tonight’s the night of the Second Seder, which is the justification for the first, a lately seconding assent — an evening’s afterlife of ritual, too much the forgotten night, and as such often slept through, ignored, its reputation that of mere repetition, the Law’s reinforcement intended only for the dense or pedantic, the masochistically foolish — to be conducted with and served to the visiting dignitaries and press inside the Registry of the Great Hall, check your coats and remember, save your stubs. Who gets served first, the question numbered after the fourth never asked by the kinder dead, and what — an incomparable dish, what else the final course, savored only as the last. After its plates are cleared and silverware stolen, what’s left’s only the Blessed art Thou. Disordered. Art Thou Blessed. The Seder desedered, desecrated. Thou art Blessed. A table leavened, lately risen so high that anything served atop it would be beyond anyone’s appetite. Stomachs eyeing swollen. That and there aren’t enough chairs. My condolences.

Ben turns, staggers palms to foot the ice, falling to His knees, He rights Himself onIsland, to His house and weeping freely. Teary as the way’s uphill: snow drifted to the edges, the fringe toward Joysey a precipitate pack. Not alone, He’s escorted home by His newest lookalikes — flanked by Mada, and a novice whitebread operative known de novo as Frank Gelt — past the lingering smoke, lightning flashes, the bulby horns of moonmade beasts; constellating fame lost in darkness encroaching, just a plague or two too late; the lens of sky shattering at the sight, the spectacle, believe it. To the shore of Joysey and, across the Island, to that of Manhattan and further, the uninviteds, the hangerson, fans, and the citified curious disperse homeward on skis and snowshoes, across ice salted, ice sanded; those who’d hoped for a miracle, say, a resurrection, are frustrated — it would’ve only disappointed, or so they promise themselves, assure, their newest rabbis agree, they always do, we’re sure; them sloughing off slowly, laggardly, diasporating, together, apart, into a diasporation further, unnamed, without number, into futures individual as purposemade, exiles none of them could ever hope to understand.

Which, nu, doesn’t rule out Submission.

Steinstein, says an approved mourner here with the appropriate pass inside the Great Hall, a weeper who’s on every list — now, he was golden. A blank check. This Israelien, He’s difficult, a tough sell. Doesn’t know how to do a soundbyte. Unquotable! Unphotogenic! Or if not Him, His decoys — how much they make an hour? Anyway, there’s not much to like about Him, you know? Hard to relate to. Too strange. Never know what that schmuck is thinking.

Doesn’t matter what He looks like, says his plus one pewmate, what He smells or sounds like, what He feels or even tastes like — I wish the kid had ten hundred, ten thousand fingers to sell off. As relics, you follow? They’re going to make a killing!

Hymn, if nothing kills Him first.

In His house, Ben lies atop the table He was born on, in the diningroom, flopped on a shard of dark tablecloth slipping from its top; then upstairs He’s embedded, upstairs-upstairs, on the decks’ deterioration, a mattress perched aslant a pitch of snowsuccumbing roof — what the media characterizes as “a period of recovery” calming soon, a sobless nap, a little healing schlaf.

For seven nights through Shiva, Ben’s dead to the world. And, too, to dreams, which despite our ignorance of any revelation they might offer to interpretation couldn’t be more terrible than what passes for His life, what’s passedoff to Him as life passedover, the unlivable liveddown, the divine decree of un-lovable fame as proclaimed by prevailing silence. The sun dawns day through the windows, Manhattan nights without phosphor or fuss — everything having been declared dimmed for the mourning, His and theirs. His sisters gather around the table, calling to stall, while unfolding fresh accommodations of cloth and pad, edible inveiglements, sexplay suasions — but no one can reach Him, nothing can talk Him down. The moon remains through the mornings, the evenings find that ancient ancestral plate, cut by its silver, as empty as ever, while the window between it and the polished tabletop on which He rests becomes as a shroud veiled over the most dire vision imaginable — unthinkable, tomorrow; to frustrate even the most adept prophet, whose rest’s given over to the workings of His unimaged God.

Morning after Shiva’s sat out Ben’s woken — rolled from the table of His room off the tables of the upper floors, forced back downstairs, to its waking life, the business of His state. He’s ushered atop a scale that eighth afternoon, unearthed from a cabinet in Feigenbaum’s bathroom for His weighing, a procedure to be done daily on orders, to regulate His gain, moderate appearance; this to focus Him on the public, His image, a girth even greater — to be worth His weight in gold; polished with publicity, the shine imparted with appropriate alchemy and management. No mourning, says Doctor Tweiss, that’s for Shiva’s sequel…starting tonight — people enjoyed it so much it’s been heldover, popular demand. Stand still, says the other doctor: don’t lean on the tables, you’re no leaner on the walls; stand straight. Stop that sobbing, each tear weighs a ton. And then we’ll do it naked. He weeps enough salt to deaden a sea. All who art thirsty, let them sip from His eyes. Their brows being plucked, their lashes slickly licked to flirt. Arrow the finger pointed, sucked to wipe from His face a smeared tear, a point of schmutz — it wobbles, steadies, wavers, shakes, the dial spins His sighs. Jesus, you’d think we were fattening you for the slaughter. That’s a joke. That, too. Please and thank you nice to meet you, good Sabbath a guten Shabbos. Shake. A fitting for the new more casual clothes to supplement the suit. And, thrown in as if a towel, a fresher, drier, veil. His number gotten, sized, He’s sent to His room again — to fling through the scripts received, proposals, projects, telegrams and letters. No one survives, they only inherit a different life. To be a star means this, to disinherit the darkness of the sky.

And then there is One. Me. Who else, who better. Ben, the son of sons. Uniqueness, a quality universally prized…rather, our universal constant itself: one hard breath amid the ether, through laughter or tears, I know, I know. One sun that wakes Him. An alarm, which functions in the time of the Messiah. Ringing. Tell the resurrected it’s time to tick to work. Stillborns off to school. Then, one moon that sleeps Him without dream. Between, one brunchplate, hosting a single bagel of a widening hole. In the afternoon, the larger of the last two knishes He knoshes, knowing his interlocutor’s respectful enough to have selected the smaller one anyway, in anticipation. Are you feeling well, are you feeling. One mountain in the distance, a singular pyramid of stone sheetrocked, it’s said. An oneway track ripped up under the progress of the train relentless, farflung out from behind the rear broughtup, the caboose He’ll hobo on, when soon. Give Him space and time and parents. After all, His people gave such ideas existence. That and the Temple, citybound — hosting one marble pedestal and its frayed vein itself hosting the infinite universe, its vaster gods. They couldn’t be here but they send their regards. And vengeance. One like the nation, under His invisible God indivisible, with liberty and justice for whom. As it’s said and never known. One as in chosen over the other, singled out but by whom and for what. Is the question begged. Because He’s unattached, a singlemon, an eligible match, maybe — meet my son, the Messiah, He’s free most Friday nights. Or, one like the Substance of Spinoza, the nugatorily negating immutable, the ineffably annulling…

Or else, He’s — heresy — just like everyone else…is everyone else. A multitude of mensch, and their achievements: Joseph the dreamer dreaming Joseph the interpreter interpreting Joseph the prophet; the brother who hides the cup, Benjamin fated unconscious to steal it, prophesized together again, reunited forever in Him. Like the chance of that choice, how many lives you’re allotted, how many eyes and mouths and noses — O does He pick! The fraternity’s mascot, the tribal runt. Alone again alone. I sit on my bed and ask it, are you my bed? And because it doesn’t answer me I’ll never know and sleep. A pillow. And its whiter dream. One as in one. One meaning one. One one. It’s you, everyone’s telling me, it’s your life, so many options, and with so much support, what don’t you understand, your problem — I want to say, it’s me. One in the same, as in the emotions of Pain and Hope, as defined by Spinoza; as in the ideas of perfection and reality as Spinoza once set out. As I’ve been told, I’m telling. One as in God Himself. As in His son, but let’s not go there…He remains upstairs. No one does. Upstairs-upstairs. I sit on my floor, a mockery of mourning — its carpet of stains, hall’s wood bemoaning in trodden groans its scratches and the rug. A fundament of doubt. There’s a noise from below, a spirited banging of the ceiling with ladles and with brooms. They say, intensely private. Sequestered, they say. Appreciates His quiet. I say…Alone. An entire house at His disposal. And make no mistake, it is disposal. Unable to leave, He isn’t allowed to, and He doesn’t allow Himself, not even His possessions — to leave an intimacy just lying about. As the only permanent of this exorbitant house — as Mister & Misses Israel Israelien, Homemachers, Copresidents of the Board for life of this singularly shingled siding — this dwelling good for an immodest family of tens, and fine, too, to house at least a hundred others, certainly, in relative comfort, a thousandplus under refugee conditions; as the only survivor of this plot, He still feels like the youngest son and as such, infinitely old in His loneliness, banished to His room, containment policies pursued, to keep His dirt there, never to infiltrate or taint. Their expectations. And their painful hopes. His mess is His, roomed. I sit amid laundry and wrappers and cartons and cans, lightbulbs and hoarded spoons, foreskins shed, tight shoes. I wait until I am called, and when I am called I will call that call temptation, and live out the rest of my days against it, which is only waiting. Or so I say, unsaid. At the door, an official knock, a bell. Downstairs, demons surge. It’s time for Him to wash, to dress. Their whispers jar the window. Into the pockets of the pants He steps into go whatever’s around. Mementos. A pocket is the room of a room. And over that He shrugs on, against all advice, which are orders, a fond found shroud that’d been His mother’s, a blustery blouse, Hanna’s maternity let out in pleats.

At the end of Shiva prolonged twice the traditional span to accommodate the sitting of all these mourners, those who’d known a goy who’d known a goy who’d gotten them a foot in the mouthing door, Jonathans come lately and not come directly without pity wrought across their faces that isn’t merely makeup for the edification of the press over wardrobe, which is black as if the secretion of their nightly and mutual heart, with the Marys as hostesses, sisters and mother appealing, attending to the nervous network of guests, their needs of food, drink, and of memory providing, at the end of eating, drinking, talking, and the occasionally mispronounced prayer — davening — misery commiserated then calmed in that order again reborn, after the last guest leaves, forgets his coat then comes back and retrieves it from a Hanna disapproving with an amusedly severe if distracted glare for whoever at the threshold on the last night of official mourning sat out, it’s this knocking, then a ring on the bell, which sounds one tone long and loud and harsh. As if a final siren. Answered by himself with his own key, it’s Gelt, with a leavened chin and selfmade buzzcut, arrived only to whisk Ben away, in an open sleigh parked at the fence at the foot of the path since slated for preservation (the house registered a landmark, not just to His life or theirs, or as an excellent historical example of high exurbiated living — but to the Garden’s prophetic project, how well and thoroughly they’ve divined, recreated a past into a materiality that is both monument and future), bells a’jingle hollowly, wild dogs frothing a dash down the foamy, toothy spur, their tongues straining over the hillocks of drift and pile, whips of hitched and harnessed tails, up to the Great Hall and therein to Ben’s private wing, quarters established amid the remains of the Registry’s Seder. He shouldn’t be left alone any more than He already is, this on the recommendation of His employer/disciples, His meisterminders and mother. A chandelier weeping crystal. Floors marble, or marbled. Dust mounded against the walls, dereliction, the lapse that makes a Tel — and then the windows, which if undraped would give out onto the further scape of gloss and glass and metal: Manhattan; a coming world, beyond.

To leave His home is to leave a boy behind, what He once was in a house handmedowned. The shroud of rooms and the embalming windings of the halls to be borne now, forever, upon another body…the new baby in its blush and chub, the newest affection, at her age, Hanna’s, an affectation with fists the size of tears, never to come swiftly crawling toddling walking a raw knee felled down the stairs then straight into the hallwayed arms of its mother, who once was His, had been — love for Ben cooling like Saturday’s soup, which is cholent sopped with the crusts of stale bread still bagged, storebought, which, too, had been the challah of Friday, the errant second loaf. Promise only vouches you so far, so distant, until old, unemotional, and moldy with mind: to grow up awkward and isolated, pimpled and alone, made witness to the probable stuff of youth, the toy guns and knives and other playthings never had, never allowed as inappropriate, unsafe, the tricycles and bicycles coming around in cycles, balls and blocks of wood and plastic and of plastic like wood with alphabets, presumptive — revived in the life of another, the objects themselves scuffed and dulled to dead now newly shined, once given son and so suddenly appealing again, attractive, put to fresh uses, fun He’d never imagined could be had, they could’ve had together: Os of wholesome cereal strung on the strands of His mother’s hair bewigged and dyed above but below as dark as milk, across the room living, family, or den, stuffedanimals strangled in the ties of His father arranged around the brunch table, perched atop chairs to referendum on the issues of the day, the fate of the family, punishments for Rubina’s pubescent misery…miniature houses of leaves and twigs and moss and nests assembled in the driveway, to be brought to collapse when Israel pulls out the Merc the next morning so early it’s almost still night, for work; he’s always working — the Israelien house left vacant, abandoned to what could’ve been. To be made Present Resident of the last house on Easy Street, taking into Manhattan the gravied train, the commuter’s heartquick circulation. Ben never to darken His own doorway again, to be humiliated a fumble at its lock, with the day’s close its shadow drafting reductive, immature. Feed for Him the fish we flushed long ago; water the houseplants, the weeping ferns of Babylon-by-the-bay. Do me a favor, and silence. An intercom hiss, the fuzzed tongue of the stairs. To sleep atop the sheets of His conception, with sisters He calls His own…

Across the Island He sits in the Registry, on a suitcase His father had once bought in Miami at the aeroport as extra luggage for the souvenirs he’d bring them home, anything he’d buy on impulse come his boarding: the blizzards of snoglobe, postcards never to send, that poseable pink flamingo. Here mourning the hold defiled, laid to waste in the process of such heldover His head nightly grief — which is talking, dining, praying in necessity’s urgent order, the priorities of the overscheduled martyr: slipcovers as if they’re flayed scholar-skin hanging from the arms of the sofas set with recliner matching, stuffing-spilled pillows slipped irretrievably into cracks behind couches against the paperpeeling walls, the chairs upended, unseated, the upstairs beds and even Wanda’s tousled by guests too drunk and Amenfed to have made it home alone, their smokes smote atop the carpet and, also, as black clouds upon the ceiling, the arms of the overhead fan broken, the emptied glasses smashed, plates pooled in a bronze sea of oil crossed by Shiva’s knives — bloodblunted, gristly, twisted in hands shook poorer of their nerve; protective plasticwrap smoothed and saved for nothing, foiled, with the drawers hanging open; to what would’ve been Hanna’s horror, no one’s bothered to cleanup.

Enough.

O, if only His parents would have died! It would have been enough.

If only His parents and His sisters would have died, it would have been enough.

If only His parents and His sisters and His PopPop would have died, it would have been enough.

If only His parents and His sisters and His PopPop and then all of Them, except the firstborn, would have died, it would have been enough.

If only His parents and His sisters and His PopPop then all of Them, save the firstborns, and then even Them, and then even the saved firstborns they die, dayeinu, Gottenyu, it would have been enough…to say, this’ll probably futz you scarred for life, what did Israel call Him, boychick, and then would say along with Hanna, this hurts us more than it hurts — nu, you’re thanked then praised, almightily. And not just that and living and unharmed, which are as lentils flung to the spring’s harsh wind, the lost half of the afikomen sharded small in the light of His parents and people dead, it’s that He’s safer now than ever, emerged bathed clean, roofslept, and with His fortune secured, the return’s reward, the birthright collecting interest…enough to say, stop that kvetch, but me no buts, I’ve had enough of all your whine. This geshray and bitch bemoan. That nothing’s enough. Nothing’s good enough for you. An only son, how He’s an only Messiah, too, and whether false or not no matter as so far unopposed — hymn, He’s thinking, and that’s supposed to be a pass, a snowday, a Florida vacation taken off from the mind and its daily duty. What an overprivileged pisher. Taking each breath for granted curse. You’re never satisfied. Impossible to please. But this, it’s not His fault He was faulted this way. Brought up to expect so much more of Himself that He rages that better others fail. Responsible, that’s how He’s raised, that’s how He would’ve been at least then college, career, a wife with kinder of their love, themselves to be bathed clean, roofed, and sleeping rich in a house of their own that didn’t have to be recreated as consciously as here, as He would’ve bought that way, they would’ve. Nextdoor with weekly suppers simple. And then adjacent plots with matching stones, opposite His parents, her having taken the Israelien name, the veil of His mother that is the oven’s hood. Graves visited monthly and wellmaintained, we’re talking. Again, remembered with a rock.

As the prophets always say, He’s not getting off that easy…

Above the Hall’s portico, Ben stands facing the islands offIsland, the city to come, over the railing reclining into weather. In the freeze, a squint of reflected moon. Out there, it’s quiet, corpsed in hush: all five boroughs and the sixth of the ice pierced with regret, with even Joysey in mourning, from the beaches up through the pines and the smokestacked clouds; businesses have been shuttered; minds have been closed; churches lie smoldering, rubble neglecting even to fall…Manhattan, a cincture of cinder. Shiva, once its success has been proven over an extended engagement at the Israelien household, is taken national, then worldwide, spends itself from hurst to wood to burg, to glen to city, yadda, each discharging its public rites, the performance of municipal ablution with media assured; solidarity, shtum. All ends on a Sunday, the day of the rising, of Hosanna and olden unction…the Sunday of palms holding its day weeks prior to Easter, which’s been forgotten, too, as if a gust’s direction, its windy directive, Easter, go Easter and Easter — weeks more waxed a wane down through their days, inked through the boxes of the calendar, ticked off nick by prick upon the face of the stovetop, its timer and that of the microwave deprogrammed and unplugged, to what once had been that fake or falsest of days if with true intention, marketed for the honoring of Mothers. O Hanna, He’s forgotten your Hallmark, your slippers over the rugs soft and sinking, your heels on the hardwood tapping impatience, anger, displeasure with yourself the punishment of rage — the weight of your approach, the force of your presence, your warm and sucky flesh; knows only the posthumous linger, the cold breath of your skirts and your blouses in the closet once mirrored in Him, that smell of perfume #5 you’d shpritz to your wrist; how the sweetened flowers — last year’s irises — would’ve been delivered with a card signed with Israel’s name to wilt then die in a vase in a hall, now shattered, glued, reglued, and then shattered again; Wanda would’ve made sure, Wanda who never forgets, marks the boxes on her own calendar a recreation of the one hanging from a loosened tack upstairs at the wall scuffed by the slammed opening of the frontdoor, the archivists and the historical maids, such experts; watches the clock an eye for an eye, watches her watch, which was a gift given to her by Israel and Hanna for a holiday she didn’t observe; on break, how she reminds Israel an entire Friday before; gives him a second call at the office, notice ample like breasts, following up urgently with his secretary, a final warning, get her a gift, who, your wife, whoever you might’ve married While You Were Out, as it’s dated, timed, a slipping pink, a scribble; Loreta running off a form, a replicate, yet another rejectable settlement in triplicate, and demanded ASAP, puts her on hold while she waits for the feed, then through to his extension, his voice; Hello, you’ve reached Israel Israelien, I’m not able to take your call, but if you would please — leaves a message, hangs up.

Inroit an end. The calendar leaves wilting to blotches of ink, blatt blowing off and away on a wind from the west; the hands of the clocking watch on the wrist slowing to stasis, clasping each other at dawn and dusk, then at every other time between — the freezing of the tide and its moon of one face, turnedcheek lune with its modest blush; opposite the sun, resting its house-warming, retiring to the reflection of Miami behind the clouds to putter about at an altitude no sky could ever scrape, highrisen amid the greatest lot ever vacant. Though it’s been worthless since day one, which was day never, obsolete since forever, time is presently asserting its purpose, its fundamental truth: as a nothingness, against which to measure death. A height marked short at the doorjamb, hinges tall and growing. Noon is lunch. Dinner means six. Linner and dunch indulging between. Hunched, tired, icesalted. Sandy Hook hikes its pants over the waist of the state. Newark exhales. Bereaved, bereft, weakened. Were it another time, if one could exist, if there might be two species of nothingness and those both existing concurrently, the city might invite this: lying elder and willow at the foot of the ass kicked through the gates, which are located, it’s said, on both sides of the Tunnel. As for its rider, it’s been said He’d preach, too: withholding, limitation…no new taxes, He’d promise, better health care and schools for our kinder — before ascending, then forgetting everything, every promise, every preachment unpracticed and then everyone, as well, that’d ever helped Him, who got Him where and who he is, today — to the Temple. Then trashing it as badly as His house shall require our cleaning. Tzedakah’s always welcome, then with admission you are, too — reservations not required; how the people don’t even need to be reminded anymore, informed as to what they’re ignoring, what they’ve forgotten, what’s forsaken, no — more like what or Who they’re supposed to be venerating next. A given up given over, a negative lent. An altar stood on its head.

Palm Sunday proves a lesser passing: in silence, without ceremony, host to no circumstance; lashes stay in without pomp or parade; the people dressed down sit at their tables and cry; station to station it’s static, the mating call of snow…empty avenues and streets, the underground tunnels of the trains stilled in rust; Staten Island stranded in a lawn of ice, which is fenced in by concrete, which is cemented to earth that’s ungated; Midtown a block abandoned even by shadows; no one’s seen: eyes cast out like stones at their feet they can’t even see each other, or won’t; no sound’s heard beyond the weather: their ears have become cold, and listen only within; how they’re all inside, they’re interiorized, palms in their palms not knowing what to do: discussing, debating, planning for which to prepare. Ben remains inside the Registry to which His room’s been transferred, its furniture, His filthy heap entire: the bed, the chest of drawers intact and rumpled with the lamp atop unlit. He yawns. Idle hands, idler palms. He undoes His robe, extracts. Verily, at the gates of His loneliness, which are His legs, His thighs with their hindquarters lamed, by an angel named I’m curious, as if to prevent escape, postpone His flee, Him lazily limping — He lays down His loads, unburdens Himself of skin. Upon this Sunday, which is the outdated, outmoded Sabbath, He lashes Himself with His palms. Fast then slow and shvitzy. A Garden without a tree to damn Him whether with shade or fruit, He’ll seed Himself alone. As if to mark the stations of an inheritance unshed.

0800: left sock, held damp in His mouth,

0848: right sock, a different pair and still in bed,

1102: left sock, again, but this once turned insideout,

1333: on the Registry’s wall, half upon a portrait of Himself unframed,

1400: in the Registry again, all over the tiled floor, over the railing of the balcony to sully the remainder of His image,

1407: into His scapular, known as tzitzit, whose quartered fringes will become bound together, drying hard, into one knot who could worry free,

1454: and then smeared with thumb into His mother’s robe’s low hem — fisted quickly, but ruminantingly rubbed — which will cleave to His tzitzit still worn below and wet,

And what did these socks look like? asks Doctor Tweiss, though he’s staring at them preserved for exhibit in plastic.

One was black, the other blue; I’d slip them over my…myself; then stroke the sock proper, like so.

As if a second foreskin, the other doctor says, an auxilary prepuce, if you will…

Though only a suggestion, He feels He’s contractually bound to nod — the gesture of His hand.

1502: now…begun in a waitingroom, then continued in the next, finished here in this office, underneath the gowned covers atop the analysand’s couch, with His feet up in stirrups and a blush choking at His neck.

To sprout from these seeds: all a question of interpretion, a matter of blemish, a blot on the mind…a whole host of Hims in motile miniature: hurtling spermatozoa, with their own yarmulkes, grown spiraling payos already and curly beards that snare them into stains.

What seems to be the problem? asks which doctor, is the problem. Adolescence. Anything I can do about it?

I can pay today in cash.

1628: in the front seat of the limousine,

1748: and then again in the limo’s rear as He’s returning,

1856: in the widest hallway of the Great Hall on the way to do this in the toilet,

2035: then, while breaking bread in the Commissary enormous and alone, Him indulging singlehandedly,

2205: and then again between the pages of His only evening prayerbook, Arvit it’s called while faking its devotion,

2337: into His own yarmulke, finally it’s late, and thankfully white, which He replaces atop His head then, to sleep another day…

And for all these sins and for many more, O so many more of them unto sheer unaccountability — for these sins unto even the omissions therein, and then for all of their sins obtaining, too, You should forgive Him, Thou shalt, O so pleased with yourself, do us all a favor, will you, please…forgive.

Forgive Him for His

Apathy.

Forgive Him for His

B .

Forgive Him His

C .

Forgive Him His

D .

Forgive Him for His

E .

Forgive Him His

F .

Forgive Him for His

G .

Forgive Him for His

H .

Forgive Him His

I .

Forgive Him His

J .

His Jealousies, say…as petty as they are—as he had excellent shower-slippers, which won’t fit, and then neither will his hat: Steinstein’s personals stacked to the side, under the desk made a tiny pile, cinched with a snippet of his belt…

And TEN (10) is the number of the toes on His feet. And NINE is the number of the pimples on His knees. And EIGHT is the number of the wens on His thighs.

Forgive Him His

Ken, kenosis, keptstatus…

Forgive Him for His

Laxity, laziness…lists.

Forgive Him for His

Machinations…

And SEVEN is the number of the foreskins He’s shed today alone. And SIX is the number of the hairs encircling His navel. And FIVE is the number of the hairs encircling each one of His nipples.

Forgive him O Lord of Hosts,

Thou Horde of Losts our forgiver forever…

Forgive Him for His Necrophilia, though latent — practiced exclusively with incarnations of His sisters, and His mother, which only occasionally, when and if He asks them to, fool Him.

Forgive Him His

Onanism.

Forgive Him His

Persnicketyness…as to which

pleasure’s which.

And FOUR is the number of the whiteheads on His neck. And THREE is the number of the blackheads on His nose. And TWO is the number of the ulcers in His eyes.

Forgive Him His

Q.

Forgive Him His

R.

Forgive Him for His

S.

silence…

Forgive Him for His

T.

Forgive Him His

U.

Forgive Him for His

V.

Forgive Him His

W.

Forgive Him His

X.

xenophobia,

what else in the X’s?

Forgive Him for His

Y.

Forgive Him for the sake of His

Zion.

And ONE…

O forgive Him our Horde of Hosts,

Thou Lord of Losts,

Who art in Leaven—

O let us be risen, too!

And let us say,

AMEN!