Witz

V

Into the waning of summer, verging on fall. Once the time of deepening leaves, burning piles, needles smoking, a fiery pining away for life without season…an even heavier jacket sprung from the frontcloset, gorgeous autumn to be raked from tablecloth lawns, netted from inground pools leaf by sogheavy, ribweary leaf no more; it’s still snowing, tucking in the ruins of the past, whitely tired. This is Av, still and stilled, the fifth month, or the second to last, depending on conversion, on who you still can believe: this the month of mourning, of introspection and abstinence, of reflection in the ice underfoot — this the moon hosting the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, the Temple risen again, its heir rebuilt in the city just distant: the anniversary of that destruction being the ninth of the month, the day it’d been destroyed by the Romans, and Jerusalem — left to waste.

This, the appointed day of His ingathering.

Here is His return, a Prodigal Son situation if any we’ve known; how He’d hoped to unlock the city with the key He’d been presented, but the Garden had moons ago grudgingly returned that token to the hands of the Mayor, in one account; in another, how it’d been confiscated, taken away as if from a misbehaving bocher. No matter, it’s not as if He’ll ever find its gate: there’s no secret, no golden door to unlock, slam down without a warrant and torch — only tar, which is impenetrable, unreflective, then the ice above. Despite, He’s having thoughts of a welcome in the grand style, of New York, New York going out of its way for one of its own, though adopted, basketed through bridge and through tunnel, though not yet made good: still, thinking a parade, with every pomp, floats perhaps and tickertape, thousands no millions of them His friends and neighbors how they’re shpritzing themselves all over Him, throwing silken, soweared flowers from the windows, rooftops and terraces, from the highest skyscraping observation decks down to the lowest tenementing fireescapes — Him in a convertible, if any of them they still have, or denting a hardtop, maybe, why not, He’s waving, tophatted, sashwearing, He’s smiling, too, and unforced, with Miss Maydel Whomever beauty queen of the borough of Queens lapping it up from her perch on His lap, there’s Mayor Meir Meyer Himself — Hizzoner, He Who Takeths Away — at the wheel, honking sirens with the songs and shiring along Himself, they all are: offkey brassband music, oompah tubas and tailgate trombones, accompanying the glissy, lispgiddy shrieks of lost happy go lucky went under kinder with their melted popsicles their sticks splintered tongues, everything sticky and shvitzy, schwarmy because now (wishful thinking — with the head of a putz and a stomach in love) it’s summer again, O God it’s an echt real school’s out American summer, but how camp whether day or sleepover hasn’t yet begun amid the mountains Upstate: cityscaped humid bunking with hot, the sun’s out and shining for you…the swirling skirts of the batongirls, baseballbattwirling them flaunting their bloomers kick step kick step along with their ever younger sisters the cheerleaders their skin as pink as that of hotdogs for sale and for kosher, their pompom cotton-candy breasts and their faces seeded with gappy, sappy watermelon grins, the syncopating, offbeat, onbeat, beatenhard lust of the cymbals and drums, Baraabum…becoming forgiven by a choir of angels marching last in His the Grand Marshal’s line, accompanied by a phalanx of miniature harpists, their sheet music fluttering from folders chained to their uniformed halos above; banners, confetti, and streamers, poofs of foam and crepe and bunting shred, and the tricolor, the old flag risen again, all the appurtenances of old glory, of past success and, too, of all the blustery might in the world ever behind it, the power that once preserved every freedom, if only in its assurance (how the parade will end, the floats will become scrap, and then kindling): these tanks in rows and troops, formations of them Avenuewide, in whose treads follow these great foreskinned guns shooting off salutes all around; the eruption of mother’s milk, honeytrailed fireworks foaming, spurt up from the hydrants of Houston Street…then, Him up on high, City Hall’s, atop the Empire State Building’s reviewing platform and there in rainbow ribboned uniform, waving the most demeaning, crapulously beatific acknowledgment to so many little dark subjects of His darkest and littlest whim. Not this month, though. Here He sits amid straw in the back of a cart, jostled and jiggled and pitched this way then that. No more, enough B — this is the month to get real.

New York, New York again, as it’s said: an invocation…as if a blessing, a benediction, for luck it’s always said twice: once shining in the marquee of the mind, the second instance and final invoked over the grave. Nu York, He says to the driver, nu, York! Manchattan! once the hometeam town, I’m sure you’ve received the postcards and sent them, hymn, bought the snoglobes and tshirts and magnets and pins — the land of the rottenmost apples, fallen hard from every tree in the world, as the earth tilts away from a season of the sun and all of them roll their oddest wormed ways down to us…the land of the locusteaters, drinking the blood of their neighbors for overpriced brunch, fighting ground of the bears and the bulls, the stage for a waiter acting out The best cheesecake in town…for B, though, it’s been this walking endless walking, hitching walking and hitching again, caravanrigged, this trading up from camelbacked britzkas to landaus, then from pitiable droshkys to piteous drays, a stretch of troika and telga and tarantas, once handsome hansoms, too, and even a saintly because free, nocharge fiacre up from the wilds of Wishniak Hill — and then before that, God and His fiery chariot, think of the time, of the change: there’d been the nation, Him trudging His wander through acres of nowhere, walking jochs and jucharts, these versts of waste, morgens and milyas, halfhorse towns the rear half mostly; stubborn and bucking, now brokenwilled — who knew the United States of Affiliation, if that’s the name nowadays, even stretched out that far, into such contiguous sameness, too long?

Why here? Why, nowhere else. B hitching a hayride at the mouth of the tunnel, He’s offered to pay the toll plus an epes extra for hay — a cart laden with a couple of subsubcontinental emmigrunts, with their dreams hitchedup, hauling in the persons of their innumerable kinder whom they hope to sell as housegoyim or indenture as glaziers’ apprentices, their worldly possessions piled atop and around Him hidden hush under the straw past the cops with their customs and emergency checks: in traffic, stalled amid the whinnying honk of horses, the bleating of goats — they’re stopped in the tunnel’s middle for prayers, extolling ashrey yoshvey — the two of them husband and wife, or husband and sister, or brother and mother, spitting away in indeterminate what language that is, Him thinking He’s always hearing His name, wipes it from His face with a palm. Shalom, good luck, by which they mean mazel, mincha finishesup, they roll forward to drop Him Downtown, wish Him away with much phlegm. Though the streets are empty for the holiday, such is the familiar severe — a formation of metalworked winter; Liberty’s dimmed, His Island’s lost shrouded in weather.

What a day to arrive, B’s thinking, up from Joysey on a life like this: the wind, then the fast, its prayers pouring out a hush from the gusts, Him privated with what, to go without money, without purpose save go, apologize to the gutters and grates. It’s the people, though, they’re the unaskable, the unanswering why — the Other, these others, and nu, fill us in…how can you stay in Joysey living the life of the mind? As the Greeks once said, don’t know if you know: show us a mensch without a city, and we’ll show you what’s either a beast or a God — that’s if the secular isn’t already banned, or otherwise censured. In the name of the Ramjohn, is what Johannine’s calling himself lately, we’re asked the following, what we’ll be asking ourselves for generations to come — what does He have to return to, He doesn’t know anywhere else? How dumb is this? How dumb is this. Hymn. He should have stayed quiet in Joysey and small.

At the Stateline, in the midst of the Holland, verily, the waters are divided — and then, there’s a sign at the exit, a billboard that blinks:

— 12° F

— BLIN — — KING -

COLD ENOUGH FOR YOU?

Landscaped from one of the two mouths of the tunnel, for the many tunnels of this mutated city are monstrous throats that never digest or ever waste what they swallow, without intestine or stomached gargle, how they merely gorge then regurgitate and then gorge themselves again down to the bottom of Broadway — willows groved tightly, their trunks lashed together to prevent them from being uprooted by the tunneling wind, their boughs hung with among many other objects, or forsakings, the harps of the Philharmonic disbanded since last season’s interruption, and then with their strings, all their sections: their violins first and seconds, violas and violoncellos, the occasional weeping, droopy bass, their strings wilting in memory, going loose and de-tuned in the howl coming up from the bay — trees hung not just with bis-biglissandoing harps and with fiddles gutted and bows but with memories, too, and forgettings, pleas and supplications, signs and notes slipped and tied dire: help me find my father, one says, have you seen my partner? another, this posted alongside a photo faced grainy from its constant reproduction, a losingly lined courtroomsketch, if so contact Sassoon & Silver LLP., cash reward for information leading to his recovery, all (succor) wanted, needed, & offered…tins of spam dangling from giftribbons, plastic liters of generic soda, empty jars of mayo weeping ornamentally wrapped from these trees, trays of decorative cupcakes and cookies, novelty balloons; these groves nymphabandoned, lining Canal Street west to the Bowery with equity neckties, daytrader suits on hangers commoditized in plastic fresh from the drycleaners, highheels, dressy pearls’ strands — this the highest rate of return, a reversion to our natural state, a great comfort unconfined: this season, menschs let out their bellies; womenfolk smear their makeup onto the faces of streets, pink and streaks of red like rainbows trailed by snails, then pray for an innerly inclement weather, asking the cloudfall to cool their lusts, to purify their souls; their kinder pitch pennies worthless into the sewer green and gold; dogs once theirs now stray dash lame from snow to snow…skyscrapers once new, abandoned to scaffolds; earthmoving giants idle, dumpster hulks sanctifying as symbols of an emptiness within: ambition unfinished, thrusts unfulfilled; lorded over by an inutile silence and the holy stillness of cranes.

At Union Square, which is called such still, despite — as the most niggling, let’s say perspisacious, of our sages note — its hosting no more unions now broken, busted, and, too, that it’s not, strictly speaking, a square, though in another sense a calling appropriate, and even accurate, a bissel, if only because misrepresentation is what’s expected, what this promised city does best and has always since first it was found, lies to us, misdirects then destroys…B goes and asks a mensch on a bench if he knows the way to the, hymn — Zimmerman’s…if only to say something, anything, just to feel alive and with it, but the mensch turns to Him and answers with some dyspeptic word, not understood, then spits a lip’s worth of angst on His shoes. At Madison despite, He works up the nerve to stop another mensch, this one older, a pensioner and so He thinks more respectful or honest, asks him what he thinks of Mister Israelien, and also, if you don’t mind, as long as I’m keeping you, is his opinion, you know, regarded as popular, but the mensch he just shrugs, keeps his sunglasses down, taps his cane due west. Then up and eastward at the Library, there He says an exploratory, nervous Shalom to a woman who she only blushes, bites her lips — the mouth mortified — the rest of her ignores if flushing still, then skits down the block, turns the corner and bursts into crying…denied, again that feeling that He doesn’t deserve it, not as much this being alive as being alive in a city, in this city with such life, with such change, and how B, He doesn’t belong, feels what’s worse than abused, debased, it’s turned within — unworthy. My people had been right to exurb themselves early — we deserved Joysey, I should never have left.

How it takes so much — headenergy, foot’s thought — to get used to it again, never, the land lying down for no one, less and less: all the customs, the rituals and traditions, B, what’s hot, who’s not and the indifference of the undifferentiated lumpenmass, thinking God you leave for one day, just one night, then you come back, bridge & tunnel yourself in, the Holland’s swallow, the Lincoln as if an escape back into bondage — and how everything’s different…new people, new rules. Lately, the whole city’s been rented out: now everything’s owned, every block, each slab of sidewalk, asphalt’s each twinkly grain. He’s walked through the particulars; explained to, talked down to, they give Him the business: you, I’m talking to you — shopkeeps, menschs leaning their drafty beards out the windows — you can’t walk there, that’s leased, don’t make a kasha, a drygoods, a delicatessen, what right do you have, what are you not understanding? Their language, for one, a mix from the guttery guttural, slumming, the slang slung of an easterly gust; which becomes slowly translated, though (it’s not too difficult, already halfknown, it feels, if not just felt and faked), then translated again — He’d rather not put forth the effort. Takes time, this targum. Have the pity of patience, wait for it, geduld. Another mensch sticks his head outside a storefront below a sign that says, He’s trying, He’s sounding it out: Peter Portnoy & Sons — Purveyor of New Antiquities—begins sweeping his walk with copious hairs, with sidelocks gingy, dingedusty, he’s swallowing his whistle to yell at Him to get the futz off my property, private, No Trespassing, Keep Out, what do you think, this is your house?

Apparently, the whole town had been sold off, if not sold outright from under then at least from above it’s been rented, leased then sublet: this untrafficked stretch of Mitteltown pavement bought by a mensch off a mensch who rented from yet another who lived large across the river, Not So Short Island it’s going by now’s the line for a laugh; how some mensch owned the sidewalk (actually him the cement only, though, his halfbrother’d bought the rights to the concrete), another owned the street, yet another the avenue intersecting and yadda blah north by south, and so you have to know always where you walk on whose you’re walking, how much more it’ll run you and fast: alleys held by a business, owned by this dummy corporation don’t ask, we’re talking fake addresses, doors without handles or hinges, empty windows (the mullions, however, they’re still on the market, any interest, you know who to call, be in touch), it’s all strictly needtoknow, none of your business, bubkiss my tuchus lecker, who the hock mir are you, wanting, on the outs, skidded, stop right there, no room at the inn.

After being evicted from standing His loiter upon every corner in Mitteltown, B makes its upper limits, Times Square and keeps moving: keeping it in mind, that the more you keep moving the faster, the less chance they have to charge you for putting your feet up and staying a while. Billed by the hour, the square a roundless clock, He’s got nothing left by now, not much. After the tunnel’s toll and the tax on the toll, then the tax’s tax assessed to’ve been no more than a bribe, He’s broke, busted, inclusive of slavery severance: without money whether in bills or coins, He’ll take either even if His face is fading from them; they’re being phased out, converted into a currency newer, the metals and paper as fragile as yesterday, as precious, too, though the gems still as hard as tomorrow. Speculation, in every denomination. Foreign forage. Hofn oyf, forget it, meaning hope.

He heads for a pawnshop He finds advertised on a wall, peeling in promise from exposed brick blackened with smoke — ripped like a disreputable, deathinscribed name from the yellowpaged book sealed within the booth of a payphone…but it’s closed, we’ll be back at and locked and so B with klutzy fingers rings at the bell, wakes the onelunged, tiny like an insect beadle and when the sun’s still cresting high, waits for him to fall downstairs two flights, a spindle with a twinge of gray hair hung in green pajamas. Knock knock. Who’s there, who’s there? A wink that it’s worth your time — enough urgent assurance to justify suspicion, expectation lowered so much by now that it might on its own trip the alarm. Rachmones, you have to have pity, the pawnbroker’s saying as he opens, undoing the intricate locks of his door and shutters and grate, this I’m always telling my wife — keys and patience, patience, the life of the deadbolt, bound to who knows how many chains. B comes in quickly His hands in His pockets as if armed for a robbery — a lining giving shine, only a glint, an equatorial edging: His silverspoon — He’ll hock it, to afford an aliyah in any direction.

You’re disturbing me on a holiday, what’s so important, what’s the emergency, a fire, pogrom, has the Messiah arrived?

B holds out His hand.

O, the pawnbroker’s saying as if he’s surprised — though it’s only resignation hidden, this ritual yet another act, a tallis cloak or spare tefillin cover (whatever kind you’re interested in, he’ll oblige with wait). As he has all day, he’ll see what he can do, and by the looks of Him — Him, too. Having been retired to readiness ever since B’s very entrance, the customary ring, his own sleepy slowness merely a shtick, allowing whosoever here to pawn the pretense of advantage, and so now just offering the most requisite of prayers: shoptalk, this Kaddishing of weights & measures, the formulaic preparation of an Amen’s delay — all to enable him a sizing up, as if for B’s coffin, a suitable shroud; him ensconced behind his cage, already putting on his visor and adjusting, always, the scales of his enterprise both the honest and those used to weigh by his daughters and the wife — what he wants, the mark in his palms of the object not yet his a suppurant stigma: what he could get, he’s calculating, conniving, there is no can’t, and those thoughts and others like them not motivational, but true and believing, felt so long he’s convinced, convicted upon his own recognizance of B’s desperation, which he’ll share for half; all such thoughts, hopes, prayers, and dreams accompanied by the various commercial ablutions: such as, the sacred wicking of the moustachebeard, the ritual liplick, the calming of the throat into a fist that’s tightly held…hymn, he’s beginning so soon with the setup, the Blessed Art bumble — so it’s a spoon you want to sell me, nu? Business. That’s something else altogether. Everything. Come in, come closer, that’s it?

A spoon, He says, silver, and an heirloom, worth more to me than to you: hard times have forced…

Forced me, too…says the mensch, he’s heard it all, listened to little, to none — now examining the pawn under a glass, a loupe unlidded and wedged over an eye within the rim of a wrinkle. It’s a spoon, he’s saying, that I can tell for myself, silver, not much. Hymn. A bit tarnished, isn’t it?

As if to noncommit, intereshting.

How? He wants to know, what do you mean…B wanting His money but more His calm, doesn’t want to impress Himself on anyone’s memory — anonymous charity, isn’t that what they say, that it’s the highest form of help…

Nicht, I mean nothing, a bit touchy, aren’t you, neurotic, the shpilkes, and this on a yomtov, it’s unfortunate. You seem good people, though — have you ever been told such things…what am I talking, bet you get that all the time: presentable as you are (but suck it up, will you, tuck that in), and sensitive, too, compassionate’s what they used to say, and with character, such a nice boy that face, such hands, without parents, am I right, a tragedy, always too young, always too soon…an orphan, it must be difficult, and for that you have my condolences, my very best, you’re assured — but forgive me, your spoon, a triflele lefele…so it’s kosher, as an antique it’s echt, not by much. As a keepsake, I’d say it’s worth something. Tell me, how much?

A hundred…He’s thinking as an initial offering high enough, which means there’s still ample low to spare for his greed, the pawnbroker’s — the long, thin fingers refusing to knuckle under, stirringup the cracked teacup mouth, the eyes above unsalted butterpads over the unleavened skin — this alterhocker whose fix seems to be in…an even hundred, thinking that’s fair, as if assuring Himself He does and He doesn’t, B saying it twice, once for each zero on the count of His breath, which is horrible, hungry.

As if to say to the mensch — here’s my pride, bubeleh, now bargain me down what you will.

Ach, the pawnbroker moans, why, it’s a sin…don’t sell yourself short, and he slams his head on the bars of his cage, clatters between them the visor. Tell you what, he counters, I’ll give you three hundred and, hymn, a daughter of mine in marriage (you know how many I have — nu, I don’t either), you have maybe plans for tonight, my wife’s making break the fast, such a cook as you wouldn’t believe!

What’s this all about, B thinks with His face almost too knowingly…and then how the mensch suspects that this, too, might be a tactic, just another ruse, one of many — then why not, with eyes lit as if for effect and His mind going fiery…He’s a quick study, innocent but willing, preternaturally thorough, immediately expert, at ease. I don’t deal with thieves, He says to begin again, then commences with His walking away, the requisite display of disinterest. It’s so unexpected and yet so perfect, so right…wherefrom this instinctual guile, such inheritance heretofore subconscious, underknown, His respect for the deal, the old hand and its shake in its gloriously fallible humanity, its mouth sensuous and sad and yet humorous, too, below the pointiest and so most accusative of noses now put to the grind — and so with that dealhand, the stealhand, on the knob of the door and turning, He turns to the mensch to ask of him fifty, adding…more than fair — I’ll even sweep up around here, and throw in a shoeshine…or two.

I’ve underestimated, the pawnbroker says in a voice that says underneath in a muttering undertone (but that nothing’s ever tragic, or final), must be dealing with a real professional here…listen, tateleh, jokes I don’t pay for. Hahaha, a laugh won’t pay for the coffin, or my utilitybills. You have so much promise, don’t settle for less, I won’t stand for it, you hear me…let’s say five hundred, and meals for the week, a daughter of mine and a house out in Joysey (though only once you’re married — with kinder), three floors — tell you what, and another daughter, too, just to sweeten the pot: you have maybe a brother, an eligible cousin?

Ridiculous…B’s almost through the door, it’s insulting: eighteen’s my final offer, chai and chaver — I won’t go any lower, I can’t and you won’t…I’ll pay you eighteen, do the mopping, the sweeping, a shoeshine, I’ll even take in your laundry for a month and sit with your animals when you go and visit your mother. Water your plants, keep up the house, that sort of thing.

Nothing doing, the pawnbroker interrupts, points a filthy forefingernail up to the ceiling that would, that should, begin storming with God as his witness…understand me, I’m a generous mensch, and this is as far as I’m willing to go — you’ll take it or leave it, no hard feelings…I would’ve loved to have done business, but time is money and yet both are short patience’s even shorter, I’m sure: one thousand I’ll pay you, my daughter in marriage, and I mean my second daughter, the prettiest that one oy the head on her and the light of her face; meals for the month, a fivefloor house in Joysey once you’re married with kinder (he’s unshakable on this point, though he’s ready to shake on it now), and my first daughter for any relation that might be available, even a friend on your own recommendation, an acquaintance, maybe, even a goy you’ve heard word of who’s sober and solvent — twothirds of my estate after my death, and the blessing that I shouldn’t outlive you, Baruch ata spit spit poo.

You have yourself a deal…He swindles over to the broker, shakes his hands almost shattering the mensch’s wrists through the bars of the cage. He gives a geshray, B loosens His grip, the mensch steps back from his counter, shakes out his hands, then gathers the spoon finally slid through the slot…think how trusting, how very exposed: this mensch with a family, with daughters, and his security so wonderfully, though perhaps foolishly, lax: a human cage with its ribbing bars, him the fragile heart inside beating enormously — how there’s no partition or otherwise divide to get skeptical about, to kibbosh, to quash any deal, no plastic or glass separating transactions: bulletproofed, everythingproofed, impervious, and what’s worse tackily scratched. Without this fussy worry about it — distancing, hard of hearing, strange to speak, glad there’s not — you could really talk to this mensch, you know, get to know him, is he hiring, too…leaving the spoon to the side of his counter, him unrolling notes excavated from a breast of his pajamas, then handing them over, which B refuses to count.

My second daughter’s named Rachel, the mensch says patting the emptied pocket, used to be Kristi; we eat at dusk; I’ll amend my will over strudel.

Nodding a promise to return, B leaves with that wad of money swelling under His robe: dirtyfingered, ripped then taped or glued back together again shekels bearing denominations of an image that’s been graven too known…Him gravely aware by now, also, as the deal here’s finally downed, that He’s been shylocked, slumlordedover — that this money, it’ll be worthless forthwith (inflated to paper, mere fibrous idea, leaking ink in every shade, to become as absorbent as any still and white cloud), with fresh gelt minting its way in any initiative: new notes bearing new guarantees, circulating their own brand of surety, yet another promise never to be broken inscribed within the signature of the Administration’s divinate X; their cash to feature a host of wizened and sagged, beardcraggy faces familiar only to future (what remonetized rabbi, I mean rebbe, what cantor — I’m sorry, chazzan), honoring what miracle or mazel, tendered to our spent every prayer; don’t you want your ticket? the pawnbroker whispers after Him, to the door slamming loudly shut in His haste, the coinlike tinkle of chimes.

No matter, what could be left in his will, the mensch’s? As there’s almost nothing left in his shop, which establishment is itself in hock, though to whom he forgets: indebted in its every drawer and window display; nothing — not even the books, though they once were his, too, presently being held by the super for study — save his own tallis, half a set of tefillin, the head (his cousin has custody of the phylactery’s arm), and the spoon just hocked that the broker buries deep in his mouth, which he maybe owns, not its words.

With this windfall though mind the scatter, B makes it to a hotel, so a motel to save money, face, economize humiliation and cut back however ennobling — Hanna’s dieting, Israel’s distinguished reserve; having had enough of this, having been toldoff and His place while they’re at it. It’s westside from Times Square and rivered further, Hell’s kitchen with its bedroom unkempt, its bathrooms shared filthy, maintained to ruinous stain far along the highway opposite Joysey. A falling to flophouse B’ll bury Himself in on this night of our mourning: splitleveled over a parkinglot, the accommodation itself accommodated triapsidal three wings off the central office roomed with a view, if only potential; an ashpit alleyed below off the trash access of the city’s lone surviving peepshow slash sexual raree agora, lately combined with a clinic for hypodermic needles, dropin; ostraca of glass islanded amid oases of frozen urine, bags tenting over the rise of discarded syringes, surrounded by the scurried smeared droppings of dogs…He could’ve gazed clear across the Hudson then far past the low Palisades, if only He’d incline His head through the window that doesn’t open, that’s not there at all and so is only the wall’s plaster wet and then, hurt, wounded, stare, by then toward the stars, invisible by the lights of blocks east then those of the Turnpike’s transept, too, the skyway sprawls of condemned cogeneration plants, remember, those dusky stretches of storage and transit that lie just over the river, toxically gray. This motel the sort of hourly rated nowhere forsaken everywhere you don’t want to be and yet usually are, anywhere outside of Joysey, that is — the true wilting Garden; its units replete with inroom, onechannel televisions that operate on dimes no one uses anymore, and with whirlpools that are actually bathtubs in the hall that can always be churned up or unclogged with a plunger provided at cost, advertised upon the 10th Avenue marquee in promises smirking gaptoothed: in r (oom) (mov) i (es) and w (h) i (r) l (poo) l…in room numbered numinous, you’re going to want to go up ten flights, no elevator tonight, then hang a right down the hall, says the mensch at the bookshelf crashed into a frontdesk: he’s pale, inkyhaired, wrapped in a forelock and perpetually shuckling, he’s davening day and night it’s mincha then ma’ariv, always keep going keep going — there, in the drawer of the nightstand, in the volume and beyond the Law, amid the pages, the words, of the Psalm: by the rivers of Babylon there we sat down to weep

let my right hand forget her cunning if I do not remember thee let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth…superfluminating pages turning pages of pages into His room’s very walls — wallpaper peeling all its words ever echoed, shrieked in pain and pleasures; shedding scribble, graffitiskin wrinkled with inscrutable signs, phonenumbers, profanity: for a good time call home, can you remember the last time you talked to your mother…the paper a shade of parchment, smokeyellowed, drinkpickled, an animal slit, split, then bared to the wall facing out, opposite the cindering brick: this room, B thinks, had once been but when possibly seven, eight, nine, ten times its present size singleoccupancy, and then the walls, their paperings, slowly glopped with spit, gooped one upon the other, atop, forming ever thicker and so the room reduced, raggedly smaller — with more neglect, with more paper upon paper upon paper upon paper, loose mouths gnashing gummily, the bed would be consumed and Him, too. B lies on the bed just a mattress bare on the floor. Overhead fan swings slow, rickety. A nightstand too high for the mattress, its lone drawer hosting amid mousemade minims a tattered, dogeared copy of what was once called the Bible. Testamentary, old, new, borrowed, blue. As far as books go, pretty good. What else, what more do you want: the only other presence in the room an understuffed recliner, infested with rinds, shells, and peels loosed from a decade or so of anonymous pockets, under its baldingly tonsured cushion a vault of oxidized pennies, as if skullcaps for the loose and lost. Stale air. And no toilets here either, or ice, or laundry, or — those are either down the hall, or down a flight of stairs, He forgets, keys to them kept by the mensch in the office, each worth a tithe. And the telephone, too, either/or. Everything stained.

Here’s His holiday to repent of — this room the cheap reification of B’s atonement: for not mourning the day, for not observing, for not being able to observe without window, the ninth of Av’s moon; for always being out of time, always timeless, whether too early or late, born already delayed, arrived unprepared, checked in offhours and without the inheritance by which to identify, without tradition’s baggaged burden and so, with nothing to prove — ignorant as He is, unsure as to what they held by, as to what He still should be holding, clutching, what’s clung to, the Israelien family’s rites. He doesn’t know from their breaking the fast (as it’s been said: she who passes, is herself passed; she who serves first, is served last), Hanna’s loaves raisinrisen, she baked, in death she might finally bake, the glaze of honey, the shards of apple soon to dip, shechyanu — gesundheit the minhag, and then when her eyes are on her husband your father, how you go to wipe your nose with the linen…doesn’t know from the set table, the cloth Hanna’d save from the spills of the mundane, would launder in moon — sisters, His, as if stars to lineup syzygy against the white wall of the hall, their faces washed to beam in pure light, setting the candles to shine, Israel standing proud, seated justified, Hanna honored in their midst…O His family lost — and so, to seek a reunion tonight. Upon the New Year, may He be forgiven — though if He can’t be by Himself, who really can?

B lifts the telephone from its hook in the hallway used to hold the drip of transient coats, cords it out from under its muting slickers and muffling jackets down the hall to the shelter of His doorway where at least the ceiling’s not snowing, not yet, dials His homenumber, Israel’s worknumbers, Wanda’s extension, PopPop’s, anything scrawled on habit by memory’s hand. No answer. For a worse time call disconnected, He thinks, disdisdisconnected. Ring ring hiccough ring. It’s a holiday, what’s He thinking, whether busy or changed — then, dialing the Koenigsburg’s ten tries later after its tenth ring, gets a goy on the line with every line in the world, who he knows from favor and favors, backscratching with the palms greased in balm, spikenard, and cooling coinage, the purifications required for a leap of faith such as this; from the heights of depression, how far the fall underground, the Resistance, it’s been called, the Unterwelt; he’s promised his fee, the goy tells Him to hang up and wait. The phone spurts a ring in a moment, and it’s one Laser Wolf, or that’s how he’s been characterized (maybe he’s real, maybe he’s ten of them, a whole minyan of real), Shalom how’s been by you and where, he asks, then agrees to handle particulars: it’ll take an hour or so, no problem, how are your fixed, or broken, take care of yourself, if you need anything else, don’t hesitate, click.

Prayer later and lamentation, with the frontdesk mensch hosting a shiur of migrant kitchen workers and idle maids in the motel’s laundry downstairs, there’s a knock at His door and it’s them — His sisters, the Marys…mishpocha, what a mechaye! B holds the door wide for them dripping with the weather’s melt and that of their thick, hasty makeup, adjusting their skirts and swishy wigs, then slams the door on their noses and breasts, which have been bound if not padded, and their knees and their hands held out to embrace, only to throw it open again to ingather them all, one by one over the threshold: He drops each hard to raise dust from the floor. Marysomeones, anyones, Marywhomevers in relation to the illegitimate why, as long as it’s now and quick, over and done with like soon — a giggly gaggle of them, a nosegay in a handful of familiar scents, colors, blooms; Rubina and Simone and Liv and Hanna, too, He’d forgotten: she’s none of them, and is all, was who or what that mensch his name spit poo was Jesus meant whenever he spoke of his mother Mary as the Woman, as everything, total, as all — in that goy’s life too many Marys around, abounding, Mary his mother, also Mary his elder sister, then the whore who’d mothered him to the end…the Mary who’d laundered His diapers with a pinch of His mother’s perfume, the one who indulged the suckling fetish, and that of the wetting; the one who always had to be threatened to set the table, to quit wasting time — have you finished your homework? — then eat up but slowly, chew your fill, wash your hair, scrub your teeth; Judith, Isabella, Zeba, the same now, all one, entirely Hanna — call her a balabusta, a berrieh ballbuster, just call her this once in a while: one mother, twentyeight-limbed touchy and feely and wiping this Hanna visiting the sick, doing charity work, benevolent business, cooking, cleaning, volunteering her time; how she’d sacrificed so much she’d remind you, how she gives still of her self what she thinks it so selflessly, kind. The Marys, they’d stolen the van they’d followed Him in coast to coast (since the aborted Tour, it’d remained garaged, kept on ice offIsland), a mudspattered heap spewing rust they’d christened with a bottle of Manischewitz the Mizvah Mobile, then drunk themselves full as if to fuel their revenge. A midnight’s raid of the Garden, how they’d managed to slip into costume before slipping out. Wardrobe, they’d gotten dressed, skirted, madeup mascarad and rouged, but in their hushed rush have become mixedup, half workedover: one wears Rubina’s skirt tableclothwide, down below and pleated to match with Dina’s blouse too tight up top, shriveled as if a balloon; Natalia’s skirt blue or maybe it’s black in this light, too short with Asa’s flounced white blouse way too tight, too, Gillian’s skirt hemmed short in purple beyond any modesty, barely showing below Josephine’s blouse crying buttons in its snug to pop eyes; as for Rubina, she’s blossoming to be generous: feeling a little bloated, damply fat, in Batya’s tiny floral panties; that, with their earrings mismatched (the older ones pierced, the youngest pinched by their clipons), with one lip sticked pink, the other stuck with the red. They pick themselves up from the floor, wander throughout the room to an alluring array: on the nightstand, openlegged atop the luggagerack, retracting their foreskinlike stockings to rub at and warm their legs it’s so freezing in here, held substantial and wide atop the radiator that doesn’t work and then opposite, on the filth of the flabby recliner; one digs candles from her pockets by their wicks, she’s on her knees in grotesque attempts with matches wet to light the room dimly — flames guttering, then licking high, the wax melting to the floor in a ring around the mattress as if to holy what’s about to transpire.

One by one B rends their garments, they scrounge them up from the floor, fold them flat, lie them in piles neatly along the arms of the recliner, curtained over its back: such a slob, such awkwardness, it’s embarrassing enough — this inadvertent mothering in the arms of your sisters, their fingernail scratches of love…. take yours off, too, one says, which, teethes the gloss from her lip, it’s only fair, and so He loses the remnant pajamarags worn underneath the robe’s last lining, until only the socks in their shoes remain. He’s still in His swelling, though, the skin held taut, taunting, a wineskin overfilled — only the shame never sheds, pulsing its snake about to seed poison…but to deny Himself, must withhold Himself tonight as if in penance, appeal, and so without a hug or kiss or even a stroke, grope, or tug, He falls to kneel at the mattress’ floored foot — as if to worship His own defilation, this defiliation. With Hanna altared thereupon and wreathed ritually in flames, her arms and legs splayed as if to open herself to the slaughter, to accept whatever sharp and steadiness of knife, and with her wig spread, too, loose and errant above her head itself surrounded by the halfshining, halfshadowed faces of her daughters attending to His mother, theirs. And then, to lower Himself to her, a lowering, then, of her, too: His girth wildly stretchmarked, reddened like a heifer, scarsplotched, His hanging breast and gut a low and ugly barrel, a hump fallen to become kissed and so, changed — transmuted, made new — at the lip of this mattress, the graze of its rim; His knees numb, too, fatling legs rubbing raw on the rasp of the floor, the wheeze of the planks under the patchwork carpeting, the scuzz exposed beneath.

To bow is to become a fetus, deference without mind or defense…to kneel with ache in the knees, and with ache in the spine, with stiff in the neck and the shoulders. Before Him is a pouch. A pocket. To keepsafe, to vouch, any secret. In His kneel, B with hands on her waist maneuvers her His mother near to Him, at Him, then with shoulders high and stiffneck set straight and temples tight He shuts His eyes and lows a grasp of tongue, as if extending in greeting the hand of His mouth. To trace the ridge of dark dense down there, to loll the lick of His tip along the topmost mating of unkissing lips, sucking at them to bring her even nearer, to mate mouths in a dialogue of silence, interrupted by only the occasional slurp or smack, though He feigns moans to which His mother responds in kind from her own other mouth above, which can kiss, which does kiss, with noise of her own He prays is genuine, or if maybe not to pray then to never know for sure, say, that her sound’s not in response to His sound rather to His labor, I’m working here, praying, repenting, which He undertakes solemnly, with diligence, without pleasure. To raise the slope of His nose against her, falling in to sense her innerly, His tongue the rivering rush to her dripping sea, the parting of a hidden ocean. He furthers, at the shores of her sand and the dunes of her sandy wighair, then deepens Himself onward, as if onto a distant land, toward the mountaining of the ridge inside, the valley of her womb; that sunlike slow head of His straining up from below…with Hanna’s own lower held languid, loose, dangling from the mattress’ fall of flow from her sex around hips, down to thighs, then her legs, feetward, the drips of her toes tracing in their stretching clench and twirl the ashed remains of smoke shod into a floorboard.

A question — why’d He go to such extremes to pleasure her?

D. or Dee Lila, whichever’s the name under which a motel maid who she wasn’t there at all assumes to recount the situation to authorities, answers…Benjy—because that’s how I knew Him — He’s just that kind of mensch, you know, more interested in your pleasure than His…His pleasure mortifies Him. With His hands on her hips, on her waist, on breast then on breasts beaten up to the shoulders, she’s shook, a sway made this merry waver, a shuckle in private — B praying His mouth to her, the echo of her dark and the Amen meant by her drenching…though beyond this, there’s only a stillness, a silence: the overhead fan pursues itself, the only air in the room save two breaths, the fluttering of paper from walls and His farting. A labor, we’re told — the only way to joy. Or else, He’ll soon think — an excavation, dig in. He arches Himself, His elbows heave and they founder to wrists and hot palms then their melt into fingers…pursuing her with the gnashing of teeth — an application of the appearance of mourning, accomplished to titillate and hurt. With His tongue in one thought, His mind in another, He’s sensing suffusion, an oozing of light from within. Nude transudation. Glaciate and slow, hard as the earth His head immersed, misted, in the midst of what seems a soft sky dewy and glowing, He squints against that rising shine, He has to, dazzly motes, tears and their saline sting, dizzying and foreign, the dusting of sand, real sand, actual sand — then, as if prepared, He opens His eyes wide inside: and there, inside her, is — Jerusalem…valleyed entire in the genital of her womb: Jerusalem of molten golden slopes fleshed and downed, the whole of His head immersed within and yet hovering above its image reflected, spit as a star to brighten her all, to make clear. He sniffs at the gates of her gate, at the walls of her, too, licks at the domes and the fountains, the ways and the alleys, ripples the cracks of the stones and then those cleaved between them, those rocky, mossily shrouded crags — an immaculate urn with its parchment preserved, her glans stored rolled round within, holding a map of the world living around Him.

B’s gasping to slurp, to suck it all up. Thinking God, the heat in here, the sop and the quiver, how it’s too much to swallow at once: the mountains around the valley, then the valley itself, and then the walls to rim again with their many gates and their seals — His tongue bursting them into blastings of wet, as if exploded grapes giving milk and honey that are both only salt and perhaps a century soured; then the walls again, always the walls of the walls, labial around and around without end, walls guarding from what or from who the cunnilingually chaotic Cardo, then the Shuk, with its waft of exotic spices to stifle…quarter to quarter to acknowledge with tongue the high, limbstraining arches, the climactic rubble, chips of blood and shards of discharge. Her hips as if handles to the jug of her, fill her up, stuff her shattered, He’s thinking, He’s not anymore. With His weak hand, He tweaks at her areolæ, while with the other and strong He lows down to her tush to finger around by the knuckle. He wails, inhales; with His mouth sieves and with His throat, He saves: graving the image of this pubic polis inside Him…her sand in His eyes to wind tears into wrinkles — furrows He’s plowing perpetually toward the floor of her fertile — and then, squinting as He nears as if gazing into His very own face, to head to that womb set inside the womb, ever deeper toward His issue, the bottommost basin, the ultimate depth of this valley sagging womanly into mattress, which gives underneath Him like the swallowing earth. He strains to tongue the Temple’s last wall, within her, westerly and hot, His length to mount the Mount how He’s in too deep, totally in, wombed to root at His shoulders, stooped with the ache of His arms that beat and clasp, then their hands — one of which is still fingering. B bent and about to loll down upon the mound with reverent tongue, the immaculate dome tipping the ruin of the Temple, hers, as if to lick away the gild, to wick each dram, every glimmer of waste — a ray of saliva from His tongue to kiss with eyes shut and heavy thick pant the hidden hold of the very Presence and His face reflected, secreted to sleep within the holiest of holes…He’s stuck, without breath, a stifling gag, He chokes panicked.

An abandonment, this escape…B’s mind having held its turn, unrevolute; a virgin transcendence — how everything fails…the forefinger of His righthand, knuckled up her tush, is rendered limp: analgesic, obtund. As for His tongue unpronouncing, it’s numb, too, paralyzed, flailingly within the strain of its veins, licking to stick to the roof of the mouth of the womb of His mother — this, in a sensational loss of sensation. In His need to please her, He’s forgotten Himself, and gone wanting: His forefinger then hand entire drops weakly to the mattress’ lip. His tongue hard and fat sticks fast between the presences of her hips. Due to His disposition, and despite their thrashing accompanied by an incomprehensible language of gurgles, it cleaves between her clitoris, which is understandably engorged, and her prepuce if He knows where those are, even what. Marys no longer sisters or mother responsible more like reverted, twelve shocked, freaking, screeching girls with their gnawed sharp fastflying manicures and their wighair afling, their falsies falling lump to the pits of their arms, mountains leveled, razed, terraces tumbled down from the lush, weatherhigh hills to the stomach’s desert, its flat unforgiving — they gather quickly, tightly, mind the flames assembling in a wreathe around Him; groping to still His limbs from their flail and from her, knocking over the candles to set the carpeting to smoke, to set fire, the mattress burning then their stockings and skirts catching, too, as they attempt half to put themselves out with their girdles and then with their nails to dislodge Him and so leaving scratches across the plains of His flesh, shiring along with Him their alarm, what has to be the strangest song ever sung in a land this poorly, hourly accommodated; as if pitched to sirens, geshraying…wildly the Hanna Mary has her hands on His fevered skull, attempts to slap Him loose, swatting the soundings echoing from within then through her as she sits up, bears down on Him between her legs snaked and slippery: His head, huge, as if a birthed tumor, a blond inner growth perhaps a bit balding upon aeration, receding in revelation, with the hairs of His neck tangled slovenly with the hair of His back, singed, scorched amid the sloppy flares of flesh that lap and lick their ways down the widening wick of his bottomless sit and hips, the waist and the bulge beneath it, His fat, furry middle melting into a shiny puddle of shvitz; the other Marys up and tugging at the Hanna Mary’s hair in altogether now one, two, Three, then off with her wig to grab at her real hair knotted underneath again one two, He’s hyperventilating is what His mother would’ve said if she were His true mother, overbearing as always and suffocant, nearly unconscious, or maybe she’s already dead — finally, and yet still feeling Him: the dread that midwifes any attempt at pleasure, attends every hope of fulfillment. As if expectant, virginred a flush, He’s overheated from gasping her hysterical air then the no air, from gorging on her juices and fruit, the sin of the apple…B’s complexion that humiliated shade, mortified but alive, still submerged: up to His neck in it, gagging on an odd mucosal mixture, saliva and female ejaculate flooding down His throat without the obstruction of acting tongue, but with the jaw lamely free to take in all at once without swallow. Now, some of the Marys are pulling the Hanna Mary by her natural hair, the other Marys pulling Him the opposite and pushing Him out, too, unnaturally — they hold, they cling, they’re clingers, they clutch, they’re clutchers, at His shoes, His socks fallen, then the toes and His feet and at joint of His knee, haunches, lardaceous lovehandles and shoulders, leaning away from Him from her with the force of their weight, not enough.

No time to assess the situation, nu, we understand — after all, postmortem is postmortem, after is the fact. Questions, did they ever have their questions, for everyone, who not — the cooperatively crazy mensch here at the frontdesk, the motel’s putative maids only illegals who they never cleaned, they’re merely homeless and every Shabbos or so paying what they have to use the facilities to bathe themselves, to wash their minds to purity…even for the schmuck who delivers them the ice hacked straight from the street to the hallways’ machines. What will free first, will prepuce give or will His tongue, which is affixed to which…will His tongue wag from between her legs forever and last days, or will He be condemned to wander around Purgatory, hymn, with an intimate aspect of the female anatomy flapping obscenely from Him, as if the flag of the surrender of His gape? B losing final air and as they’re tugging…His tongue’s stretching — bodylength soon, it’s a bodied double, distended far from its tumescence as if to paper the opposite wall, as if to lick it clean and further, wicking a thin dribble across the room, then drooling toward the door to the hall as if to collapse to corpse only while waiting for the elevator out of order. Expired. And so to residence in this motel for an eternity with no rates reduced, how they’ll pry the cash from His hands, the hock of His spoony cold. How to summon when you can’t even button, or ask for passing help in pressing. Questions, always questions: is the tongue I bought off what’s his name the real one or only a fake — refund, who do I kvetch to for my money back…but what about Her organ, where is it now — cold itself, between her smothering legs. The Hanna Mary wailing still to end all terror, writhing across the flaming mattress with a roll of her thighs around His skull as if to wring His neck — to kill a festive chicken, the screwy opening of a Shabbos bottle of His blood…Him thrashed from the smoke in His lungs, Hanna’s pooped how He’s soiled Himself, the mattress, its fiery floor — and then, with one last leaning tug, He, pops, off and out:

B birthed wet onto the motelroom’s floor, the notel: crying Mom without a tongue, and burning. The Marys scatter, fall, hit walls and bounce collapse…Edens of flow as the tongue falls, too, a flop past limp atop the lip of the mattress licking lameness into the airless room, which is so smoky as to seem the Mitteltown sky itself, just outside, walled behind the night: the tongue’s tip, though, stuck hard and fast to its vagina dark and tightening above. Utterly without life, the pile of flesh then falls from its soaked weight, plops in silence as a stump, majestically purple then darker — soon to be a coil of absolute blue royaled to black, as if a turd unburdened, steaming, wound-flecked, left as a tip for the maid atop the taint of the carpet. Our mensch at the frontdesk having heard the resoundings of serious thump, just taking an interest in the integrity of the motel’s structure, you understand, its foundations not to mention its reputation, already shaky enough the both of them that its collapse or, suggestion, demolition might be welcomed, and how any felony charges of arson ever filed might be lost on their ways to the court, rest assured and a wink, or at the very least downgraded to misdemeanor material: an insuranceheap, lightningready, as it’s without reservations ever, without even the most grim glimmering hope of a star — its mensch weeping (according to what’s now his third statement taken) has already, by the first bumptious echo from ceilings above, in violation of the spirit of the first holiday he’s ever observed as much as this doing business is and with B, worked the telephones overtime, talking up the last of the media and its gossip columnists switchboarded condemned, in his whiny, hoarsely feminine garble: gutter press to swell up from sewers, assembling into swills of ink at the 10th Avenue entrance, photographers already gathering in the parkinggarage, in the lobby and at the door to His hall, their flashpot moons revolving around what lies beyond, giving light only to be reflected, never absorbed: they’re waiting for a uniform — but Authorities in observance arrive only later, well after the mandate of their departmental Lamentations — any angel with a warrant scrolling from the bell of its trumpet to blow the damn door down.

Example an editorial, then, for the Weekly Affiliated: a highbrow, low page-count rag light on advertisers of late and becoming increasingly desperate, only recently having been labeled by its myriad competitors and even those in the suffering if soon illegalized secular media as the quote Weakly Affiliated, unquote, a nickname that like all of them becomes less funny the more it’s invoked — an extraordinarily maligned and litigated writeup, an edit of which despite everything goes on to make syndicate (causing an entire chain to be silenced for a week, then shut down, its editors imprisoned, its morning edition torched with its stands), opening with a memorable phrase characterizing the tragedy as “Tongue-N-Cheeks,” then going on to note that “though He’s eaten of the forbidden fruit […] it’s not like He’s still enjoying its taste.” countered only a day later with an oped claiming, “If we have no pity, then we have converted all for nothing. Just as it takes more than a God to make a religion, it takes more than a religion to make a mensch.” Unofficial reports wander freely, and leaky…a drippy, slippery out of bounds: the chains and gags of wire, of summary frontpage, hovering above the fold, bolded and columnarly exalted…it’s impossible not to miss the management, to reconcile it with rumor: murder slash suicide pact gone wrong, shots fired, Metropolitan Gestapo headed up by the newly installed Des Moinesher Rebbe wading into the reportedly frayed hallway from out of nowhere (though he’s the son-inlaw of the Light of Kansas — traditions already generating, ambitions becoming dynasties becoming power) — arriving to find the assembled dead from gas, from smoke inhalation, a fire…Mormon kindernapping, ransom paid, hostage never returned, ransom never refunded, hostage involved in a tragic quote accident unquote, a quote unquote unfortunate incident, substances abused, and women, too, white slavery or Resistance supremacy was it, involved medical experimentation, on newborns, the unborn, Animalia, with regard to equine ejaculatory response, decapitation, castration, tongue severance, hotel falling in on itself, swallowed whole by the earth, flying ambulances of fire whisking away the Marys who immediately after in quotes themselves, “decide” to leave the employ of Garden, Inc. without settlement or severance further, granting no interviews save what’s reported in a statement so official as to be regarded as prophecy, as if dictated — but not read — moons before Av ever began…His mind is His slavery, His life, who He is, a slave, that’s who He was born to be. He needs a woman? Forget it. He needs a life! or so a woman who wasn’t there or even named Delilah recounts in rehearsal for The 18th Hour, we’re at 1492 on your AM dial, the host with the most with the radio face, a former plumber with the best, cleanest pipes in Passaic appearing in person like a down on his luck ventriloquist or his dummy and despite the suit (which just has to be worth hundreds), he holds her while she weeps away the show, then the theme music fades up, the On Air lights off themselves and the static comes in like the clouds, weathering patience…

Mary which one who knows as who has the time she thinks to save, plucks up the fallen, fusiform tongue and wraps its impressive length in the Business, others hold skimped Sports or Book Review, section of a newspaper dated a Shabbos previous, in one account, bylined by the owner of that very paper…though others hold rolled in a hospital’s fundraising newsletter left lying around by the last shoesalesmensch to slink this way (used to wipe the filth from his soles) — in pages palmed, ripped right from the book of Psalms: if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my righthand forget its cunting, let my tongue cleave to the Ruth of my mouth, it goes…saves it though, “apparently,” no reattachment surgery’s possible (even if the price’ll be lately right by the Doctors Tweiss): risk such a procedure He’s thinking and He’ll risk His freedom, to think if not His life, Him stumbling deranged mouth glop maniacal spew from out of the motel’s rear service entrance and onto the highway, miraculous you have to admit as do latter commentators that He doesn’t get picked up by Anyone, hauled in for a session, a little of the old Q. & A. even for just appearing in public like this, a dressing down for dressing up as His mother, actually in disguise as a Mary disguised as His mother, if you’re with Him: that old desertruined robe exchanged for a pink slip of housecoat clasped too huggingly tight with plastic flower buttons, forgetmenots but who remembers, dumpster’s sneakers over slippered raiment retained He’s traded in for heels, pumps one for each stumble of foot He’s tripping, falling, huddling past the assembled Law, the Media, who are the Law’s later interpreters, its reporters and photographers (many latearriving Affiliated journalists actually forbidding themselves from pen and camera due to the holiness of the Ninth, the wasteful nature of such observance distressing in this ridiculous ritual of these lensmenschs and shutterschmucks: how making cameras of their own filmless hands, they squint one eye then click with the finger) — they let Him pass as her, without inspection, whether to them a motel maid, a whore just off for the night or her grandmother’s sister, a voyeur onlooking, rubbernecking what with her head kercheifed, too, become babushkad, old and avoided as destitute and sick. He trannies away from the river in heels, the skirt of His coat shrived high by the wind. His mouth’s open in an attempt to air pain, and so exposed to the weather falling, the spitting drift, but no yelling’s to be heard, only the untastedness of the street wind and the avenue wind and then at their intersection, the resoundingly ringing silence of that angry greedy pud. What it resembles is a growth of goldbrick, a bellish bud or coin sored upon the middle of the mouth, deep inside it and secret, the ornament of His standing aleph, an uppermost putz only smaller and softer than most. What He wants to say with it, though, He doesn’t know, as He isn’t saying it, as nothing’s being said through Him — only this letter, the round of its soundlessness in search of a vowel, the translation of this search for bearings east, a new beginning voiced only in blood…B’s arms flailing, as if communicant and with His legs, too, His head, as if limbed directly to His mouth’s fingery stud, made veined to what remains: the stirrings of a torturous howl through the slip of parkinggarage, then down its slipping grade, the turns, the ramps on and off, waiting at the crosswalk for any light to change, Him an aleph splayed, waving finally with sound, Aaaaaa…all He manages, to echo across the darkened and utterly vacant 10th sad & 40th He doesn’t know which, He wouldn’t, dispersing, disappearing into a traffic of whirling ice, obscuring the noise of even the sirens.

His tongue to become a relic, to be exhibited first for a week at His home in the Garden, then taken national, eventually worldwide: to be paraded around from town to town, wherever pays, whether money or homage — as an oracle, oracular; some swear ask it a question, it’ll answer without mind; miraclegranting others promise, perhaps prophesizing, presumably on mute if only for the exploitation of those who’d interpret: a week later and the night before its Garden unveiling, Doctor Abuya and the Nachmachen in blue & white matching scrubs stand a press conference over the stump, the withered flaccid flabellum as redeemed from Evidence of Metropolitan Gestapo with an outstretched arm clutching tongues of quiet cash, having been scooped from its jar of formaldehyde, then — as per Die’s specifications — set amidst a host of semi, hemi, and demi precious metals and gems, inlaid into a reliquary shaped like, of all things, a mouth: its dorsum veined in what’s passing for silver and gold, rocks of faux diamond studded in rows of teeth, viciously polished: hardcuts for canines, cabochons, wisdom pears, then assorted raw stones for far molars, good imitations at least, rubies faked with spinel for tonsils, unpolished hunks of malachite limning the wound to be found at oropharynx, at the velveteen depth of its setting, the red cushioning the bite — a baubled bibelot and prize for the mantel, the trophy of a world as fragile as glass; only after that stint at His house’s museum, when it’s sent out on exhibit, on a tour even less successful than that of its body had been, back when it’d been daily brushed then nightly mouthed and had talked the talk wellscripted: a show removed to a sideshow, remanded to freakshow, noshow…for now, they say, but just wait till we hit Berlin, they’ll lineup for anything over there: photographers asking for the reliquary angled so that the light hits it just so, that’s perfect, hold it, now smile and say — reporters asking the tongue enshrined questions who knows what it would respond, were a mind still sticking it out in thought.

Downtown the half snow half rain are done arguing themselves to all wet: it’s agreed, a day as holy as today requires such compromise; tonight’s introspection makes this kind of weather relevant, admissible, wholly appropriate, and so God opens wide His pockets, which are deep and silverlined, drops it down, a storm. Having wandered at His own painful pace, and through a personal fog, as if privately pursued by a cloud even daytime dark and its imminent burst hovering always just over His head, a breath — the pressure, the heavy gray and threat, He’s crossexamining for dry over and around a schaft of loiterers, assembled at the base of the stairs in dripping casualwear caftans up the steps forever high, as if leading up above the sky itself, B breathless: to stand a loiter under the portico colonnaded heaven above Centre Street, hiding behind a column as wide and as tall as any of Solomon’s, waiting for judgment to cease and desist. A practice of ponchod employees stream down the steps to haul the sty of piggy pushkes inside — the Courthouse, where everything but everything smells by wet.

An overhanging freeze…a glomming gloom, a second skin, and suffocating. It’s hard to swallow. All that, and He’s getting stares from the guards. And so B goes for further shelter, within the door under the portico and the perilous, dizzying sway of its lamp never lit. He’s soaking, was what Israel would’ve said, Hanna would’ve said, drenched; His heels squishing on the atrium’s tile, don’t ask as to the socks. He sits down on a long stretch of knot, puddles the floor, rising only when a guard officialmouthed — with sadness rung around his eyes like the rings left by mugs, by cups of coffee left to sit atop the table of his face with their marks then traced in sentencing ink, with an angry fist and wagging fingers — motions for Him to rise and that’s right, follow me, sir, leads Him down halls through halls radial each poorer away from the arch of the atrium and its rotunda, tile giving way to linoleum, dustducts, cloudbursts now of exposed wiring, then through a door and into a courtroom, which is empty and cold and barrenly lit, screeching a seat out then leaving Him to decide whether or not He should sit. A straightbacked wooden chair — the chair of the defendant, cobbled together to be the most uncomfortable, the least conducive to shifty slumps, engineered for incrimination, the seat of the client who usually pays the most though gets the least; it holds Him fast, His housecoated fat bulging out the slots of the sides, catching Him unhanded. The guard leaves Him with a pat to the shoulder as what must be His lawyer, His Goldenberg, it’s been a while, too long and yet not enough, enters wet himself, and sloppy, in an untailored, seamstripped suit, and with a clammy palm without calm shakes Him a Shalom.

Glad you found it, he says, you just made it, you seem well, haven’t had the pleasure in an age.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to do much talking, no one expects you to, what with…this is just a formality, let’s hope — at least, the jury seems sympathetic, have pity. They’re too honest not to be, and pitiful: we managed to get rid of the living early on in the process…still, we need to present well, and unfortunately we haven’t had much time to prepare. Answer me this. You can nod, or shake no. Or else we could have a whole system figured out: how one finger means yes and how another means, you get it. Suss it out. What I want to know is this: do you swear to tell the truth, to me, not the whole truth, to them, God help us, I object. What I mean is, next witness. And then upon the seventh day, we’ll rest. A bailiff, who’s just the guard who’d led Him here changed into a new uniform for overtime’s sake, approaches with no recognizance whatsoever, and without a word wraps his hands around His neck and clips onto Him a bowtie, obtained from a reputable receptacle piled with all manner of neckwear worn, mildewed tongues, preknotted, knit lengths stained with shvitz. Are you with me? Look me in the eyes. Read my lips, and without moving yours. Isn’t it true that? What — is that two fingers, or just one; work with me here, you call that a signal — you’re going to have to nod better than that. What were you doing on the night of the eighth, and how was that night different from the morning of the ninth — where were you when? Do any of the following names mean anything to you…when she said that, what exactly did Miss Demeanor mean? Est-her, but I don’t even know her! Then, the lawyer for the State enters, a piercing mensch his hair not wetted slick but oilgreased, rivulets of melt flowing atop the sheen of his widowpeak, his lips thin like the most expensive and so most successful but still painful of knives — he’s a shysty son of a something…ben Ballshabayit’s what they call him naked in the shower at his countryclub, if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t. Toweled then dressed in a wonderfully unconventional entirely camelhair suit, he’s much better tailored than His who in his shmatte (which his wife’s been after him to launder for a moon) the more he sits the more it’s wrinkled, rising with a sigh, such an effort to greet his colleague, his better save the two hundred more he bills per hour with extra padded for this very rising while still gripping his valise, which falls open to spill an unfinished ostensibly lean pastrami sandwich, the only contents of the dingy pleather case; as he stoops to pick up what’s left of it he smiles happens regularly, apologies to opposing counsel who’s used to all this, too: a ploy, this wry distraction, him having to address all the while the seeds of the ryebread stuck in the gaps between the teeth.

Everybody rise, is what the bailiff says as if in training for the reformed rabbinate, which he is, thanks to a correspondence class his daughter’s enrolled him in, nightseminary — and so everybody halfrises, more like stoops as if they’re too tired to care, or too cold, what happened to the heating. A door opens behind the dais and a bird, white, white, forget the species, flies in to perch on a bench in the back. An honorable I’m sure Judge, at least his intentions (and as golden, too, as the light that accompanies his head, a shining bulb as beacon), enters now, habilamenting his robe as dark as night on tight over his thickfeathered, strongstalked wings — always too cramped, everbinding; zips himself tripping over its flow, getting tangled, arranges himself then sits; instructing the bailiff with only a fluff of his beard to make himself useful, will you, and usher in the jury — laggard, haggard, and twelvestrong, a late jury here of the last twelve, the tribally lost, resurrectedly lining to their seats in the order of their deaths: Steinstein the Foremensch sits last, straightening his black, barmitzvah suit and tie he never got to wear, it’s shrouding, uncomfortable; he’s fidgeting with his collar that it keeps coming up, the fistsized knot that’s too strangling buttoned beneath, so handsome. As for the sanctuary of this courtroom’s case built against Him: worries that it was to be thrownout, desertexiled and such, are proving unfounded, at least unsubstantiated, un-transubstantiated, within the without of reasonable doubt. Rumors, excuse them into evidence. His judge clears his throat of that honorable beardness; his fist serves as a gavel, which he or it B’s thinking bangs hard to create a void in the icy air for the airing of a voice.

Has the jury reached a verdict?

How to raise my head?

The box is piled overflow with corpses.

I’m going to go with guilty, then, twelve times over — as if I don’t already feel that way myself. But the trial, if you can call this that, hasn’t even begun, is what I note without tongue. It comes out like choking. Restrain yourself, will you, to your representation — the Judge overrules all, even rule itself. He then asks, will counsel please approach the bench? and the prosecutor goes and first approaches the Goldenberg next to Him, wakes him up with a fraternal slap to the head, a light greasing of recently moisturized palm and the two lawyers one dazed and dozy approach the dais, a hunk of beaten, comingapart plywood at which they stand silently, then wink at one another, both eyes, now turn around, each to his own table, His shorter and narrower and, as it’s missing a leg, as tipsy and unevenly spoken as this Goldenberg here — guess which one of them puts his head down again and is soon lightly snoring. And so we’ll proceed directly to sentencing…what can I say: my representation’s beginning to drool. Still, I gargle and fume, spume air from my mouth, a throaty objection. Stumped. Strike that. Jury, I’ll instruct you to ignore that — whatever that was or wind, but they’re still dead, with fattish flies gathering at the wet under their eyes, wallows freezing fast…until another bailiff, this the first’s son or his brother, maybe, enters from their door and with a beaten, lipbloodied wheelbarrow, into which he begins loading their weight one by arm and leg, the courtroom clearing.

Will the defendant please rise, and I can’t pretend I’m deaf, too, so I rise to the voice, its occasion: case or docket number, does it really matter, the People v. Israelien — let it be known that this court has upheld the rulings of the lower temporal courts, nu, remember those: we are, Mister Israelien, not under anyone’s jurisdiction…the Judge of Judges, is how the whole spiel goes on, with the Judge’s face if angels or dreams or else experiential hallucinations, hymn, who knows whether from bad blood or its loss ever have faces with eyes to see one truth and ears to hear another truth and then a witnessing mouth through which to speak up for them both becoming puffy and flushed, with bulging nose and wings slowly but viciously ripping their sharp ways through his robes to spread themselves over the dais, shadowing the entire proceedings — the Judge of Judges, this is what the voice’s calling himself, demands as protocol, perhaps, to be called to what account: a self-promotion, flown upstairs…having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Benjamin Ben Israel Israelien; that’s you, son — hereby tells you to get lost; consider yourself unconsidered…what I’m saying is, as good as dead; as of today, you have been excommunicated, anathematized, made an example of…as a warning to others, what not to be or ever to become, what not to make of your life, or ever allow to have made of it, I’m saying: as such, no one is to talk to you, with you, or of you; no one’s to even acknowledge your existence, loan you a shekel, help your corpse to cross the street; more: castigated are you as you are cursed, and cursed are you as you are damned — you following; cursed are you by day, and cursed are you by night — stay with me here; cursed are you when you lie down, and cursed are you when you rise up; cursed are you when you go, and cursed are you when you come — and when neither, and, also, wherever…cursed are you with all the curses of the Law — as of tonight, I’m talking. As long as we’re at it, even your curses they should be cursed, the Judge of Judges says, tell me why not, that the Lord of Hosts Blessed Be He shall blot out thy name from under Heaven, so there…and he pauses for a moment, hacks a storm into the flightsliced tatters of his robes then nods to the bailiff whose son or brother’s just left carting the last of the corpses and asks him, would you please remand whoever that is, I’m not sure, to Himself? And so the bailiff approaches Him, who for a mensch just fated worse than dead’s rather angry, struggling out of His seat to stand a hollow holed into His face, then takes His arms at wrists and applies to them shackles, which aren’t shackles as who has them so large — what restraints, tell me, come in my size — but are wheels off wagons once towed, never claimed from the lot of municipal impound.

Don’t worry, son, says the bailiff, kindly because old and known this before, escorting B out of the courtroom…it’s not like it’s that hard being a nobody, I’ve been one for years, you’ll get used to it quick. But you’d want the brightside, the halfsized full…it’s not like we’re going to tattoo your forehead or anything. Your mark’s even less subtle, or more: it’s your very existence — escorted out the door, then down the hall down the halls in reverse, dead mensch walking down the ways of the just and the seeking, the urgent emergent and the developing kvetch, past doors behind which lord the courts appellate, lower and lowest, those courting the newest interpretation of the Law, favoring those lately favored by God, over what; linoleum, kitschratty carpeting, cracked tile then again into the processing area with its windows and wait, wending through tangles and fringes of people worried faceless, encampments and strongholds not kept or held themselves together enough to be called lines they’re more like hopes, like pleas or appeals to: the mercy, maybe, of that approved namechange, a conversion meriting an inheritance, perhaps, a reparation or restitution, each to murmur to any teller or most abject glassimprisoned authority their own personal prayer, their own private malediction, united only in their though forbidden, unofficially encouraged, uplifting through sin hatred of Him, as they now spit at His feet, in His face, throw rocks of slipping salt and stones at Him, too, to smash a skull, rip a stomach minding — official implements of ridicule obtainable from a host of utilitarian white urns positioned in only the most wellmarked, heavily lit areas of the Courthouse lobby He’s escorted through, toward the door leading out to the landing below the portico underneath the Decalogue chiseled above as ten clouds upon the sky and there their lightningstruck, thundervoiced commandment to weather, though the wet’s stopped for now, if not just slowed. He’s led out toward the landing, to the top stair of these roundeddown, smoothed marble minyans of them descending in rubble to offer grounding to flood, this bedding of short, narrow streets better alleys turned fluming rivers scummed with junk loosed from neighboring shops and stands rainbowgray, with oil and grease — or, as if an ocean of stair shoring itself endlessly north toward Mitteltown if not further into inscrutable mist (the Upper West Side, Harlem, the Heights), then again and eternally lapping its wake returned to the top of the wide marble stairwell from which He faces the trashdappled dusk; the engorging throat of the crosswalk, the budcutting jut of a traffic meridian opposite; moored carts and boats in from the islands surrounding with their dimdark people stomping their rubbers high through the muck on their ways to prayer and what’s done between prayers, which worship is anyone’s guess. He stands quieted, which for Him now is still, as the bailiff removes the wagonwheels, unlocks the chains that bind Him to Himself and, why not, to any He’s outlived, survived — holding them together tightly and fumbling, swearing throughout in a tongue soon to be legislated forgotten, the key to it all kept between his teeth between locks. A tiddle liddle jiggle, a tug then He’s out, freewheeled, finally. Kneels tush to heels, rubs His wrists back to blood.

B stands between the central columns of the landing’s colonnade, two large and thick, closely spaced hunks of assimilated marble, their twists involved and dizzying around and around the fineness of their flutes, each identical, topped with pediments heavy on the fruit. He puts one hand to each, sets teeth. And strains, again with the neck how He’s exerting Himself, hoping to bring this house, theirs or the Law’s, to ruin, to collapse all around. But no, they won’t be brought down, even moved as the bailiff is here (sniffling into his uniform’s sleeve), won’t be budged despite efforts, won’t give or even lean the merest of falls. His strength fails, is denied Him, and so He gives up, relents if demonstratively, falls His columnar arms to shanks at which they hit limply then hang, useless meat, the soul’s beefy excretions. Exhausted, enough. Hang Him out to die. He turns to nod at the bailiff, then turns again to the open world oceanic, steps out to wander upon it from under the portico, upon which step the sky opens its womb, redoubles its birthing as the bailiff yells after Him though softly and weepily rasping to have a good New Year, a happy and healthy!

Todah Rabah, I think, to you, too.

As for me, I’ll do what I can — the rest is out of my hands.

A strongly outstretched arm of blocks Uptown, the menschs in the looted, holocausted Library they’re still sitting still scribbling, untouched and alone: glosses and marginalia, obscured references to menschs who might never have lived, rejoinders and reprimands to the mensch sitting just next to them and scribbling still, points and ripostes that would’ve been more easily spoken — but here these menschs have no voices, and no sight either, nor smell neither hearing, no touch, not haptic. Nowadays, they merely disagree, the only sense left to them is disagreement and, nu, very funny surely they won’t agree on that either, have your laugh…hymn. These are the Garden’s menschs from goys, the Administration’s, Shade’s, humorless, incorrupt, and altogether brilliant, who’ve been fully invested with the power to Selekt; menschs lately forgotten, too — will the last one to leave please kill the lights, make it hurt. And so only one dark decision in all this year, almost, has it been that long, only one decision has emerged from their void to be voided itself in due time, process, neglect…drool hangs loose and hot from their lips, the uppers fattened ripe, the lowers furried mold: and no, their decision’s not death, that’s too simple, too evident (though they haven’t yet ruled that out — or have they?), not exactly excommunication either, at least not in the way we understand it: not a putting outside of the midst, not a giving of Him over to the wilderness of bridge & tunneled Joysey, it’s more like a total forgetting, a denial, an assertion that B simply, evidently, just isn’t, that He never even was; it’s just a recommendation.

Vergessen, going and gone, Israelien’s to be made verboten territory, shtum…though rumors passed among the least respectable and rearmost of pews have Him surfacing next in Europa, scattered reports probably dubious (whispers during the Silent Amidah, jokes told during the final recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish), Apocryphal meaning hidden in Greek though its ramifications evident in any language evidenced here, on the tips of tongues intact and attached, placing Him in Portugal at the same time as Spain, then in Paris, too, living south to the sea, on Mediterranean time: misnomers, misnomrim, this season’s Polandland has Him gone and turned, according to some, fryzer’s apprentice in this sinkhole once known as Kazimierz, though others hold by yesterday’s Zamość, or a secondhand to a onehanded cowhand at what was once Sandomierz, what a pit; with only the ignorant swearing to the city formerly known to us as Warsaw…devotees and even Casualist cartographers marking the maps they’d salvaged from burnt books, ripped from outdated encyclopedia sets still mentioning — what else — Galicia, Bukovina, Bessarabia, Carpathia, Sub-Carpathia, Sub-Sub-Carpathia, Ruthenia, the only atlas ever to mention Yehupetz…in the courtyards and converted parkinglots of their services holding up evidence of antique postcards, German pastels, Bohemian black & whites, forgeries upon expert inspection, others stamped what’d been Vilna and Kovno, Litvakworld up toward Riga to the north, Sweden then the Pole. Anybody who’d expected to make a killing at auction’s left sore, though that might not be from disappointment alone: all of the kollectible kitsch, the ephemeral paraphernalia, the swag and the junk, it disappears overnight, mandated, maybe, on orders of, perhaps, but also consciously forgotten, in a mindful attempt to displace, to revise, always rewrite. Whoever they ever are to smash the plates of In Hanna’s Kitchen (Binder’s & Sons, 0 A.I., ISBN#: 0-394-53258-9), of Israel’s Unabridged Deposition Transcripts (Loot of the Frum, 0 A.I., ISBN#: 0-671-76089-0), Introduction & Notes by Doctor Elisha Abuya & Reb Shimi Schreiben, the Nachmachen, with a new Afterword by Dr. Allen Sherdowitz PhD…how they rip off the covers of the remaining copies killing any value in resale, then torch the remaindered stock because they can, that’s that. Icons are put out on firesale, then put out to fire, too, ash and then trash. All His Signs & Wundas (S&W in Industryspeak, referring to the entire Israelien family of products) are taken down and warehoused un-cataloged, secreted in the underground vaults of the Garden with a vast trove buried up in the Bronx dugout beneath the infield of Yankels Stadium turned perfidious genizah, and the whole image fades, is effaced, thumbedaway with fists, rubbed out with knucklespit, ghostly tongued in a great if painful schmearing: of laity’s laxities into potholes, into the sewers and subway tunnels, down into the inner guts — the gutter intestinal seething with a depraved deprivation, making room for a vast gastric disburdening to empty…there, the lower home of those who are or who have willed themselves to the life of the indigestible, the rumbling fate of the unassimilatable, those with no interest in observance, any next incarnation, shirking that whole dominant paradigm shtick — not so much goyim voluntaries as rat and roachlike people plagued with huge families both immediate and extended if not by sympathy then by appetite’s ravage: they’re hauling subterranean their keepsakes and stray kinder napped from streetside, fleeing the flood of Affiliation, the threat of Metro Gestapo, word making rounds of what’s still to face, whispers of renditions and roundups, lineups, mass detentions without representation, violations no one questions of rights now left to the dogs…

Upon the New Year, which this year, this last year as a year, falls upon the Shabbos, today, everything will become changed. We will atone, and our vows will be nullified in the eyes that are not eyes per se, only anthropomorphic evocations of a sense that remains far, far scarier, we fear, and yet still unknown. All over, throughout the city’s darkness, waiting in the shadow of the newest moon: Die has undercover, plainclothes (gabardine to yarmulke) menschs staked outside every synagogue, every shul, and their associated shtibls, then inside, too, they’re pewed and shtendered standing at the ready at every conceivable place of congregation, waiting for Him to make His entrance, any prayer now, surely He would, we’ve brought Him up so well, everyone has and should, mostly does, Amen. B’s always the exception, though, has to be. And so, a noshow. Maybe next year — in Jerusalem, say. Do me a favor and save me a seat. Hold my place, what page. From the beginning as from the end, turned white and blank and over — the New Year’s weather thick, a clumping cover, the sky’s lump settled heavily where the air once flipped and skimmed: pure pile up against every berm and curb, firn, and sidewalk slabs of hoar, livestock scuttling escape wildly across the lanes, slipping then righting themselves. The city’s float a glacier and its Park, a bergschrund, as if a scar slit at its stomach. Stores are shut through Yom Kipper’s fast (crumbs have been picked from sidewalk cracks, breads crusted forbidden: manna’s theological mold — O pity the mensch whose mouth opens onto a flood of even mixed precipitate while going amongst his brethren this day!), ten days of abnegation wasting from the New Year, days withering of privation, of abjuration and abstinence, with only denial fulfilled: a holy week then a Shabbos more of businesses closed, with nothing transacted until after the annulment of vows then the closing of the book, the ledger, the final pages the heavens of the sky — most concerns to be opened only holiday hours following, to allow their owners and employees ample time in which to contract their sukkahs: strung maize, decorative squash like goiters, burnt carbuncles, blinking colored lights…then, there’s that holiday celebrating a new cycle of Torah, nachas shepped around, all that dancing and singing in observation of the beginning of a new cycle of Law and life, and an ordering of the final preparations for what should be total conversion, what will be: old plates and silverware cleaned out to the pareve trash if not miserly kashered, decreed contraband after a period of grace, the very selfsame, selfreflective ten days, possession of which objects after the Day of Atonement is to be made punishable by stoning, they’re still debating that, at least a modest fine.

Forget the forgetting, though, the Garden directives say, there’s only one way to settle the mind. It’s Him, and if they don’t find Him, don’t produce Him right quick, gevalt — they don’t want to think…Doctor Abuya proposing B’s sacrifice, if ever He’s found, maintaining that His blood must be spilled, to quell the masses, and the restlessness, also, of an Administration increasingly hostile. At the Temple, which up and having passed inspection is, without Him, functional for nothing: an eidolon’s idol with no one to worship it or at it, within it, the same — with His name devalued to inexistence, His image forbidden soon forgotten among even those who’d like to remember, their own craziness, betrayal: as fallen as the gates of the Temple stand tall, stilled in ice as weather itself — and so the New Year opening’s postponed, is rescheduled tentatively for the Anniversary upcoming in what’d once been December, the yahrezeit next, what would’ve been Xmas Eve, which we’d do better to forget, as well, burn that tinseltime wreathe. And so for those ten days between the New Year, which is called Rosh Hashana, which means, literally, as the billboards explain up and down the pitstopped coasts, The Head of the Year, the Garden, if quietly, puts the word out for His own lesser head, names the price: with the Temple ready for patrons and pilgrims, visitors and press, sheep, goats, and cattle are out of the question, they’re not big enough draws; what’s required for us to stay relevant is Him, fattened for the slaughter already, you with me? We shouldn’t be doing this, I know…Die’s saying to Mada over the phone, longdistance from the warmth of Palestein as an honored guest of its ruling family, the venerable Abulafias. Superstition, keep up. But it’s not like we have a choice. You think I haven’t thought this through? It has to be done, though. I love the schmuck, me more than anyone. Believe me. But this is the way it’s supposed to happen, even if it’s wrong (they’ve got the replenished ranks of Saperstein & Saperstein going over the particulars; as for the priests necessary to this procedure, with its intricacy of knife and neck and slitting prayer — they’re still in training Uptown, urge patience). All I’m hearing is they don’t want it, but I’m saying they don’t know that they do — they’re afraid of themselves, of their power: we’re talking old instincts, dormant, slow to revive; they regress, I’m sure, on their own time…we’ve taken a loss, no doubt about it, our numbers are down, people’ve lost confidence, interest, they’ve been told to lose interest, grown bored beards and dulled. As the lions pace the grounds of the Park, nervous and idle, paws sliding klutz across the Reservoir frozen, Mada and Gelt are occupied rehearsing a processional plan, its vast decoded scroll unfurling their steps down the stairs of the Temple’s ascent through the Park then out and into the streets — that’s if they can meet deadline still alive: a procession replete, they plan, with salaried hecklers and pelters, trash, too, and unsavory stuffed vegetables (the vendor menus include holishkes, or golubtsy — cabbageleaves seeded with triple paprika to spite with their spice); a slow ascent up the steps, one ritual or another now, this they’re still working out, then the slicing itself in fullview: the Mayor himself to serve his city as the day’s ceremonial High Priest with a rubbery gag knife to B’s throat, painless, humane, that’s the idea. They’ll never accept immortality, whether it be corporeal or that of His reputation, and with the favor they’re in, they can’t afford to, either. But to find Him first, that’s no question of spectacle or public, of Parkside ingathering, a herding in of the flock you’ve been fleecing: no, that’s kept low, underground and there inquired of in only a whisper, a flutter of the moneytongue, refused…this hushed informality of information exchange, humbly but casually asked — it’s personal, a question of honor…Mada, Die says over the phone, I want you to deal with this. We have just over a month, if we’re lucky, until the Administration gets involved — I’m sure of it, Shade that gonif, ungrateful, he’d just love to shut us, whether up or down…I’ll let you know which, I’ll call back in the morning.

An hour reneging on the wager of light at the down of sun, Die accompanied by Hamm exits the lobby of the Q’asino here in Hebron, Palestein — the Vault it’s called, a complex erected around a famous cave at middle, the grave of the Patriarchs and the burial of their promise, in that its entrance’s now atriumed in an arch of bombproof, bulletproof glass — and is valeted in a stretch of limo through the desert toward a distant glint, this rising, shining orbicular track: the Drom Dome, tenthousand seats stadiumed under a retractable roof under the immaculate sky, if the weather holds; he makes Abulafia I’s private box in time for the first card. A beastly silence shot fatally by gunfire — a ring, they’re dashing to track in bobs up down up and down again; two of them, breaking fast a length or two now three ahead right from out of the gate; this team of dromedaries racing ridiculously with knees held high like risen mountains. Twotoed hard, and lately shaved of their shag to decrease resistance to the wind they’re faster than, they turn turns around and around, with their necks outstretched, their mouths agape, spitting forward, a gleet fleet with tongues like flags, loose and flapping lips and nostrils flaring. The leaning might of these racers, these small dark smokes, cameljockeys they’re called, enslaved short and skinny kinder, rationed by their sheikhs to keep down their times — they’re slumped low atop the naked fat of the hump, stripped to the waist, pithhelmeted. To ride against that wind, its speed and force, their records: history, too, is racing tonight, and the principals, they’re just trying to hold on…and, to broadcast this race: an ancient vulture trained by its forefeatheredfathers to fly with an antenna in its talons, transmitting Image.

Die sits on the rug, on the floor of the platform glassed above the action; smiling a fresh moustache with a pretense to enjoying the sport, he’s really just preparing his shtick, working up the room and the relevant nerve, what he’s willing to give. Here in Palestein to merit the favor of substitute gods, he’s willing to offer, what do you want, what can he do for you on the outs as he is: if Die needs B to keep himself not only purchasing but politically necessary, which is free, and, also, if Shade’s going Affiliated on the deal, then Die needs other allies, alternate angels. And so the Abulafias, until now the most important faction of any Resistance, their ambition unchecked by moral imperative, the idea of statecraft, or good will, any responsibility to the world and its sufferers that doesn’t in any way, even if calculatingly meek, profit their own effort into the bargain: Abulafias II through Allah knows how many taking turns amid the warm dusk phoning out wagers to their bookies below (un-guessed scarabs they seem from up here, running numbers around tracks of their own making), Muhammed the Infinite Oddsmaker O don’t You forsake me now…making straights and shows, pick threes, sixes, perfectas, trifectas, and supers, anything with the promise of fixed returns; card after cards they’re betting big, until the races end — droms each to their own stables, jockeys returned to their cells, the losers to be whipped with the severed tails of retired rides. At the suggestion of al-Cohol, who’s just returned from a state visit to Moscow, they’re drinking yorsh, that mortalizing mix of vodka bombed with beer, ladled up into crystal from a trophy’s bowl — the stadium’s lights dim, they’re soon sloshed, and eventually, ten, twelve lchaims in, wagering on everything, digitdrunk sums who thinks to take seriously or honor: He’ll turn up where as who or what, alive or dead by the time we get done with Him, His weight to size of waist upon apprehension, hatless or hapless they’re slurrings, phoning further bets overseas to Gelt who takes them down diligently into a little black machzor he keeps in a suitpocket, and this despite unimpeachable evidence of their wagerers’ intoxication, the incomprehension of figures named then raised amid promises made, faces kissed, hands shook then wrung in for a hug, embraced into a kiss for the duplicitous face, too, oneupmenschship all.

Too early the next morning hungover from dawn, shikkerthirsty Abulafias II and III in matching tatarplaid golf outfits ring at the door of Die’s penthouse, luxury you should be so lucky (second only to the Presidential Suite at the Q’asino Q’apitolina, it’s hushingly said, presently occupied by the Shush of Iran, here in Palestein to make a bid on a Transjordanian masstransit contract), excusing the absence of their father, Abulafia I, Prophet and lately King of Palestein, in their most wretchedly obsequious idiom. A thousand apologies they say with their hands, a million of these tendering the most sincere of regrets, the other ups the ante, they’re not invited in. Die stands at the threshold sick. Keep your kopf together, he’s thinking, there’s a war on. Could I get a glass of water and an aspirin? Abulafia III asks, then spits like the Bactrian he’s importing for tandem competition; it’s waiting for him grazing on the tarmac at the aeroport in Ramallah. We’re not mercenaries he means, or not totally, II interrupts his brother’s dribbly reverie to say, scratching him to attention under his three days’ worth of stubble. Is it Shade? Die asks as if he didn’t know, him you’re afraid of, there are ways of dealing with him. It’s everybody, III says, alerted, who are we against them? Nobody, his brother answers for him, and so what should we do? Make as much profit as we can, III stares at Hamm passedout a soil on the carpet, reminds himself to have a talk with which numbered sister of his down in housekeeping, while we can, he means, his brother saves again, and then be gone, III finishes the thought to think no more, it hurts too much, cradles his chin as if to lull to sleep the vomit. What’s happening, what’s going on? Die’s asking on the return flight that afternoon, routed through Washington for a report back to Shade not just polite but required; he surges down the aisle, storms turbulence at the stewardess who’s headached Hamm in drag, half at least with the mini hat but without the miniskirt now that who can afford to keep a staff anymore. If I’m not for myself, who’ll be for me? But if I’m only for myself — futz me, I forget…forget it. Have the Hymies taken over? What’s wrong with a world that rejects its own Messiah — especially when He’s been positioned so well? Frontrow, seated on the aisle — asking, what kind of End Times are we living in, anyway?

«Apparatbedienung schloroformdämme rungsendfieberge spensterherr schaftsirrtumsjenseits krisenlähmung mißverständnisni chtungsoperationspanik quadraturenredestaubtä uschungsüber fallverrenkungswüs tenxmalypsilontenzeit«is just one possible diagnosis, though the other Doctor Tweiß (as they’re spelling it scharfed), as always, is inclined to disagree, pronounces it an» Anfangsbeiläufigkeit schemikaliendurs texistenzfurchtger innungshöllenirrs innsjämmerlich keitskrampfleidenmie nennormalität sopferpuppenqüt schungrandschicks alstraumübers teigerungsverbotswahn xbeliebigkeitsypsilotiezeit«boosts a book from the shelf not to consult, rather to set it under his sit. The former Head Psychoanalyst and Plastician to the nation, they’ve been stripped of their positions, laid naked under the dotted eyes of headlines (Mayor Meyer only acting on orders of, a favor asked by Shade who doesn’t do begging); they’re kissed off in miser fashion — with severance of either a few grand each, or a limb, it’s up to them — and soon find themselves without business, referralless as the Garden falls further from favor; smacked with suits, too, they’re being sued by anyone with a lawyer for an inlaw — that is, when they’re not formulating these absurd diagnoses for Die who, named in these suits civil and criminal both as an accessory, often as codefendant, three weeks before the anniversary of Xmas, two days late on the rent how he sells their offices out from under them, effectively banishing them to the burbs, without their receptionist, equipment, or files. They laze their days at home, then, faddishly nude atop their exercisemats on mornings when they do their calisthenics (magically Persian flyingcarpets when they’re high nights), over brunch following forging themselves prescriptions for drugs not yet invented: an insurance pill, an employment pill, a pill for debt reduction, utility assistance, you name, we’ll script it, whatever mishmashed medicament; talking over the paper every morning delivering reports just getting worse: all Unaffliated doctors are required to register at once with a new licensing committee (retesting), are forbidden from treating the Affiliated as of yesterday, have to stop in at an office and get themselves a routine shot, don’t ask, it’s all for your own good…how we promise, swear on our ethics and oaths — and then, buried in the backpages next to the classifieds they’ve been circling like buzzards (cash for gold; baggage handlers wanted, will train, shomer Shabbos req.), the casualties on all counts: “Sergei Shloshimvasheshky, 36, of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, was found dead yesterday in the East River. The cause of death is undetermined. Though relatives report that Reb Shloshimvasheshky had been despondent of late, police have not yet ruled out murder. ‘Having received no reports of anyone falling from any of our city’s bridges, which are under constant surveillance, I would hesitate to call this a suicide,’ said District Attorney E. Falsch Goldenberg at the City Hall press conference.” (Mayor Meyer standing behind him, on the dais, the altar of the rotunda, his hands on his shoulders, squeezing) do you hear this, are you listening, “At the time of his death, Reb Shloshimvasheshky was on leave without pay from Garden, Inc., having acted in the capacity of bodydouble for May His Name Remain Withheld for All Eternity, present whereabouts unknown. Reb Shloshimvasheshky is survived by his wife, Feyge-Kelly, and a daughter, TovaKristina, currently of Angels, Calif.” I told you, I so told you. “A member of Metropolitan Gestapo speaking on condition of anonymity has confirmed that this is the twelfth body to have been found in the East River and in Resistance subway tunnels during routine sweeps in the last moon alone, the victims all said to have been employed at various times by Garden, Inc., as doubles to the Unmentionable. Due to mutilation, however, the other eleven victims remain unidentified. The DA’s office awaits the results of a dental analysis…” and yadda and blah, the continual teethchatter — performed by anyone but the poor Doctors Tweiss, not quite forensic odontologists more like fake DDS’ though they need the work, God, by now they’ll take anything they can get: sinking gumlined and deeper into their dust habits, two grand per day’s what it kills them to get the stuff flown in from a supplier in Sephard, its corridor chaining through Palestein where — will you listen to this? “according to Reb Goldenberg, Esq., ‘unfortunately, it’s still too early to tell whether or not May His Name Fall from Your Mouth Like Teeth is among the dead…’” and, anyone with any information regarding anything is hereby urged to ponder the hassle involved with it all — now, we’ll open the floor up to questions…please, mind you don’t fall in.

O the rotted roots of the familytree, the strangling, twisty begats, begets, and begots that rot the tree from the roots on up, then the forest, too, every town, village, and Development surrounding: excommunication, it’s been argued if only recently, can become a form of purification, a manner of rebirth. And so now let us make our ways out onto the steep of His father’s branch, the strong and outstretched bough of the Unaffiliated, deepdrinking, stoutly trunked, thickskinned, and lasting — anything but the Garden’s withered, winterleafless barren chopped for coffinwork, abandoning Him to the elements without even the shadow of shelter. In this beginning, though, as in all of them, how it’d been shared, the roots or root, all stemmed from the same, seeded by the grave of an original fall…that of Adam, named so by He Who has no name and every one of them, also, according to many actually ninetynine of them that they all themselves name as One the ineffable, inextinguishable hundredth that Itself named Lilith to know her named and then, though only after this the first union or, say, marriage ended in what had to have been the first divorce, a great split of fire struck at the growth of the trunk — did he know an Eve, Hava her name was in the tongue with which he licked her and, too, named his other animals (snake, serpent, sidewinder, rattler), Eve who in her own way grew heavy with kind, meaning pregnant as opposed to fat and unattractively apple-shaped from overappleeating, brought to bear two sons one of whom killed the other it’s tragic I know, would rather not talk about it, you understand…and from then on throughout the halls of the house of David, which must have been manyroomed, sixfloor sixfigured expensive and held up under an enormous mortgage, the naming and knowing have been most commendably documented by either God the One and Only, or at the very least by Moses, if you want, or else by any other prophets you’d like to name who though they, too, like all of us had been present at Sinai, still only prophesized their knowing and naming of the past for the sake of future generations such as ours and amid them as well, living subsequent to the Law or their description of it and of its putative giving upon that mountain lost, all of them much more omniscient I’m sure than the mortal here, presently invoking their calling; passages becoming a bit circuitous then, windingly serpentine, fanglocked the doors along the hallways until we reach that sepulchral, chronically unfinished, basement-like abode of a mensch he’s named Jesus the son of Joseph and to many dead the son, too, of God the One and True: the room’s unkempt, sorry, actually messy, requiring duster and vacuum, a mother or whorish maid though Jesus He or he never knew anybody, apparently, knew in the knowing sense, I mean, reportedly never left his room, or it’d been rumored that he couldn’t make the payments, and that the bank it foreclosed on the House of his father, or fathers, or Father — and so where to wander now expelled, made homeless, prodigally estranged, and vilified, too, held in cruciform contempt upon the last standing beam grown out from under the mangered roof ’s collapse: to begin, then, again, or only to meddle around with the middle, ten generations later, if not fifty, or rather many many many more than all that, on what had been the coldest day on record that year, which was the year 1770something or other, perhaps, or possibly only those number of years before the birth of our B, upon which a peasant, endued dirtily in rags of skin, and with the head of an ox, three fingers on each hand and four toes on each foot, its loins, his, perpetually inflamed, rashyred with carbuncle and boil, set upon as if by a ghost, an apparitional superstition he claimed Baba Yaga or Rusalka, the Dziewanna who was Diana and her dogs if you want his name’s let’s say it’s Dziobak and he’s a priest, responsible in his district whose property boundaries and municipal borders have yet to be established for the establishment anyway of a standard depth of grave, who on this day was made a father through his rape of a woman named Tamar of a son named Jan who died along with his mother in birth and then through his rape of another Tamar who this one was married to a mensch Dziobak never thought to remember his name before he killed him then ate him, too, and then drank his wineblood and pickled for winter his brain, then fed the offal to his dogs he also raped and ate and whose blood he also drank was the made father of another son named Jan who he also died in birth but not his mother who, through yet another rape of her, which weakened her bruised, beaten, battered as she already was how Dziobak was made the father of yet another Jan during which birth this Tamar finally died, a Jan who was a daughter this once but was named Jan anyway because once you begin a thing (raping, murdering, naming) it’s famously hard to bring about an end to it, a daughter Jan who she verily seduced another Jan this Jan a priest himself, to sin, the fruit of which union were fraternal twins they went and named Slobomir, the boy, and Slutomira, the girl, and later also a daughter, and this one, if briefly, Dziobak’s wife, following nine moons later whom they abandoned upon her maturation to womanhood why, because one daughter, Slutomira, was already two too many, that and the scandal of her wifely rape by her father and then her abandonment by him and her mother and the unsettlingly rapid growth of her breasts and hips, a daughter who’d become adopted by a cowherd named Cowherd (Pasterz, like a pastor, if you’re interested, a herder of hefty flocks), a daughter found at the side of a road less a road than a mud through the fields who knew who owned them and why, whom he named Daughter as she was never named much by her own parents who’d known her by force, her father, then left her to fend for herself in the still of the night, Daughter (Córka) who would grow up and then into her hips and breasts only to become a premature widow without kinder, her husband name of M dying on the very night of their wedding from drinking homemade slivovitz brewed with consumption, before going on to marry another goy named let’s say for the sake of our argument Przybysaw who he would only one day after the consummation of their marriage be conscripted to die a solider but not in combat out in what once had been the pale of Prussia, fell upon by the horse he rode on away from the front deserting the very same day his wife back in it was then known as Polyn bore them their daughter whom she named all on her own because he wasn’t around anymore Adela, who you wouldn’t know it to pass her on horseback or run her down with your carriage on the mud of the street but she was two bits of what’s now called a nymphomaniac herself, then known as a Milkmaid, Bartender, or Chargirl or woman, who she verily bore a daughter whom she named Wanda by one of maybe ten Cossacks or so or their nine horses it’s up to you, nu vot, nichevo, returning to wherever they graze from Krapivno, Wanda who grew up to womanhood and then with her hips boxed amid a heap of excelsior that had been the kindling of her village burnt in a recent pogrom got out of hand with the cup of her breasts, too, properly crated though never insured, bought herself a ticket on only a smile and a passport she swallowed for and imported herself all alone Over Here, just in the nick of time to lose the affections and so sponsorship of this Italianate goy named Nick the Greek, short for Nikolas whom she’d met on the passage over in steerage in favor of yet another fellow immigrant or emigrant take your pick she’d met on the Island in quarantine, measles, this halfGerman, halfIrish, and entirely bisexual goy named he claimed it was true Richard John but that’s not the best part — Israelien, who he left her soon after on Orchard Street in New York City it was with a two day hotel bill and a three night bar tab for the daughter of an insurance salesmensch, a longtime American and yet also still scandalously Affiliated woman by the name of Rachel-Leah who she would later run away with a butcher’s son and his cart then owned by the butcher’s second I think she was wife, commonlaw it was called (which cart was before that the exclusive property of his first, who’d run away with the mailmensch for Missouri, where they opened a barbershop, in the back of a store selling Notions), ran away then with the only son of the Butcher of Bed-Stuy and with the son of Richard John Israelien growing inside her, born only after the butcher’s son was killed in a Brooklyn bar fight over the privilege of a coaster, perhaps, a son she named John Israelien Jr. whom she lived with in the cart she kept until the day John Israelien Jr. who was verily called J.J. if only by his halfsister, Mary her name was who was the daughter of the butcher’s son and Rachel-Leah who, he went and married a woman that she was named Deborah née we think Epstein, and supported her and them by working as a plumber while his wife this Dvorah, or maybe Deborah or Deb or else Debby who knows how it changed with her dresses she spent all his money on them, she traded plums for what she swore to him were only light favors, exchanges and the like, trades in kind, including which was a son maybe this J.J. gave her and maybe not (how it’s been argued, though only lately, and with the results of tests based conclusively on research no one’s at liberty to reveal, that the boy’s true father might have actually been this Leroy Goywhoremembers, of Astoria, Queens, whom Deborah she’d taken up with only one summer into their marriage after her plums had turned themselves shriveled, then tongue-dry, and so had to be traded as prunes — admitted to his apartment she didn’t even have a chance to lay out her wares on his kitchencounter before he laid her down on the livingroom floor and there had his way with her, knowing her and naming her whatever he’d moan: that’s what these people do, these goyim, understand: they lie with one another indiscriminately, and uncleanly, on floors that are filthy, unswept, unmopped), and so they whoever made a son together name of Isaac and known to us as PopPop, last name Israelien, later raised after J.J. left her barefoot, barestomached, and pregnant for a woman he’d often plumb, too, up at her home in the Bronx, this goy name of Martha who cares for her or what she was called by way of last names, by Deborah and a putz whom she hated but at least he provides, she’d always say Harry who was an electrician but without any electricity himself, it’s been said, that he was quiet and sullen, always at home with a beer and a ballgame, and humiliated, too, at her demanding and only in spite of him and all he felt for her and provided as well for her feet now slippered and her stomach now full though never with his seed but with his own homecooking that her son Isaac he keep the surname of his father, which was Israelien, PopPop and this we’re almost totally sure of who through His MomMom, one Beatrice Schmeatrice it’s not that important, only that it’s PopPop’s wife whom he met outside of a church of hers he’d often attend himself, if only for the free soup and crusts of bread they gave out and for the use of their bathrooms, they had a son themselves that they named him Israel, PopPop thinking the double naming humorous, iconoclastic, and MomMom, she didn’t have any say, it’s said, how they hardly ever talked, and how PopPop had anyway only promised to give her kinder in return for her silence, that around the house and also with regard to his true sexual orientation that was first and irrevocably ascertained at the age of eighteen with the help of a neighborhood priest, Israel their son the first of his kind to convert, then, and that without knowing much of his lineage beyond a generation at most, him the first ever to identify with Affiliation, without any governments or their militaries forcing him to, and all perhaps psychologically in light of a recent history that…to even love his own strangely intermixed, Atlantic watereddown Affiliation, embracing what he would grow to regard as his birthright, as the Cain do, Abelbodied mark of a worldly American with firm roots deep in the earth, a love’s growth filial and strong no doubt stemming as well, as a fruit from a branch from a bough from a tree airing his feelings for a woman that she had the name Hanna he married and impregnated only one day and ten loans out of lawschool and his admittance to the bar not a week or so later, Hanna née Senior her maiden name was though soon better known as the mother of B, the thirteenth of her kinder all of them girls with the exception of Him, the salvific last a boy they named Benjamin and whom we must refer to now by His initial on the advice of our counsel — Ben He once was known as, meaning: A son, originally named after a relative that just had to be maternal, and that only after protracted debate unto sleeplessness and the midnight making, morningside remaking of lists they in their various nervousness, his, and her predisposition for order, neurotic, went and arranged alphabetically, though listing for themselves only the names of females, girls for the girl they’d been expecting as of daughters they’d already had twelve:

MALKA (queen),

MAVA (pleasant),

MIRI (bitter),

------------------ MENACHEMA

(consolation)???

MIRIAM, (rebellious);

this, the degeneration of the degenerations of one Benjamin BLANK, as provisionally assembled from an extensive trove of scholarly materials only last quarter discovered amid collections charred, basemented, of Siburban attics both sacred, profane — both previously classified and heretofore outright outclassed: Rabbi Doctor Karol Hushner PhD’s estimable summary of the entire Nachlass of Doctor Elisha Abuya (Ethica Semitica), comprising a small, eminently portable volume whose covers — as do its Subjects — branch themselves out into innumerably leafy later editions, supplanted in terms of comprehensiveness if not in that of readability by the multiedited, multiauthored, multivolume (7) opus Tractatus Neohebraicus, representing the unrivaled summation of all Affiliated thought (indeed, the acknowledged precursor to all future scholarship in the field, it’s suggested in passim), with emphasis placed on parallels manifest between religious ritual and trends within then contemporary culture (invaluable Notes & Postface provided by one Rav Yossi Letushkin). Also might we mention to you our vast selection of surviving incanabula — for esoteric, press #1, for exoteric, press #2—which we are only now prepared to make available in handsome reproduction for the edification of the general public (lacunæ not included, pericope upon request): the Steinstein Agrapha fragments, Poxy 48a, and the Q documents, GMy1, 2, and the Rubina Pseudoepigraphia, this remaining Oxyrhynchiana going on sale now and for the lowlow price of only 99.99 NS (New Shekels; note: B Notes no longer accepted), supplies are limited, operators are standing by the banks of the Jordan reclaimed. And these are the degenerations of the degenerations of the degenerations of one Mister Benjamin Blank: witness the destruction ignobly ordered of the entire Garden Archive, whose hold had been rumored to include a Rothschild’s richesse of firsthand accounts, along with a Warburgian wealth of secondary source documentation, an Oppenheimerian fortune of footage: thousands of hours of recorded interview with many of the Subject’s intimates, culled from hundreds of appearances in tens of media outlets; at the heart of this estimable body of record since lost, once lying in reels that would seem the tombs of instantly resurrectable corpus — pull the blinds, flick the breath, it’s alive — at least threehundred sixtyfive (365) films dealing with the unspeakable Subject Itself, including: Israel’s Home Movies (Beta II, Beta III, VHS, DVD, SPECIFY FORMAT), professionally recorded simchas shredded, Garden surveillance torched…and an excellent selection of those legendarily forgotten Holywood epics, never to be screened for our patience again: The Making of a Messiah (5760), Live in Los Siegeles (5760), The Making of the Making of a Messiah (5760), Pope for a Year (5760), Joysey Girl (5760)…

But we haven’t mentioned her much, have we — allow us to rectify. Her name was Rubina, and she was the true Israelien firstborn, though a girl, a woman almost, the guardian of their blood and its cause. As if Him developed in opposite, His other half…the mirror that was once in the hall that was then moved into her room to be her mirror while a new mirror was bought for the hall: she was reflective, was it…slim, tall, and silent (reedy, it could be said, but should anyone resemble a reed?), in appearance as neat and orderly as her room, which for those eight days during which they shared the earth together and its house thereupon was B’s obsession. A room fluffed of all pillow, or so it’d felt — hers the one room topside He’d avoid in His house removed to the Garden as if a reflection of the basement below: any sleep there was troubled, nightmares whoever remembered anything but their fright, tumblingly tear the sheets from the bed, highly threadcounted to lull and then…held taut, a white that was tight and yet soft, welcoming to fall asleep and yet, a terror to dream: that wasn’t for Him, the room was too virginally pure, as if carpeted by snow underfoot so undisturbed He wants to fly out the window she’d gaze through toward the tree in the yard, not step down to stay and admire its shade. And she, too, was soft, that once she held Him on the recline of that eighth day home from the hospital with Hanna asleep upstairs-upstairs, them in the kitchen, Him gathered hulkingly into her lap, the folds of her skirt, as if cleavage Himself, or a still bumptious pregnancy — but she was still a virgin, wasn’t she, never known…her hips in motherly sit becoming her waist becoming her breasts two of them both severe and knifelike, He’d cried when they wouldn’t milk, pricked His lips, then how she let go, too heavy, too huge — then went to gather Him up again, tried to but couldn’t, pale, unforgiving: the cries she ignored as she felt hers were ignored always and still, leaving Him alone on the floor for her room. Of the wrong sex for inheritance, birthed carelessly to the wrong, engendered only to lose…Rubina would pass with the rest, to the sleep she so desperately needed. Hanna, jealous of her youth. As for Israel, he wouldn’t touch her anymore. Years since menarche. That and the three of them hardly talked ever since she got her license for her own car, too, with her college acceptance, Dear Rubina Israelien, We are pleased to inform you that…she was to leave soon enough, the house, the hearth if they’d had one that worked; the pillows, stuffed full with room. Freedom, she thought. Real life…not to be.

As for her name, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel or Leah — they’d decided early on Rubina, and so beginning the cycle of resurrecting the dead, as if a Messiah’s remaking: her named after Reuben, though his name was Reuven, her mother’s side her greatuncle, never knew him, you never do if you have their name’s how it is, how they always die before you’re ever born to their calling. She has his lips, too (erogenously rued); it’s awful, you give someone a name after another, suddenly that someone has another’s lips and eyes (hyperthyroidal, exophthalmic), her nose, or hair. How that last Shabbos’ night she’s left alone if still, distantly, ghostingly, mothered at the table already emptied and even sponged in the diningroom, the tableroom, the we sit and eat and drink here and be a family sustaining ourselves altogether here room, sitting at the place at which she always sat, facing Hanna now resting herself upstairs to the left of her father gone, too. Then the boy, Benjamin’s His name’s what she knows not His namesake. All’s cleared, except her bowl of soup, lentil, taken with a large dose of salt. The warmth had left, her and the soup unspooned. Upstairs-upstairs, the pillows were waiting, holding her form.

Eat your soup! Hanna’d said, you eat nothing, I want you to eat up, I need you to do it for me…two spoonfuls, at least one or a half, you’re old enough for me not to have to — should I heat it up?

And how Rubina a little late to mature begins crying again, seasoning the soup already, I’m sorry, she’s not, just a pinch overseasoned, doubledipped, too, with a lapse of the pepper when Hanna was called to the phone.

Israel again — again late.

You, you’re as thin as a snake…I’m asking you to eatup, please, a something, just a little something, for me I’m your mother, but nothing. As if too tired to hold even her spoon’s silver, its bowl weighed down by only the light it scoops from a far sconce, she’s exhausted, with no expression of response, then, thrusting the white of her wrists out, her pure upturned hands, she rises from the table, walks to the hall, seemingly somnambulant (her face fine and un-lined, slenderwaisted nose, greatuncle lips though that mensch, he was actively sensuous, loved him his women and girls and his food and drink, and her introverted ringlets of hair, corkscrewy enough to take up a tangle of it with which to open a bottle of wine), up the stairs to her room, which she enters with feathersteps, then lies down: enters not through her door, as there’s no door to her room, it’s just curtained, and the old curtain from the shower downstairs the stronger defense, against what — Israel having hung it in punishment after Josephine had found her inhaling inside, smoking what; her form as if gusted, through the hallway and into the sheer, and then through it, oneirically, in a gauzy meld (at least that’s how it’s been filmed, softfocus, soundtracked with an orchestra of strings divided more than could be any family, tribe, or her nation), disappears into sleep, fade to black: despite or perhaps thanks to such state, which is medicated to numb — generically zaleplon, with zolpidem occasionally mixed — to share her angels as if these halved wingless pills offered in return for fast friendship with Lilith, the Mother of Night, to hold wild heavens of sleepovers, gossiping over junk manna until dawn upon the winds of the harp. Rubina had had it all, had possessed the stuff in the veins, the life and its generational furtherance — all the living branches of our bodied tree, veined out from her heart to the tips of her fingers and the pleasurable bud between her thighs and her toes: it’s that she could’ve engendered, barring the effects of an unfortunate endometriosis — and maybe that’s why she slept so much, always tired…that’s what the doctors decided, not depression or smoking or drugs or the college degrees her car required or whatever else the shrinks shrank from her, the pulse always in her protuberant eyes and the burnt broken wing of her mouth — but sensing that she was of no use, perhaps knowing this only on her last night as if it were a void just discovered within her in bed and about to sleep for her last, found deep in her womb as a hunger, a lower thirst, having hidden to maturity in a hollow, the death grown bare, her barren. Ours will be the world of the bloodless. Ours is the world of no claim.

Why is that this time of year would be family, would’ve been, the holidays and their own familiar family that once a year and every year subsume our own and lesser, ingathering the schedule: All who art offering us seats at their table, which is always longer and wider than any of ours and, too, with leaves that extend so far and almost irretrievably out as to accommodate people who yearly are strangers to us and who not only look like us but also think like us and how they even like the same foods as us and have brought the flowers and wine — all that essing and fressing from Sukkot on down to Simchat Torah, that indulgence we then work off our waists and our hippyhips with a dance, the hop hop then smack smack of our palms, their fronds, against the face of the moon waxing gluttonous, eight days fattened from its new…this they have to know, not to understand, just to know: the ritual, the life that was Tishrei or is, the first of the months begun over again, after a year spent intertestamentary — sit down, have a seat, I’ll tell you what, you can even keep it, it’s yours, we have many more like it, and who knows if there’ll ever be other guests; a cycle ending with the month known as Elul only to begin again with I think Nisan, not sure, it’s been too long this forever; this year every year, this life every life, for immemorial made of lists and threats, impulsive shopping; the months made moons to wane away the time, the set then rise of coming sun whenever least convenient…Hanna lowering herself exhausted deeply and demonstrative into a chair, mundane, there at the kitchentable, profane, on the first regular old nonholiday, nonsacred autumn afternoon that’s fallen after everything, after the New Year with its ten days tonguing away at Yom Kipper’s privation, Yom-Keep-Poor then Sukkot the holiday of festive gathering outside in the sukkah under the harvest of stars, the dancing again and the singing observed what with the Torah then all over again and then, weekday, no day at all, at least nothing special, and, if just for a moment — there’s nothing…nothing to prepare, nothing to do, nothing expected of her and, too, nothing to observe for herself or her others save this immaculately slow slow lowering of her spine into that everyday chair in that brunchdrunk, salt-shaky kitchen over which she sweeps back the hair and the wig, a breath, mops brow, a moment only of exasperated existence then, what do you know, it’s the Sabbath again, Shabbos again, who has a choice, is what she’s thinking, who can choose or would want to: ticked time to prepare again, tocked to slave, to suckle; there’s so much to do, and so much less time is what the clockface questions: to bake or not to bake, chicken; Simone needs you to sign a form allowing her to attend a trip to a museum; Liv wants you to sign a test an A in history why not an A plus, she’s asking; no time for scolding pride though as Judith, hymn, she has this little seepy weepy problem that she’s locked herself alone with in the bathroom; blood, I’m scared, what is it, Ima, what’s happening to me…it’s a boy.

An emptiness, the Shabbos of a school not just off or out of session for the day or holiday but abandoned…B busts the locks then barges through the chill, seeking only shelter: an empty class. It’s just down West 90th, a girl’s school without girls or anyone; poshish, tony, the first school Rubina had ever attended, though through kindergarten only: she’d been an only daughter for a year before Simone was born, she’d been a citygirl, for six snobbed years before Liv ever joined them and made them sisters more than just to one another — then they moved down to Joysey together, way before the days of the house and the lawn and the basement and the twocar commute. Simone and Liv and the rest unborn had been too young for anything, though, and had stayed at home and unmade, but Rubina — this had been her world five days a week, fullday. Too huge to fit behind a student’s desk He destroys to splinters, He sits atop the teacher’s for a rest.

To think: this is what it would’ve been like to live in a city, to be native to this shtus, at home here, a life lived quick and quickly wise…how this is where He would’ve gone to school, too, to yeshiva, though in the boy’s wing, which is just next door, life’s always just next door, He’s thinking — had what happened never happened, that is, had we never moved out and then, died. A mind denied Him — this school the repository of yet another inheritance deferred. The shelves are empty of books, bookended loss; it’s dark in here, better not to tempt the fluorescents — the sweep of the floor, its pencil shavings, chalk remains from the happy clap of appreciative erasers smeared into the spirals of shoes out on permanent recess, their tag you’re it, and skip and jump. Dust gathered thickly on the scarred faces of desks, chewing gum’s wadded on the plastic panels of the ceiling gnawed with wet, snapped pointers heaped at the radiator as kindling, an old flag hanging in flags, a globe’s smashed in, world flattened; calendars fade into maps, so tired, the round white eye of the clock’s shut stopped; there are charts here and there are graphs and there are trees here, a mess of corkboard herald, pushpin fame, gold stars spangle the wall, they fall from their walls from up high near the waterlogged ceiling, below the paper trim that scrolls out the math and the alphabets: A a, B b, C c…B turns His head to follow the tongue of paper around and around, tongueless trying to sound its letters out now, right to left, Aleph, Bet, the latter the letter that begins His own name, ending in a grunt — call me that…in His turn facing front again, to take in the tablet before Him.

A chalkboard, effaced in clouds to bear heavy weather over the metal of its lower lip, hosting in the beveled curl its scowl, a single wisp of chalk — but no eraser. A blackboard scarred in white, balmed with the puff of gray clouds at its margins, wiped into winter at its center by a palm licked slick, dispersed with the tail of a coat, dispelled with a flick of the cuff: its surface entire a great whirlwind of days, of weeks, or moons, their record scribbled, rescribbled, worn, scrawled into palimpsest then rubbed thin to a unity, dappled pure, this sky streaked light over dark. He jumps from the teacher’s desk to stand, to grab at the chink of chalk. Then, with a fierce stub thrust, He rips the board from the wall; flaking plaster, screws stripped from wood on brick, it comes off in His hands. He ties it around His neck with a ripped stripe of the flag He halves, tying with the more modest fray the wisp of chalk to a boardtop eyelet: leaving the classroom, then the school itself, heading out into the interpreting world, stilled in Shabbos silence. B spits on a finger to erase, a clean slate, saliva daubed with blood. A thumbprint’s trace. Upsidedown, it doesn’t matter…I will write myself.

The sightings taper off to a worm. People have other appetites now…and even the most recent pilgrims, thanatopsical tourists with serious possibly illegitimate income to dispose of packagedin from Hotzeplotz to here, to Miami, their reservations made moons ago, nonrefundable deposits put down, to pay admission as much as their homage at the refurbished sites — nu, even they’re reluctant to make the trip and, if they do, just think of the money they’d lose, then they never purchase souvenirs for anyone of any relation more distant than that of a mother or wife, even splurge on dessert at the still swanky yet woefully understaffed Restaurant Under the Sign of the Imperfectly Toned Pectorals, at which establishment an Oriental tourist of the name Jacob-san, after having waited for over an hour for his order to be taken, then forgotten, then taken again, excuses himself in advance of any question to the paunch of mensch dining at a neighboring table, then asks him in a perfectly unaccented phrasebook grunt what the guidebook has thought fit to omit…ach, what in hell does the name Miami actually mean?

And the mensch, up for either Freeholder or Freeloader your choice with two sides potato and greens he ashes his cigar on the wall-to-wall, answers the tourist fanged through the tines of his fork that Miami, that’s just old Injun talk, means only Miami, thank you, it’s appreciated, forget it, don’t mention and returns to his brisket they call it secretrecipe, really choppedsteak marketprice-gouged. Jacob-san tucks his napkin under the straps of his photo and video equipment just as, a miracle, his order arrives, miraculous, too, that the kitchen’s made no mistake: it’s the house specialty, a heaping portion as prepared in the spirit of the old Gospel of Lukewarm, an oftrecommended, incomparably of the moment, most artistic and between you and me delectably profitable selection of savory: the Garnish Plate, which is a dish of horseradish, roots only, each of which’s gotten sliced into the face of a panoply of public figures lately vilified (and accompanied by an indifferent dipping sauce, pareve), as featured, in order alephbetical, on the last page of the menu above the reddened white of the winelist discontinued. Jacob-san forks into their version of the Pope, Pius Zeppelini da Foist newly displaced, become an encyclic salesmensch some joke and it is, a lifeguard to the canals of the ghetto at Venice others might laugh, whatever the giggly rumor no longer in favor despite his conversion, which was only lipservice, most think, suspected reversion, a cryptogoy (according to sources formerly of the dissolved Washington nunciature, Shade had offered a deal, either accept a God without a son or face, or face that son disinherited’s death); he foists the root onto his tongue, keeps his mouth shut about it, masticates thoughtfully.

In New York, where Jacob-san’s due next week if the itinerary’s subject to no change or lastminute holiday cancellation let’s hope to take in the lower eastern remnants of all’s usurped birthright, they’re only a step ahead of the (expected, please) throngs, out erecting Affiliated Monuments out of almost any tenemental, slumlordabove wreck: dedicating plaques, plinths, and statues (replica souvenir statuettes to be made available posthaste, bobbleheaded, skinchangeable, they’re just waiting for the shipments to arrive from the overseas shvitzshops this Jacob-san’s brother helps to manage back home), just a moment before any line should begin to form east from Broadway: an experience in the finding of unfounded memory, an only knocks once opportunity this, to be ingathered again, to become disembarked upon whatever passes for diaspora nowadays, onto this Island offIsland, as were their now again assimilated forefathers way back when, here to wander map in hand and foot in mouth the Heritage Trail, its serpentine ways, alleys and streets, avenues and drives — snakeskin cobblestoned, coldblooded paved, then graved over in an asphalt currently being torn up all over town — of a heritage just about everyone claims nowadays on penalty of, like how not to…to follow the trail of the crumbling bread even the crows won’t peck at, or whatever else that intermittently winding substance our most observant of streetschleppers and sweepers’ve been noticing lately, it’s worrying — though just short of them filing an official report, those dashes and dots of drip dropped up and Downtown this lonesome stretch of barrengardened, coldflat Orchard Street: a secret message of what, encrypted for whom. Anyway, is it even Orchard Street…isn’t it maybe Grand, or Delancey I’m crossing, Division dividing Essex or Essen, hesternal Hester heading western to where, I don’t know, no street numbers I’m seeing, O show me the signs — Second Avenue I know at least, I see they’ve renamed it Avenue Bet, First Avenue, Aleph, I get it, nu, I can count, but this is easier than ever, and southward unceased…who’s been down here before who’s native, who knew, who could ever hope to? Not Him from Siburbia, not used to such mess made of grid, such rank dissolution of order. He retraces steps, trails His own trail, how to get out and where to, wandering amid His own waste, wallowing amidst His own slime, the prints of His shoes swirling His progress He loops up then around, lost again, looks around. He’s lost sight of the skyscrapers Uptown — landmarks, occidental enough, when what He requires is an orientation. Where was that knishery my Aba had loved, that place he’d mentioned once to Ima how he’d go entire blocks out of his way just for their shtikel a pickle? Their bagels, bialys? Anyone who wants to find Him has only to follow His loss, the drop of His drip. Mine. That’s how I find myself, here.

B’s begun trailing this slime behind Him — it might’ve been something He ate, some’ve suggested, a schmear gone wrong: just the last day or so, a viscous and humiliate secretion. He hasn’t yet been to the doctor about it, why, too many conditions to consult, who would treat Him and live, after all, who can trust them, and who’ll pay the bill — this perhaps the relapse of a familiar syndrome, yet again returning familiarly, Tweiss shy: with etiology merely another waitingroom for those with more time than pain, them and the already eulogized, too, in short, the headshrunk, it’s a latent fear of diagnosis He’s suffering from, a fear of treatment, if you want, the generic idiopathic, and sticky, stinging on its way trickling out; this slime, His trail, the solution He’s marking out from the swell of His rear. Once it leaves Him, slowly gloats down His legs then out their pants to meet the pant of the air, it tints a Radzyn royal blue, with a fading hint of Tyrian purple, reflected in the rear of the clouds below the tush of the sun: it’s the shade of techeles, that’s the term in the new language old, apparently a substance the rabbis once lived to leech, a dye obtainable only, it’d been thought, from the hypobranchial gland of the ancient Murex trunculus, dug from that highspired, whorled shell of the snail He appears to have turned into; Him mated with some seep of truculent slug a moon matured from estivation, the dwelled shell atop His back as if a worried hump, a hidden house of burden, with which to wander in search of home, in homing seek of search, all the while His true home just behind Him, if only He could turn; or maybe, as others have said, mystics and their interpreters as argaman in the face in argument as the substance He’s secreting, it’s that upon His return He’s gone the faller, and tumbled hard, into the possession of an angry purple dybbuk, a previously unclassified yet malevolent species of porphira: trailing His wander to stain the pavement in indigo at dusk, dibromoindigo lightening as dusk later turns to light, at dawn. Don’t misrepresent with misheberach, B seems to be seething a substance so supernatural that it’s only later identified, by many amateurs since experted, as that invaluable mediating enzyme known to us as purpurase, the active ingredient of that regal shade so valued by the Romans, and long sought after by our rabbis and us their students, too, scavenging at seaside for any shell washed up from the hoarding of the Flood, and further, less secret: by innumerbably unregenerate generations of the postdiluvian inilluminated, who would use the dark to dye the knotted fringes on what many would have known as a scapular, a lesser lighter shell to be borne by the body, over the skin, with an aperture here, too, but now cut through its very center, to accommodate the swell of a reverent head whose lips would kiss the fringing knots throughout the balming bind of prayer. To today’s observance, however, they’re known as tzitzit — the thin skin a grandfather would keep hidden under the black of his caftan.

Wholly psychosomatic, thinking it’ll go away on its own, just as its onset manifested, that He’ll survive this, too, as down Orchard Street He slips on His own looping, from Uptown, backtracked and without bearings as if to break His back here — slimed on His own slip of street on barren, citified Orchard slipping itself from gutter to sewer — shelled unsteadily and so goes groping for any hydrant, a lamppost or parkingmeter not yet uprooted, them or the root of a passerby, the tap of a cane topped in jade. Anything to stay balanced, the stayed course of the upright, not this wavering and wobbly, but there’s none, and so falls again, atop what He’s stood for, facefirst and onto the sidewalk outside this last open franchise, an Oriental restaurant that’s wondrously still lit. This the last late encroaching of those other eastern emigrants and open late, their sweet restaurant on this side of the street, the sour until last week had been serving on the other, the west: this storefront pagoda shooting stilled like a firework frozen in an ascent into air, the space a hexagonal vault of bells, carved flowers, and honeycombed shrines, fired tiers high from the mediating serenity of a garden of rock. The sidewalk B falls on has been starred, shined through with what seems like the least of the firmament; on the way down, He recognizes no names…apparently, this whole block has yet to be graven over, is handprinted still and signed by the ostensibly famous: older names, PopPop if anyone would’ve known; their autographs lasting longer in cement underfoot than the memory of their signatories in the world. Only a block north the concrete’s pouring wet from recent renovation: since Affiliation, Mayor Meyer’s been obsessed with bringing the old neighborhood up to code. And famous or not, what’s remained proves welcoming to such an accident of talent, since His prints are now pressed there alongside those of handfuls of others, His life palmedoff on posterity, hardening: a hand thrown in front of Him, His face, to still the hurt of His fall, extending a finger, too, and with an outgrown nail attempting to sign guess which of His initials, an ideogram, a sigil…and just then, one slash before that letter can be completed, a to share portion of cummerbunded waiters, some from column A, their bowties tied, others from His own column B, theirs loosened like lips, scuttle out to help, gesticulating placidly that for them is wild, excusing themselves hoarse in a mothering of all tongues.

Above their uniforms, which are tuxedos, they’re turned out in yarmulkes; they’ve grown silken beards to complement their payos, like thin and greasy noodles: it’s as if they’ve been waiting to wait upon an opportunity such as this, any service that might serve them a customer, any customer as they’re always right, as is the custom of their abject gratuity; as the evening’s third and last seating has long turned over (the earlybird special tonight was young Szechuan duck, which’ll find its way into tomorrow’s soup), and since then they’ve been bored, staring their slits at the blank quartz clock over the desk of the cashier; sitting at twotops after having finished their own meals as their fortunes have finished them, unsettlingly sated and tired with little or nothing left to do: some smoke opium from pipes as long as nightmare, extensive stems of bamboo, fitted for the drug with the bowls they’d use for tea or rice; others toke hashish imported from Palestein, rolled tightly in their surplus of outdated menus: with their slick, quick tongues they lick to let the bones burn slower; then flick their ash at the murmur of the fountain, its pool lined in plaster stones and shards of broken china, pennies without wish; a few play dead with those delicious porcelain dogs: fetch the chopstick isn’t working. In the kitchen, busgoys wash to their wrists, then rub the Buddha’s belly for luck with the nightly splitting of their tips: wishful thinking, they’re lucky to still have any hands to wait on. The last few straggling regulars having unfurled their fortunes as wide and as whitepure as napkins with which to wipe their lips, then scurried out the door, with menus held over their faces, praying to avoid the eyes of their employers’ spies, their family’s informants. What’s more, the latenight takeout rush hasn’t delivered on any hope of late, not fast enough at least, ever since this block went and zoned itself for imminent conversion; it’s natural, where more Affiliated than here, their historic home, once upon a time. The new laws aren’t the problem, though, not their most pressing (hahaha: a few of the waiters are planning to open a laundry), it’s inadvertent, effect — it’s business, it’s cash. And the intolerance, the discrimination, terrorism even: a week ago — and this after a moon of threats from who exactly you think they’re dumb enough to name; they’d run up a tab, then walked them through how it was going to go down — their windows’d been smashed in and so they had to shutter their other place, sell off the appliances for scrap as it was all already treyfed up, porktainted. Trash had been set on fire. A waiter smacked around. Another week as empty as this and they’ll have to go kosher or else, shut it down.

Excited, apologetic (don’t they recognize Him, how could they; they’re not allowed to, and anyway, that’s another’s ghetto), with an entire menu’s worth of the derisive servile, the whole industry’s trade of humble bows and modest blinks, the waiters serve Him warm inside. The youngest busgoy, hoping to make cashier or heaven by dint of his good deeds, dashes out again to retrieve the half left of B’s blackboard, a chipped length remaining from His chalk. His slime to stain the doorjamb, Him to track His incoherent trail atop their priceless rugs, dizzying in their symmetry, in the intricate integrity of their patterns; to destroy, then, their wonder in the wander of His mad — don’t worry, they assure Him, it’s fine by them, they were thinking of remodeling. In fluent Affiliated accent they insist on messaging His wife, on phoning His son or daughter, that they should pick Him up. Have a meal here, or three. Halfoff, or that of two for one. How nextdoor, too, there’s this shvitzbad staffed by nominal Slavs: present them with your check and they’ll beat your back with tiny trees at cost. He rises from the chair where He’d been seated, goes to retrieve from the table adjacent that sharp shard of board and hint of chalk.

I have none, I write.

No wife? they ask.

Just me.

What’s He waiting for they want to know — us, too.

Dim Sum, the maître d’, the only one with a black cummerbund (all the others are in red), and matching vest shiny with appetites of wear, disappears into the kitchen, returns with a pot steaming, then with three fingers holds open His mouth and shut His nose to ply Him with the potion, pours cup after scalding, soured cup down B’s throat, says, Swarrow!

As if to say, thisee will’a help you…one Wan Lo takes it upon himself to finish the sentiment: it should stop the dlopping, then bows wan and low to his boss and guest.

All He can think to thank them with’s an old joke, that Taste my soup! routine…remembering, though, that nothing’s ever funny when you have to spell it out, screeching chalk on board.

One hundred apologies, Dim Sum says, but this will not help stop His dlopping…

What? which B, His board cleared for the pot, spells atop the table in an artful arrangement of six pairs of chopsticks.

What I meant to say was dlipping, answers Wan Lo, dlipping, you must excuse me both.

B has to struggle to keep down the last cup of the cure.

Dislespectfur, Dim Sum whispers, while Wan Lo does his patient waiting standing tableside, what professional effort to appease.

One million pardons, he then says to B or another does and He can’t tell, not because He’s racist but laughing — what we’re talking about’s the Srime…

O, the slime! and nods His head along with His laughter to make known His gratitude, as if to say no hard feelings, get used to it, from a mensch like me you might expect such disrespect, and with each of His nods the also funny taste of the proffered potion rises within Him, up from His stomach, His throat, rather the taste of its taste, the idea of it only, its texture homemade, a hot, thickskinned homeopathological grime — that’s about the best you can hope for when you can’t tongue to tell, which is the worst of it: that lately I don’t partake to enjoy, only to fill, and with me full is never. You honor us with your presence, they say, then bring Him out a heaping bowl of this morning’s leftover lo mein. He makes to stab at the writhing noodles with, after their last pair of chopsticks splinters in His hand, a dull fork they manage to find Him: it’d been locked in the lowermost drawer in the desk in the manager’s office forever, umfarshemt. He’s slurping, sucking, making every noise known to consumption save chewing; without a tongue to offer the meal to the teeth, He swallows most everything whole. With the last served shred of a miscellaneous meatstuff, its gnarled and gritty suspect heavily dusted with a powder of glistening white, fine pure MSG, which the chef out of boredom’s been fermenting for a moon in a trashcan in the alley out back — with such a tough and darkened cut, anisodactyl, the foot of a bird, He counts the taloned toes, perhaps of one of the pigeons that arrive fresh daily from traps nestled amongst the trees of local parks — with such prey presently hanging tined at B’s pouting lips, Dim Sum, the one sitting opposite Him (He’s trying to remember who might be who, or Woo), stares Him in the eye, holds His gaze, then begins to talk in a voice that burbles celestially high, sounding to Him just like frying; he can’t help himself: his bowtie finally loosened, he hands it to Him as a napkin as if proclaiming their peace, then begins:

I was in business, he says as B wings away at the birdgrease on His lips…had gone into business with my Blothel-in-Raw: this was our first restaurant, before I moved the family Downtown — a pack of heads nod in encouragement, interest, or in rhythm to the surge of the pipa music, the pentatonic plinking coming over the speakers, hidden to soothe their sound inside the restaurant’s worthless collection of facsimile vases…Blothel-in-Raw brought up on charges of sodomy, and with an inspector from the Depaltment of Hearth; here his cousin Woo, nu, that’s who just has to cut in: this lady had come to inspect, great body no brains, didn’t expect to be inspected herself, it was rape, simple enough, then attempting to bribe with counterfeit money the arresting officer of the Raw — though with our old landlord’s recommendation of the right lawyer his son, Dim Sum goes on, he managed to do right by the judge, at least that’s what I was told, and the waiters spit twice, at the same time and on their own floor, their saliva angry or just darkened with soy. Wan Lo rises from his seat slowly, smoothes down his tux shirt, pauses to reposit a stud, adjust the lotus in his lapel, then walks stately waiter to the front of the room and behind the cashier’s desk, at which he gathers the slack of his pants, squats, balancing on the balls of his feet to rummage around shortorder, and maybe just for ritual, for exotic effect, then returns to table with a box carried under his arm: done in bone with a bamboo handle, and inlaid with moons waxing and waning in chalcedony set amid skies of brass kept lovingly polished, its horn mingg striped in onyx, it’s gorgeous, waiters who haven’t worked here long enough are cowed, even back home they’d never seen anything like it. It’s not for them, though; they’re supposed to be working: it’s intended as distraction for their womenfolk, who’ve just emerged giggles and elbows in ribs from the kitchen; here to steal a slit of eye at their arrival, the contents of this box are hoped to keep them from undue flirtation. Unseemly, illegal. Wait, Dim Sum says, pay attention…that’s not the half of it: nu, so my Blothel-in-Raw, a failed furrier, you know, Woo feels it justified to explain as if to a mystified Him, the mensch who he makes the coats and hats and supplied for us our meat…Dim Sum’s irritated by the interruptions but it’s too late and his restaurant’s too doomed to pull rank when the door says push and don’t let it hit you on the way out, the schmuck he went and burned down the place for the insurance — makes you think, doesn’t it, says Woo’s brother who he’s named Woo, too, though what right does he have to say anything being only a junior busgoy (Wan Lo, an elder, he grumbles), makes you think of what he might do now that the schmuck’s out, free and converted; the waiters listening in as the hostess, the cashier girl and two more from the cleaning service how they might be their sisters or even twins to each other, you think, have already begun with their play. In a world of olden pleasures revived, theirs has among the most ancient of origins — yichus, of a type. Think of it like mystical rummy: but instead of cards, this pursuit makes use of tiles, onehundred thirtysix of them, gematric with meaning, symbolized with dragons, flowers, seasons, and winds stilled in suits, in dots, craks, and bams, if you’re following, numbered up to nine. What else for this refresher? As in life, here, too, what you discard is as valuable as anything you keep. Mahjong.

Dim Sum shrugs as he says over the hilarity from the front, this is my life…and Wan Lo adds, won’t you please forgive him?

My Blothel-in-Raw, they sentenced him to eight to ten — he served only five for good behavior. He’s on the outside now, rehabilitated he says, living again with my sister, their how you say…kinder — by now (late, almost time to close forever) even the old chef, alright already, so less a chef than a cook, with a tattooed Buddhabody under a cloudy toque and a head whose face is weighed down and almost permanently soured by this seriously octopusal Fu-Man-Shu, also he knows his way around a knife to make a little extra money down Pell Street and environs, better not to ask: he’s come out from the back to listen, peering behind him another busgoy, this a trainee mensch who’ll within a week get promoted to the position of Mashgiach though without a raise in pay, the future manager of kashrut for this restaurant after its brief closing, its rushed reform then the mandate of inspection — and the requisite bribes, a bissel of grease, dumplings’ schmaltz — his name to be made the Honorable Rabbi Shimi-Li Dong, at least according to the certificate to be notarized by the not yet ordained other senior busgoy (but first, promoting himself to busboychick), the future Reb Boaz ben Wa, framed to hang lopsided on a wall of the kitchen, threatening to fall into the boil of any black pot: kashrut reform, and attendant refinancing, to be organized by this most obliging of Blothels-in-Raw, just out of prison, just returned into the soup, the stir, Dim Sum up until the very night of their successful grand reopening (Thursday) to be suspect, and can you blame him, expecting the alarms and their flames to be scheduled for the late eve of that next Shabbos or so, to get the firedepartment and police off their guard. This morning, he says, he sent me a telegram, says he’s coming down for a visit, that he wants to reconcile, is bringing the family, says he’s an allnew mensch, remade, that I’d be proud, prisonreformed with him converted and even circumcised, can you believe, and that he’s inherited a little money, too, like guess who’s got this great idea, and all he needs is a partner.

He’s hurt me before, but I love him, I have to, he’s family…

I pray, and here he raises his head to B to stare Him in the mouth, that your arrival will be for me as a blessing.

That you, Wan Lo goes on, have already brought us luck.

Not that we’re being nice to you just for profit, God forbid. Though profit wouldn’t hurt. Two or three of the who knows how many, if illegally, uniform the waitstaff here, they raise their heads to Him then sigh, let their lashes flutter.

Suddenly through the silence ensuing this dishwasher shrieks pong, a girl from the prep-&-line kings kong — B’s frightened out of His seat then turning around to stare at them gathered intimately at their green felt fourtop under the white tablecloth half cleared and bunched away with its little lantern, too, and the finechina cradles of sauces to accommodate the dipping of the rolls on special tonight as they are every night, for the hosting of their dealing, discarding, their bustly clatter (that and the distraction of their giggle allowing an unscrupulous waiter’s wife to cheat a chow: a meld made of three suited tiles in their appropriate order, hoarding the stray shards of what has to be ivory into her lap when no one’s looking, no, she doesn’t think), their amusement hand over mouthed, light as if to say to Him, don’t worry, it’s all just play, only fun and games goodnatured, we’re on your side, your team, you’re safe here. No one’s keeping score, Israelien. Thinking then, it’s not Him they recognize as much as an opportunity, a good turn, a mitzvah made to order — He thinks, just wait until I’ve merited their check. Mistrusting to the bitter end, the serving of His just desserts. But as closingtime closes in, with its receipts to tally to nothing and those grains of rice to count, inventory these cups to smash and bowls to shatter, then the counting of their pieces not privy to a game, Dim Sum brings to His table a treat, the sweet and dry house cookie: a brittle thing, lost lonely atop a dull green jaded tray. With one thumb to each of its nibs, He rips the thing in half. And inside’s a paper that lets slip a message. A fortune He owes in return — holding it up to the light of tables after empty tables of lanterned candles still lit festively, foretellingly, if guttering as if from the exhalations of His fear — thinking how much’s left from His pawn…it’s nothing, though — it’s free.

Today?

What does it say, what does it say, give it here…

…Happy Birthday, you happy now?

Suspicious.

B takes leave of the Orientals, helping to lock and shutter the restaurant behind its grate of shuddering metal…they’ll be closed all day Monday, Dim Sum says in parting, we’ll figure it out, everything works out in the end; he bows then, scraping — are you sure you don’t want any takeout, just asking, we have a little suey left, last chance as he lifts himself…25 % discount now that we’re old friends, in observance of your auspicious occasion?

To walk Himself wherever weathered, dry again, to drop no drip; B’s board halved, hung around His neck alongside a cross of chalk, what’s left that in the wind goes click against then clack again with every older step.

Oneyearold in Year One, today being the age of the world; there’s only a week left until the anniversary of its creation decreated, the destruction that’s made possible our miraculous rebirth. After Israelien, 1 A.I. — let it stand for that for which He falls. In a window, the sweeping glass of a going Broome Street concern selling religious paraphernalia (siddurim, tallisim, tefillin, Get Your Mezuzah Examined — No Commitment Free Of Charge), He takes in His reflection: His hair, once so moppishly light now darkly thinning, His glasses wrecked their earpieces lost held on only by the scrunch of His nose, wrinkled, His face old already, lined as if one of His mother’s lists for Wanda, his mouth a severely windreddened check marking all for off and finished, the milk and bread brains and that nose, a sack of potatoes. As for His form, it’s as fat as ever, forming fatter; waisted down His skirts His foreskin still occupied with its genethliacal growth and shed, cyclical and constant. He’s still in that old housecoat of His mother’s, her perpetual maternitywear, secondhanded but lacking pockets, then a mitten for the lefthand, a glove unfingered for the right. They hold the keys to residences untold, duplicated triplicates, with the alarmcodes combinatorials of His name, 18 18 18, B-E-N=21. He knows the routes to every safehouse, their attic and stagey trapdoor hides, Mitteltown nests and outerburrows…the homes of previous owners, masters otherwise known to Him as hosts when they’re treating and kind now summering in the winter of freedom if just to say they’ve done their part (He has all the key-chains, too, swag from Garden interests found among the trash — they’re loose; He hasn’t found the time in which to get attached). Under the housecoat but over the thermals designer from the dumpster, that Shabbos skirt, its ruffle ripped, tucked into His socks, sapped of their dressy dark from His shvitzy stray, stuffed with addresses to zips: pages ripped from phonebooks halved, revised, crumpled then crammed into His shoes for insulation (the heels made flats, pumps deflated), He’s shod in wads, too, of other people’s mail — a heatingbill from where, gas and electric invoices, then urgent warnings to Register, unofficial promises confirmed by governmental threats, the latest moon’s issue of a tznius periodical, homiletical home, lifestyle, or feminine hygienic (on negiah, on niddah), subscribed to in support of the yeshiva of a nephew; New Year’s greetingcards fallen from sukkah walls, and a lacy, stiffs-tocked invitation to a bris He’s missed, not His; a pidyon’s a redemption…feet are worn and numb, toes ten dreams of feeling. Despite, He stoops low against the wind down the street, littered with tattered fliers.

UNAF Must Register By Date Of Anniversary By Order Of The Mayor, is what they say, if you’re interested or scared.

Minding His feet and the papers flying about them like miniature lost tablecloths, or napkins, unsated souls, the ghosts of uninvited guests, B steps from the sidewalk and into the street, directly into the bleating progress of a flock of sheep crossing against the signal who knew still even worked: wool over His eyes, they’re herding way above the posted limit; their shepherd’s laughing kindly, then through his teeth whistles them together, his happy tune to harmonize with the bells that tinkle from their collars; he nods at B as he passes from the rear, then waggles behind him his staff in gentle remonstrance. B makes it out of their way only to sputter gutterside, stuck with all manner of those papers gathered, wet, stands dumbly as the sheep schlep on, grazing at sidewalks’ planters and wrecked meridians, the trafficislands unlit, no passing vehicles to worry either, as they disappear Uptown and toward the tunnel then through it out to Joysey and its fields. He sets out to follow them Himself, a last straggler from the sewer to the middle of the road. Exactly which He isn’t sure, the stickler. As most of the streetsigns have been removed, their names moneychanged to protect the not so innocent, new signs not yet nailed and hammered down…bureaucracy’s overtaking everything, with offices closed or slow to respond, addressed so far out in the Bronx who can ever get to them by day. B raises His head to the poletops freshly flagged, then steps a foot down into a pail brimming full with paste.

Schm…

uck,

Schm…

endrick,

Schmo schlemiel schlub schmegegge…these two posterboychicks call them, they’re yelling at Him hobbling, brandishing their rollers in His face while calling Him these other names, their tongues too young to know from: Mutteringmamzer, Nogoodnik, who knows what worse, me, I couldn’t say…trying new epithets on for fit of mouth, a spit. B steadies again, hauls His foot out from the paste, pries Himself away from their pursuit, fast but fat and older — Uptown, He thinks, and sopping; apparently, the direction the two posterboychicks had just worked down from:

All Males Must Maintain Yarmulke Upon Penalty Of Law,

All Females Must Maintain Hat Kerchief Or Wig Upon Penalty Of Law…

Welcome to the ghetto. Here, a world frozen not as much in time as in time past, amid the mud, down in the dreck. Now, all will know what to expect and, too, what is expected of them. Upon Penalty of Law not further specified, though, as a minyan of elderly uniformed officers, Unaffiliated Patrol, an allvolunteer, geriatrically vigilante Downtown unit of Metro Gestapo, stumble their beats, using nightsticks as crutches; their Law reigns supreme…over the old cemetery down at Chacham Square, the smichas of seminaries north, up past the mikvehs, the shuls and shtibls, yeshivas and, nu, you want the guidebook’s spiel: the Ed Alliance (197 E. Broadway), the Hanky Street Settlement and the Amalgamated Dwellings, the Yarmulkowsky Bank Building (TK admission price), the Klutzker Brotherly Aid Association (open Mon. & Wed. 9–5), which you might remember from, hymn…stores discount and department, the factory outlet tours for matzah and wine, with not even them leavening such ferment: Closed Saturday, Convenient to All Public Transportation, 72 years in the business, with beds and bedding and rentals, jewelry, umbrellas and gloves one flight up, free alterations on premises, the dramatic look in fine footwear, bootery to the most discriminating of four continents, to name just a few…up to the foot laid bare of the Williamsburg Bridge — B making His way west and Uptown in an attempt at losing His chase, He’s speechless, obviously, with mouth agape, stump hanging, but with His head held high to more notices, papered, stapled, glued, these up on lampposts, pasted over the display windows, slopped to scroll across doors:

UNAF Must Remain At Home Saturday — Friday Sundown To Sunup Upon Penalty Of Law,

Electricity And Gas Will Be Made Unavailable On The Sabbath Sundown Friday — Sundown Saturday,

Happy Birthday, Reb Israelien — the conversion is complete.

B heads through the night up Broadway, is it, then around the Park with its Temple left as if a basement resurgent: partially finished, which, as it’s been said, is also partially unfinished, being renovated again…up toward what He thinks, they have to be, more open, quieter streets, these avenues widely silent: once upon a time, the richest slice of town, the morsel choicest and chosen, that’s if you had the money and right referrals, today full of poor, filled with pauperings, it’s galling, how destitute, such shammeses to shame, wheedling beadles sidestepping copulating dogs, bloated goats grazing on leaflets, munching notices by lamplight…O these perpetually rushing, stamstammstammering menschs in their mandated yarmulkes held down against the gusts, hurrying, always schurrying, home to their womenfolk, to the luxury apartments and penthouses they’d been assigned or had bought outright on the fiftyyear forgiven mortgage that their women’d just finished redecorating for them and their families (everincreasing, raised roofward toward the gulls, stolen for consumption, cooked then garnished with their rent), in the latest style known to privation: bedclothes hung from fireescapes, disastrous pianos converted to bins of trash having fallings out with windows…these menschs with the faces of entire families themselves, of women and infants — save their hair…for what — wombred and honeyglowing, illuminated from within, the abyssal shine of their ancient eyes, disgusting. Sinking. Perpetually deep in the One True Depth, they traipse through the Broadway snowbanks, their beards and sidelocks flapping, getting tangled with the beards and locks of other menschs just passing in the opposite direction, Uptown for an audience in the court of a rabbi holding an opinion that’s dialectically opposed to an opinion held by the rabbi the others are heading Downtown now to meet; two students coming around the corner, tied up, how they’re tripped to ice…many not yet used to wearing these yarmulkes (but they’re trying, they assure you, they have to), with the thin, governmentissued scraps threatening to fly away at every turn of street and wind, with tassels rustling they stoop to snitch their remnants from the sewers, slap palmfuls soaked and dirty down onto their skulls again, frumiliar — in a ruached rush to make in time the shiur of Rabbi Avraham Ben Shmuelbob Johnson III, shlit”a, the son of Reb Samuel Johnson II, z”l…or else Rav Billybob (Mendy) Mendelssohn’s tisch, or that of the Ramjohn he’s known as, the Ranjim, to glean a pesher from that posek, the son of Baba Wawa, a soothsayer and local benevolent personality, her tongue the hottest ticket in town: dynasties hewn like smoke from wintered air…the Old Traditionalists among us upholding amid all else and the pillars of the universe, the furriest shtremiels, pointy thin spodiks and rounded kolpiks, peaked kashkets, not to forget the littlest kutchmas and shlyapkas stacked six high, in felt and in velvet, rabbit and beaver, and these worn without any discipline, without any notion that what’s worn atop the head once marked the origin if not the allegiance of the head and its body grossly garbed below. Everything done wrongly: newly minted Mogilevichs rubbing shoulders pricking elbows with Mogelescus, makes no sense, knock knees, Newmans friends with Neumanns, Ostrovitch married off to Ostrowicz who knew but nu (and the more unpronounceable or unspellable the name, the higher the price the bride commanded, her family and the shadchan, too), it’s the mouth under all that matters, the bated breaths of these liverlickers adhering, the garlicky followers of Rabbi Onions, who’d been buried to grow famous from a grave, the word rooted up in shrouds from a bulbous beard. How with every scent and clarinety cymbalon song in the world they’re blasting the newest rebbe on the block whoever he is or thinks he is or might be with question after question, all these questions, though, in the end the same…which is the nature of the Depth, the depth of the Depth, hymn, how many feet of fall today, and what’s the forecast for tomorrow, you’re such a big shot ba’al teshuva? America your streets are paved with cold, a black year in your ear, in your mouth, only the dreck fallen, frozenover: horses up to their haunches in potholes heretically unprophesized, whinnying for a bullet between the senseless eyes; oxen ensnared in the hidden stumble — a guttergrating or sewerlid removed as a servingplate, or to provide the pit of an outdoor fire — their shankbones jutting from their flesh, with crows and doves to perch thereupon and cluck sweet liturgy to the clattering of pots beaten attentively with pans…the sounds and the cooking smell, oy, of a vagrant’s ritually poisoned cat.

And their kinder, O their kinder the males of them, at least, how they trop their lessons home with them from cheder, from yeshiva, nusach for the nest, these boychicks smart and quick on their flocking ways, feathered in dark blurs of breeches and gartel: such promising issue of their womenfolk, hear yourselves be praised…O their women, these not much more than girls they are, here netted, wigged, and kerchiefed, wrangled into unbecoming floral prints, their enormous encampment tented of many formless, filthy skirts; perpetually knocked up, they’re trudging homeward, too, with new recipes in their heads, for all the new mouths in their stomachs: kinder, babies, new boys and girls of the covenant already, gestating girls pregnant themselves with already pregnant girls who in turn will sustain their pregnant issue unto the infinite eternal, one can only hope: women with pregnant guts, but also with pregnant paps, daughters eligible already secreted within each nippled sac, and suckling from within, waiting only to be born into the Law, into birthing themselves…dark forms rising like steam from the muck of the street, oily, pubic, as if smoke but thicker, a viciously rank viscous glopping, dim how they ooze themselves up from out of the churning melt, the burbling flow of downtrodden ice: they’re people, God they’re people, wiping from their eyes, noses, and mouths, their mouth massed, that metropolitan amnio ick; without umbilicus any of them as they’ve been born anew to nothing…now with two hands around each leg tugging once, twice, to free themselves from the secular mire, then looselimbed and with muddy vacant faces how they stagger themselves on ahead, deadeyed, they grom onward to swarm Him, on the way abducting from the surrounding freeze any icicles at hand, grabbing stones from the gutter, grubbingup left wood from scaffolds abandoned and hunks of asphalt the failure of public works with which to attack Him — a pogrom in progress, gevalt!

Hang down our neck of the shtetl weeping your putz off goddamn that ain’t recht…slumming down here with yr schmutz face and yr schlock grace who the futz u think u is—two menschs hanging on a corner, decently inconspicuous, passable, I’d say: they’re disguised appropriately, in yarmulkes to rekels and fingering a fidget at the hang of their false hair, that’s no crime, but they’re flashing photographs, too, which is lately if not yet verboten then frowned upon in this neighborhood, the side Upper West; our pogromists spit on them on their ways after greater quarry…women throw at them rocks of hardened potatoes from windows smoked open, the balconies of last century’s grand palaces, the highrises, coops and condos of the high sixties we’re talking. It seems to be a searchparty. He’ll take any kind of party today. Headed up by, I know it’s dark out but still it’s Hamm, it has to be, and Gelt with him, wagging his tush, scraping his knees on the blacktop ice; on the pavement overturned, ransacked, hoof and heeltossed, searching now underneath the idling carriages, every species of conveyance, the hitched yellow rides, a hacking flash of moon onduty…every cart made cab waiting to head anywhere with the meter fared out upon the drivers’ fingers, no — then lifts these udders hanging heavy with milk, brushes drecky tails out of the way, what’s he thinking I’d be hiding there, puckered deep in filth?

B bundles into a shadow, a way without lamplight newly signed as Aynredenish Alley, which is the ample, lined with stall fall of 72nd west of Broadway toward the river and waits, gasps, hands under His armpits to keep warmth in the freeze up from the Hudson’s slice; a woman approaches Him huddled against a mound of piled trash, panting a bubble to pop from His stubwound mouth as glass shatters crystalline and cool in the distance, too near…a plump girl too antshuldikt mir fat and old for the slight skirt and horsey haltertop she’s working in, propositioning Him with too much eyeliner, too, and tears, a psht she asks for tzedakah; you’re on the make, I’ll hide you, she’s saying, all I’m asking is a zuz or two for my trouble.

B ignores her, she snarls, and then He shoos her, not trusting ever and so she spits on Him, asks are you who I think you are, answers herself, you can’t be…He thinks that’s what though He can’t understand her, and so she reverts, we’re translating along the lines of, where’s His rachmones, and your yarmulke, you Unaffiliated schlump, why aren’t you indoors, spits again, don’t make me report you — better make yourself scarce…

It’s My Birthday, is what I chalk on my board then hand it to her and refusing, again she spits on my shoes, by what calendar, she wants to know, then wipes her mouth with my mother’s low hem…you believe the nerve of such people, this chutzpah I can’t quite pronounce? me standing alone and unwanted for life in this street newly named amid bags and crates of grandopening trash, bannered and bunted homilies of yesterday’s business become scraps to be thrown to the, not even the dogs anymore but their old owners, the people…Amsterdam’s strays ranging west from the Park and nearing, coming closer with prey’s every scent that makes it in on the wind, their ravenous howls only an appeasement of memory, hollow prayers, appetite’s psalms. As the mob passes Him by up Broadway, other young menschs flood in on Him with consummating fires burning in their eyes, new baums and bergs, fresh steins and sterns, not intent on a ravage of a physical nature but on a savagery subtler, namely conversion, which is worse as it’s mental and emotional and physical, too, generational, perpetrated not only on you but on your kinder to come, each to hand Him bound sheaves of mimeographed brochures, and more leaflets, fliers, pamphlets, Redemption for Dummies one’s called, Abridged Kashrut another, a sheet outlining the laws pertaining to pamphletmaking, to flieruse and marital duties, what so and so has had to say about ziz or zat regarding and what, I’m supposed to do what with them, besides take them cordially, accept their enthusiasm, fervor it’s wasteful, then stuff their words into my shoes to speak their succor to the hurt of my feet, suck a wart. They leave Him with handshakes and a complimentary yarmulke emblazoned with the info for a shtiblach He’s apparently promised to attend if not this Shabbos then the next (and, they’re almost forgetting themselves, have you lain yet today, tallis, tefillin), also with late warnings against a mob reportedly in the area, and after any Unaffiliated — grumbling, unhappy with any unapproved incursions into their territory the upper west-most, it’s all ours down to Riverside Drive. We’re peaceful around here, we don’t take kindly to how they do it Downtown.

B follows them out, dispersing north then east toward the University’s gates on a mission on paper for their next personed, impressionable save. As for Broadway again, it’s denatured, silently without search, disappeared. All too easy and suspect; He’s expecting an ambush, an Amalek lying in wait, what schlock tactics even a kock could imagine. And so He makes to bringup the rear of their converting pogrom, more evangelically pleasant, less baseballbats and kitchendrawers’ knives: B crossing cautiously to stand in street’s middle, atop the trafficisland by the old IRT subway entrance turned almshouse seething with those without house or home, but with God — mouth agape, receiving the snow on His stump as if manna.

As for the world, it feels as if it’s caving…what with His weight and that of His burden carrying it further, we’re talking Biblical strata, the depths of wells, graveward regression, this reversion of earth, down to the floor of the past, the ocean unswept by the breath: the roofs seem to be raised up to the heights, as if tugged to an invisible, inexistent rainbow by ravens, a few of them on each roof they’re clutching with claws, straining their wings to scar an incision on the face of the sky; higher, luxury apartment buildings turned to underheated tenements…boarderbordered, coldwatered, commonly lived, dumbwaitered, dumbbells uplifted, they inherit more and more floors, and grayer, floors already filled with people already observing, preparing, they’re always preparing for what — to prepare; gray candles newly lit in sills newly filthy, eight families ingathered from Siburbia too north to be the Bronx and with all their extensions to inlaws and who knows who else crammed into the cramp of a single apartment, one room, what is this insanity, is this how they prefer it, why not…newly hewn tenement rooms with a view (a word that’s been assimilated from the most assimilated of tongues, from Latin’s Tenare, to hold—which is to keepsafe…the within from the without, and, too, the without from the within, as we’re told; to erect: a fence around the Law, and an eruv around Upper Manhattan), to another world, a terra old but never forgotten, ancient, and yet perpetually reborn if in the process idealized, evoked, worked up from photographs, documentaries, unfaded, defaded, testimonies censured then banned only as they might expose the falsity of this, their next incarnation: as if the rituals have been encoded deep in their souls, in the muscles, glands, and organs once dormant now flexing and pumping awake; tables groan under the weight of baked braided breads, massively musty volumes are stacked thereupon, what’s the meaning of this, what son might you be, go ask the rabbi if that’ll make you happy, gesund.

Through the weather, left light overflowing their sills and the winded wafts the smells of a Shabbos that’ll go on way past the sunset of any wintry night, the dark dawning forever — streets stained with wax, the stain of His tears…these streets and avenues the once fattened arteries of this city, the past’s hardened plenty of late become lean, gaunt, heir to a why enforced hollow: a whiff of smoke as if flicked up from under the chins in its coming, the seethe of its anger, and then the sound of the mob approaching again from behind, led now by those two puny, pugnosed kinder, improbably the two posterboychicks from Downtown called up here to identify whatever it is they think they encountered, they who only know the distraction that are streets at all from their passage to and from school, shul, wherever holy, presently stalking this ritzier, glitzier, who knew from it neighborhood why, to keep the scare in the people, maybe, how He flatters Himself — it’s a gift, to keep the myth of His terror alive, and perhaps, too, to remind them of His own remembrance, how He taints, always sullies their efforts, renders impure, how He ridicules them, and without ever intending to, how the provision of His every existence itself precludes their very own. He stands still an orphan on the island untrafficked, not knowing what to do or not, and making little quiet grunting appeals with His mouthstub at those just passing in advance of the throng: their heads bowed chins to guts, most hurrying past without looking up, murmuring prayers (which: the blessing over avoiding a puddle, the blessing over averting the dreck of a dog or a pigeon, the bracha for concrete and breath), and reciting, also, a host of recently memorized passages of Torah no longer mere quoth endquoth Scripture, not wanting to waste even a moment, especially not on what has to be just another homeless mooch impersonating mensch, a lay leydikgeyer in search of nightly food and drink, lodging, warmth, anything you’d be generous to give. A handful throw Him windscattery bits of old currency, shredded as feed for their livestock they keep on their fireescapes, elevatored and in alleys, where not their cawing and clucking and pecking all night, who can sleep; Him bending down to defraud a defaced quarter from the freeze just as the mob approaches…across the street they’re waiting with no traffic’s law for the light to change to alight on the island, to visit upon His head and hunch a garden’s variety of the graceless, insults, murder — He’s turning from them and hiding His face, slips on the ice and falls.

A small, professionally neat mensch in a pinched derby, suit and tie, his face scandalously shaved, accosts impulsively from the opposite direction, the eastern, leans over, takes His arm and tries to help Him up but He’s too heavy and the mensch almost falls himself, withdraws, folds his arms and waits for Him to aright at the foot of the mob quickly massing.

I have to thank you, the mensch says in a calm, polished voice, making a mess of their iddishy idiom to the two boychicks bringingup the head and holding torches, flaming newspaper rolled for the fire, inky smoke billowing, blackening as imageless as Him…what luck, you found Him for me. My shabbosgoy, a runaway — I’m in your debt. Tell me, how much do I owe you?

Your shabbosgoy, one says, I don’t think so…just look at Him, says another, you know who He is. A gonif, says the first again, a thief in the nightly murderer, not quite a goy more like an animal we’re dealing with or worse, Unaffiliated with anything, spit spit grit and soulless — then to Him, explain yourself…they’re asking while being asked by those behind them, you’re presuming It can talk?

Hymn, you’re right, says the mensch, you got me — Baruch Hashem, you boychicks are smart…it’s only a joke, that and a poke in the evil eye, keyne hore, you’re no match for me. But He is — for her, is what I’m saying. A murmur’s mumbled rising. I’m bringing Him home for my daughter; it’s high time He converts — those two have been making eyes at each other long enough, and then he rolls his, from the smoke. Her, she’s aging…disgusted groans, a pick at a mole, a rashy nostril — let’s leave it at that, He’s not so young Himself; she’s a good cook, a pleasant personality, nu, so a hump, too, that and there’s a tumult of refusal, a slight limp while we’re at it, this slow shuffling dispersal losing one-by-one-by-two, but you should taste her latkes such as you’ve never had. A giver. Any takers. Only a scattering of punches and kicks for the loitering homeless, a few shots drunk from flasks of the hip, lchaimlchaim a zay get going…he was saying, how they’re always served up with a little something extra: some sweet sauce, some sourcream, a little love, or lying through her weakened teeth (how the latkes are frozen, storebought’s the blushing truth). A cigarette licked loosely of bad tobacco, found in pockets their pickings passed around…though, this mensch he’s not yet finished, if He’s not ready to make an honest woman out of her, let’s just say I’m prepared to consider any other offers; that of the mob heading south into night. Ot azoy. You wouldn’t happen to both be single — I’ve got a cousin, too…but they’re gone Downtown the paperers, separately if brothers.

As he and B head westward toward the river, there’s a final ploy if only for the pleasure of the wind: I’m a proctologist, it’s a decent living…but of course, I’d have to examine you first, my future son-inlaw, whomever; then, a last call over his shoulder, a gesture parting, a hand tipped to the hat: don’t worry, boys — it’s as simple as bowing, he laughs into his other glove, is what I’m always being told.

It’d been a clutch of thatchy, fireperfect hovels at the thinning vale of the forest, now a lonesome field salted with the melt of snow — a plain without crop, a barren threshedover, naked earth, pocked in a vast ruin, the remnant of wars, without jubilee, left fallow until failed…it was here, in the midst of this village whose menschs had all been killed, their synagogue defiled then set aflame (which set their houses aflame, then their livestock and harvest), their womenfolk raped and their kinder enslaved, that the seed had been winded from far in the east, had fallen with spring, to take plant then root deep within the scar of this flesh, this weathered pale — a wound that had once been a basement, the library of their yeshiva. Under the tromp tromp trampling of every weary army, the seed sprouted; as it was watered from the waters above and the water below, a shoot began to grow; to begin with, a small sapling, the reflection of its taproot: tromped by maddened Franks, the Plague of Rhenish mobs, hephep, the Mongols, a motley mob of crusading barbarians, mercenary warriors of who knows what allegiances, only later the civilized and civilizing Swedes, their immaculate soldiers marching in impeccable ranks, trampled by horses and hauling carts, by the feet, too, of their merchants, those fleeing the furfisted Tatars, the east in perpetual pursuit, the Cossacks are coming and with them, their hetman, O the fury of Polyn…becoming brushed in more peaceful times by summery courses, by foxes, by hounds; this tree watered by young love in the Lorelei spring, Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten—growing higher, against all that’s human and, evil: an axe, a sword, attempted it once, a mace lodged in its trunk at the height of a head…generations shading the green grown below, it’d kept guard over Kinderspielen, picnics with Mutter and the governess of hundred of years’ duration, perpetrated upon a cloth torn from a chuppah, in its basket the shewbread, the risen loaves — until just last week: it’d been sawed down then shipped express to the Garden…the schwarzwald fallen, its trunk to bridge the cold of the ocean, arriving with its memories intact, imprinted deep on its leaves, resident in the very air breathed out from its ageheavy boughs: the birds, the crows and the ravens, the hand and eye knowledge of falconry exercises, training the seasonal goshawk on the hood and the gauntlet, the bells and the jesses; arrows bearing quivering messages (to be read into the wrinkles of wood), bows curved into branches, the withered bark faces of witches, souls trapped in knots; then, once clearing Customs, it’s erected in the Great Hall of the Island, within its arched vault, snipped only a berry’s pit to fit a breath from the crown of the ceiling, majestic.

This is their tree, let us trim it.

It isn’t night just yet, it’s only the eve, that of Xmas — soon to be the first of January, which is false and forgotten, a year unrenewed. Tonight, it’s the yahrezeit, the Anniversary of the Death (A.D., as it’s respectfully, avoidingly, mentioned), which is anyway only slightly remembered, commemorated by few and that strictly officially, a matter of governmental not of popular mind: all are seemingly too occupied with their new identities, their own Affiliation, to be bothered much with the whiskered past; besides, it’s just too painful to remember, to be reminded not as much of a celebratory loss as of their own illegitimacy, again, a future loss of their own: what with kinder being born, and time. To remember now would mean to lose the present’s meaning, and, too, its hope for tomorrow: send a giftbasket out to whoever scripted that one, that and a poinsettia for the wife. All is nigh within the Great Hall, the Garden: settled deceptively firm in its foundations, the money, the power, the trash and the bodies shored around; doors exhale drafts into overheated, underventilated, basrelieved hallways, their rooms are silent in disuse and dark; outside clouds assemble, churn themselves up churlishly, into aggravated masses: everything below’s in suspension, seems only to attend upon a Fall…the very first of the night, a single perfect and softly falling flake with which to tender the evening, none of this unpredictable, unpredicate weather, just a sweet, sharp, and gasping drift of flak that might remind how hospitable nature could be, not too much to ask…which would be forbidden as aeromancy, anyway, now made subject to rabbinic wrath (if you weren’t aware, you’re no prophet). Quarters here still being used by the remaining employees, those who haven’t been let go thanks to quarterly financials, or who haven’t yet left to save themselves, are decorated with trees of their own, miniaturized mistled models in plastic of the real tree evergreened amid the Registry: wooden nutcracker and egg ornaments, with tissuepaper flowers and tinsel, lacy angels atop with model trains on tracks spiked across bibs tied around trunks. A ball as if a blob of misplaced ink bounces down heavily on the lightest of lyrics: Wish, Merry, and the heads fellowshipped follow along; they nod, some in rhythm despite, others totally drunk, shikkered all over the place staggering about fireplaces grating away toasty, sparklingly as if laughing, a crackling cackle swept choking up the flue; fluffy, coalblack stockings stuffed with pinkslips sway lulling, perilously near.

Sensing this to be the last of this holiday he’ll know but not yet why, Die’s ordered up an observance he’ll never forget, no one will, its expense and luxurious fury, the implacable tide of this Yule waked between the coasts of Joysey and that of the icicle of Manhattan: after all, someone has to keep up the old ways, their traditions — if not now, when; if not me, then tell me who better? He faces away from this in truth disappointing, depressing, gathering of these his last few adherents, employees along with any weathering friends, hangerson, anyone desperate enough to remain in contact, in business with him or his: fifty guests tonight, and how they’d expected a few hundred, which means — leftovers; abandoned by Shade and so by the Administration entire, the government, the Abulafias, too, who not, there aren’t that many left. And it’s hard not to notice that most of the fifty gathered are just remaining staff required to attend, paid to be here, ten of whom’ve been especially hired to attend to the tree, the Baum as it’s been called by the Teutonic site supervisor, overseer of a staff hired to prune, snip, trim, and wreathe, to decorate and deck. Ornaments have been hauled up in last century’s steamer trunks from their subterranean storage unit, each trunk labeled as to style of its contents (ball, lace, gingerbread kinder, marzipan snowflake, glitterencrusted pine-cone — stop me when it’s been enough), with each ornament itself labeled as to its appearance and provenance: ball, red, gift of the Russian Ambassador; each guest’s required to hang at least one, as if proof of loyalty, the oppression of that ole tradition again. This staff of fayg decorators flown in from Europa leaps over sofas and endtables to midwife the proceedings; they’ve planned this year’s Baum to a limpid perfection, after having labored for a moon over diagrams of ornament distribution, lacepatterning, tinsel saturation schematics…the scaffold’s erected, hydrauliclift driven inside through the doubledoors of the Hall’s portico, upsets a vase (to say nothing of its florist); Kush daughters grim, hired to replace the Marys disappeared to God knows where, and with the Garden not willing to spend the gelt to find them, they tidy up efficiently, are shooed away with the limp flicks of wrists.

By an hour before the party’s scheduled beginning, the Registry’s been feathered, nested, transformed into an extravagant indoor aviary: birds are flying around the heights, swooping from wings of rafter to loops wrought of iron, shrinkydink droppings sacs attached by strap around their bodies, pinching, hanging weighted from cloaca: peacocks strut across the floor, garbed in festive sweaters and similar sacs to hold their turd from the rugs; they parade regally, stately as if the only guests and as such, the most honored, through the interminable passages connecting the wings of the Hall, their plumage held open with cruel metal struts, resembling elaborate, undoubtedly sadistic orthodontia. Toward decumbent dusk, a staff of nine equipped with monogrammed books of matches flit from room to sill, to light the oil votives in all the windows shining, despite having been naturally frosted, and then to light them, too, in the interior windows, which have been frosted over with soap; all doors inside and out have been ordered wreathed in a host of evergreen voids that resemble zeros, or immature bagels, crusted in holly, adorned with leis of popped maize, strung cranberries dredged from the deepest bogs of Joysey. In the square fronting the Great Hall, aside the landing reserved for arrivals never again to depart, atop its manicure of ice over the fake green and real manure, a magi troupe of underemployed, off-off-Broadway actors are rehearsing a Nativity pageant, their requisite shvartze, a reformed Ethiopian, reciting his lines to the applause of the wind; he’ll make a passable Balthazar, though he might lack a visa…the other two kings petting then illicitly feeding handfuls of moldy lump sugar stolen from the condemned Commissary to the herd of animals linedup for the casting of tomorrow’s Manger Scene: Moo for me, thanks, we’ll be in touch, and the poor mensch leads his starving cow back across the ice to Nutley; their progress lanternlit, to search by night for a better talent agent. Abulafia II never came through with the camels. A staff hired away secrectly if only temporarily from Mitteltown’s most famous department store, Wiltinghill’s, sets to work wrapping presents, which are little more than bribes, on the salvaged tables of the Commissary set end to end down the network of tunnels, underground: off the artery leading to the Treasury, wellstocked shelters linked by citybound passages recently excavated to allow for emergency disappearance, in case of contingency, better not to think of it, best not to ask or even know of their existence; giftwrap (Seasonal Red #3, Fluseason Green), tissue, ribbons, and swatches of scotch, sticklosing tape hang like impurely rendered hides tanned from the overhead heating ducts; three secretaries previously attached to Mada’s office demoted to noel assistants, present facilitators, papercutup and harried, they mock gambol up and down these hallways of tunnels with their scissors freshly sharpened they dash through the passages, go blindly around corners shoutingout their orders, kickingup skirts past piles of torn tags, hangers, and shrinkwrap, almost trippedup on lengths of string, on the twines flapping in front of the gratings to which they’ve been tied for momentary snipping, the women’s steps syncopating with the whirr of the exhaustfans allied to the heating system above, servicing nothing down below, it’s disastrous they’re coughing, sicknesses sounding along with new Hanukah songs harmonized by the wrappers surrounding, undertaken to keep their ribboning apace, their ideally threepart SA-T arrangement occasionally interrupted with the scream of an unfortunate accident, the thumb against razor or slicer, a pinkiefinger knotted down to the quick, to purple then pulse.

After the meal, which had been abundant in courses (and too expensive, too, as completely treyf), and then after the caroling, the wassailing then the caroling again are finished, done as ham, the guests retire to their rooms: donors from interests both strange and stubborn, not just eccentric and racist, let’s say, or bigoted and big with ideas but altogether insane — they’re equipped with sketchy maps to their accommodations’ shadows, having been overnighted for their own safety: too risky to venture a return to the city from such a celebration and so late, the ornaments they’d hung would show in the shine of their eyes, marking them for yet another detention, for a punishment that just has to be worse; they find their long, slow, tortuous ways some flashlit, others candled, they’re sluggish they’re sluggishly drunk: their forms full of shepherd’s pie, their arms and legs heavy stumps of yulelogs, stuffed with turkey their brains a mess of oldetimey puddings and chutneys, sweetbreads for stomachs churned with intoxicant nogs how they’re bumping and knocking, they’re disrupting all — or else, maybe it’s one of the birds, another creature stolen away on the tree imported, eluding Customs, to infest the Garden and breed here, to be fruitful and multiply then subdue with destruction…maybe it’s that first flake that all had been waiting for, are still waiting for now, that first perfect flake, earthfallen, perhaps it’d gone missed, as it kissed the ground, or the highest spire of the Great Hall, it’d melted into flame; or it’s that at around midnight that night, a candle’s upset, on a sill, our scholars say one perched at the portico window directly behind the tree, its ornamental drop of fire wicked to catch on tissue, some have said, while others hold by a ribbon or a bow — all agree, though, that soon the Baum itself catches…secreting sap as the tinsel brings the flame roaring up to the tapered top from the trunk below: within a moment, there’s a burgeoning fire, forecausting, smoke billowing to gather its night’s night sky amid the Registry’s vault…

Warmed under his bed’s burlap canopy — army surplus from a former campaign, he’d served but found no action — Die’s woken…it’s hot, much too hot and he’s angry already, you know how much heating runs him, he rises, to have a word with Maintenance, puts down his teddy and tucks it in then stomps from his room still in his pajamas. The air’s thick with the scent of singed pine, which is so pleasant and seasonal, then heavier, too heavy, too weighty and black, it’s choking with smoke, and so he hurries from the hallway of his quarters to the balcony and then down the grand staircase, its fasteners coming loose under his run, a carpet of stairs gathering around his fuzzy slippers slipping, bunching, unfurling into rolls of red as if a scroll of the Law soaked in fiery blood underfoot and him falling, then recovering on allfours before righting himself amid a mess of alarum: the Registry, an ocean of smoke…the Baum burning like a mast lightningstruck, its ship sunk out in the ice, being circled by shrieking birds their wings flaming. A pillar. The signal for help, or for helplessness. He escapes alone, rousing no one, not every mensch for himself but every mensch for me, and goys, too, who not: stumbling out the doors, a handle scalding his palms to modest him with mark, a flail to hide his face, scratching at his eyes then sucking at his fingers. He makes it out, under the overhang of the Great Hall then across the lawned square and through the makeshift manger, trampling the poultry spooked and squawking, eweing lambs and that lifesized clayfaced babe swaddled in their white and then, beyond, rims the docks and coffined barges toward then around the flagpole barren, fingering with scorched sucked fingertips the lone purplehearted medal he sleeps with dangling from him hotly and without sound, while with his other hand fingering the moustache applied somatically, as if swiped from the deepest pit of prior knowledge: a thin wisp of dreck foraged from his rear.

Halt! a young, lanky, redeyed buzzbald guard yells…who goes there? as he’d been trained: which is heartening, especially when you’re the boss inspecting; except when you’re fleeing, that is, and you realize that everyone you hired the military refused — how they can’t even tell there’s a fire.

It’s me…Die says, you know me, soldier; he holds up his hands, halfsalute and halfsurrender, then waves them toward the smoke.

You? What a dreck disguise! the guard says very funny, tell me another, and he lunges at Die who dashes away in the return of his arrival, the guard following in pursuit his sidearm drawn but don’t worry, there’s been no money for ammunition in a week.

In his quarters, at the far southern wing of the Great Hall, Mada hadn’t slept, had smelled smoke, tasted it, breathed in suspecting the worst then tripped an alarm; the detectors have never been inspected: no rain from the roof, no sprinklers shpritzing; nothing’s up to code. He’d telephoned the firedepartment, ordered Gelt and Hamm quartering down the hall to rouse everyone, a room to room sweep for guests, to triage them out to the lawn and the ice of the square’s the plan as laid and sleeping; he’d go for the boss, personally, then with him underground, to meet up in the Temple as per protocol exigent. But Die stands outside already, shocked immobilized at this, the image of his panicked form — gazing at himself in a vast window falling whole from its mullions then shattering from the face of the portico wall, his own face burning, lit with shards of flame raging, his guard overtaking him to jump directly into the fire, its Hall, hoping O God to save himself from his reflection, too. Firetrucks are delayed, due, at least in the findings of one inquiry posthumous, executed with a holy indifference, ritually pococurante, to disagreement over emergency jurisdiction, whether Joysey should respond to this disaster or Manhattan, New York State (that it’s Xmas just isn’t a reasonable excuse anymore, is what, we’re tired); the ice, it’s a problem unto itself, it’s not only slippery but too thin and the trucks too heavy, many suspect they’d fall right through, the frazil, the nilas…how the firemenschs would have to hook & ladder themselves on out. For the record, though, a few trucks do arrive, but the Garden’s guards end up slowing them well in advance of the perimeter, pull them over, push for inspection, interrogation, in doing so just following orders, standard practice in the event of siege, compound infiltration, contingent upon what’s contingent, a tactic of delay long reserved for this capacity — until the Army or National Guard would arrive on Shade’s orders, whenever, never: guards roadblock all emergency response at the edge of the ice and go about demanding, examining papers, keeping them waiting, stripsearching, taking bribes, baksheesh, bar them despite, impede every entrance with their guns loaded if only with a wasting list of questions, tonguetipped bulletpoints; the Main Guardhouse down toward Island South surrounded by a squadron of firemenschs uniformed in payos and yarmulkes, making all the lewd gestures you’d expect with their hoses in response to subjected measures, as the flagrancy spreads past them, with an explosion from the western wing of the Great Hall that whirlwinds a host of debris high into the night, even out over the ice to threaten their vehicles, up also toward a low gated fence and its scar of lawn, then up its slate path, wickpulsing, melting the protective plastic slipcovering ice, up to the stoop to His door, yellowgold if on its way to tarnish: His house, His sisters’, too, which Israel and Hanna had paid off long after lawschool, partnerships junior, senior, after all those loans, those payments, the mortgage made month in moon out, it’s going up, too — nothing will be spared; insurance — it’s only a dream.

As for Joysey, it’s irretrievable, fogged in smoke. We’re talking banks of the stuff, a run on them, craziness in a last hurried looting of the air for air. Flames consume even the silent bushes, the few remaining shrubs along the Garden’s waterfront. Here still in pajamas under his gown, Die with a cap atop his bald shaped like the moon slouching back toward black — who could take orders from one so appareled — how he suddenly realizes, with the fall of wax on his hand, that this entire time he’s been holding a candle, clutched from his nightstand as he rose into flight: a separate lone flame, having served to illuminate his escape until now; it still hasn’t gone out, but rather’s been melted to his forefinger, and what’s troubling is that he can’t feel its burn. He sits on the icy earth rocking, shrouded in bedsheets Mada’s draped over his shoulders. Chattering, the bite of frost. Soon, and in gross violation of standard ops, he’s surrounded by the faithful surviving: Hamm, and Gelt (an expanse of singleply sucked from the jut of the latter’s weak heel, the whitened sick tongue of his slippers — he’d been disturbed on the toilet), along with a smattering of Kush daughters in only their sequined bedclothes blown suggestively tight in the wind that’s helping the fire along…suddenly turning around in the opposite direction at the sound of another explosion, wondering where Wall Street’s gone, whether Mitteltown’s made off along with it: Manhattan’s skyline nothing but a dark horizon, a burnt finger poked through the smoke it’s accusing; and so already, the assignation of blame, and this with the flames still the rage. Firemenschs having been finally admitted on order of Mada who’s taken initiative when no one else can, they’re inventing a chain of command and with it, attempting to strangle: they’re massing around their trucks schmoozing, kibitzniks, they’re arguing with one another over where their water, which as it’s little is precious, is to go next, and who, for that matter, gets to determine the flow: they trip over their own hoses, they’re flung into the air with variable pressures of spray, their nozzles spouting what water in chains binding whether misered or — as the fire melts the ice, and the melt is tapped — wastefully massive: dousing Israel’s books burnbound, Hanna’s albums of photographs lain open to surge, the kitchen wretched apart in slivers of tile, a gasleak, a rupture in everything’s main, the livingroom a soaked inferno of sofas, charred furniture antique as of yesterday hacked apart with, oyf kapores — axes; hidden under the seared doormat of His house, a scalding key that unlocks no secret…all of it gray on the way to white, in this return to purity, to void: a burntoffering to be refused by God, returned to us on earth as half ash, half watery carcass.

As the sun rises a slight clearing, again the blur of Manhattan’s very south, a wisped glimpse of Joysey beach, crabgrass and the hummocked dune beyond of industry’s smote sprawl…the Great Hall’s revealed, lost, the ghost of its guests, completely cinderdestroyed, utterly unutterably tinder: to go the way of the lives it once hosted, whisked up vaultways through smokestacks of smoke with smoke pouring through them ever exalted; its remains fall apart in the hands, fall through the sifting of fingers and stain, memory, until washed away through a melt in the ice, a hole — a polynya, a negative island. Spotfires rumble at perimeter, pockets smoldering, fume. Stray doorknobs tumble hotly across the square fronting foundational ruin. Tanks go out then the melt reserves, exhausted; eyes and mouths hold the only water and are losing it quickly; through a thinrimmed, dangerous opening whether melted or smashed with axes or trucks what with the weight of their tires, they’re soon pumping the lower Hudson directly, bailing the bay, it’s too late…reinforcements have been slow to arrive, thanks in part to a few guards at the Joysey approach still screening: orders are orders, always just following the order of orders, the protocol of detritus, procedure sunk deep in pondy pits, dug out by hoses by their steady focus and pressure, to be followed only by a directive to preserve — the Administration to take over the Island, to oversee it personally, Shaded protected, an army of agents safeguarding schlub and rub, keeping the remains from any element that hasn’t yet savaged: lengths of flute, revetments fallen, crumbs of column lining the edge of ashen decline to ice melting, melt melting…the door to His house, goldenyellow — Hanna had chosen the color, Israel’d hated it, a landmark argument (she’d called the Koenigsburg’s crying, the shoulder that was Edy’s phone, cradled between the ear and the shoulder with both multitasking), let’s not get into it, not the right time — it’s being carried by two firemenschs one on each side, carrying it to salvage: they heave it to a hulking sledge, to totter atop a mound of similar relics; still in its frame, not yet unhinged, it’s just hanging and so opening nowhere, without an up or down or an in or out or anything, melted from its wall of morning: it’s the same shade as the dawn, the color of fire, a bruised fruit sunrisefire, morning’s purge, the shake of dead branch, from its bark a page blank, aged to brittle — and an island, an Island is the only darkened thing, and darkening still, as if its own shadow, its blackburn a castdown remnant of the night; it lies in the bay becoming ocean as a wound, an openly weeping wound, floating always at the edge of this hemisphere, turning, only to teeter upon, then fall from, the very edge, right off this flattening world — never to heal.

Offshore, Liberty stands untouched, and untouchable, if already tarnished, and as such modest in her grief: arrayed in mourning robes, this metallic sackcloth, her torch a memorycandle snuffed in bronze for safety. As for her book — even if burnt, it’s still open. And as for that other monument, the tree, their Baum outlasting if only by a moment, a mere speck in the Island’s eye, all those other baums, and bergs, too, these krantzs and zweigs dead themselves, stumped graveless — once standing flagless, rude and proud in the midst of the Registry of the Great Hall halfextinguished, it’s a nothing now of choking, clawlike roots, to be upended for the mulch. Understand, this is assimilation: the transference of one element to another, one state as to its voided other, fire to smoke, tree to ashing away on the wind that seeds, and sorrows…O if only that smoke, that ash, it all, could be reassembled into the lost, but how, made manifest again and whole through some, any, allied alchemical effort…to be made then remade in perpetual recreation, what would that cost, what would that be worth — what’s a resurrected life, especially when you have to buy new possessions, when you have to chase after new desires by which to become possessed all over again? Air hovers, impacted, tight — heavy, as if the sky’s one spanless angel’s wing beating its hot thick breath against the faces assembled, too near, the holiness, it stifles. Guests standing outside loitering an uncertain future amid the certain morning, in diverse prodigalities of undress, they stare themselves into a mindful wakefulness, they have to, force themselves already to a newer purpose, inevitable and yet clutching anything they can: souvenirs, mementos mori, one mensch’s treasure another’s pagan trash, it’s said, jewelry, complimentary towels, bars and bottles of shampoo and soap emblazoned with the Garden’s seal — a tree’s star lonelier only than the Island upon which it stands, or stood, its logos the illiterate wind…grouphugging especially one another, themselves in their distress and shock as the monkeys now, the apes great and not so much, those forefathering creationary chimps, escaped from their subterranean vault, the Garden’s until presently secret Scriptorium in which they’d been enslaved and set to parchment copying, churning out their soferwork, the scrolls that are the Torah’s law: they’re flinging palmed wells of ink at everyone, hollering they’re hooting, swinging up from foundations revealed, grasping at beams and columns both falling and fallen to swing themselves, each other, with linked hands and arms from rafter to gird, antenna onto aerial then struts, with their quills as if daring letteropeners held between teeth, the Nachmachen alone in their midst and unhooded trying in vain to bribe them down and calm with the promise of a single banana he’s managed to save, just a peel, he’s sorry, from the Commissaries’ compost still flaming. Then, up from the deepest remains of underground life, as if the very unconscious of the structure destroyed, here comes the canine: dogs redeemed from the Kieferöde wildly spoiled by primal nature and yet retrained to work for their keep, hauling the sleds and the dead, with a pack following of the firemenschs’ dalmatians converted during the very siege of this catastrophe to the collarless cult of madness and so, to an impure, slobbering mate, they’re on fire and yelping and tearing through the assembled froth how they won’t tame down.

Metro Gestapo arriving only now, they slimily insinuate themselves, as if only to prove their mandate, attempting to stun, restrain — impossibly, which is possibly only for the cameras closing in, how they’re uniformly heroes, expecting the martyrdom of sudden fame, or promotion to a desk. Survived only to be taken from the Joysey wood, never lost their instincts, these dogs are here treeing what domestication’s being called for: the microphone menschs, the skied and skated lights and sound — dogs freakishly howling at the rising sun, snouting out its shine from behind the smokecast weather. They begin with their ripping and tearing, and then — even the hulkingest two or three encircled in the square, these specimens almost monstrous, worked muscular and venegeful, they’re swallowing up the evermore arriving medics, doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous disaster professionals, volunteer spectators by the hundreds if not thousands and more having sleighed or skied, skated and snowshod in from Joysey, smoked out of the city, melting into a stream sourced from all its fivealarmed boroughs: these dogs, they’re gulping them up, gnashing the gawkers then swallowing down…the terrible gape of their jaws, their mawgasps, a grum whinny, such pain in their haunches — aflame; Gestapo and those immediately, provisionally, deputized don’t let it go to your head, they’re trying their damnedest to subdue with smallarms fire, which only slows, though, and angers more, these mutants trudging on, doggeda-head and always toward the ice, Manhattan’s skyline fray. A coldbottomed, darkmorning hell of monkeys frantically freed and jumping up and down atop canine backs, dogs and bitches, too, with pups hanging from their teats, distended, burning they’re squealing at suck, biting on for their lives, chewing blood into milk, swinging, six on each at least and gnawing one another, as if leashed, by their teeth, they’re pendulous in the air, and tenuous there — and then, a gullscattering smatter of heavier weaponry, a cannon, must be, gross bombinations who can tell from whence they come whether over the ice from the Battery or from Joyseyways, and with their paws placed forward a first step from the rim of Manhattan’s ice, the dogs totter, lean, and slowly, one by one, fall, raising steam, a surface splash, crushing their pups to drown them, they fall dead the monkeys, too, what with their weight and fall how they fall through the ice now, to the water below, to begin their slow hairy sinks; firemenschs gathering throughout the paddly, madly shrieking descent of that afternoon and later even, quieting, as the dogs’ bodies fix, and the monkeys’ fix, too, then freeze; only to become melted, though, amid the roasting of marshmallows, certifiably kosher, speared on sticks of Israelien furniture — armchairs, desklegs, bedlegs — in the dusking dying flames set upon their flesh.

And then, as if feathers from wings, as stars ejected from the flight of the sky — snow begins to fall.

A hull, a husk, what a waste…what’s left’s only the exposing of foundation to the scandal of undestroying light: the Israelien basement lying open, exhumed innardly for autopsy, domestic viscera, how there’s nothing left to heal or save, to balm or else, to change — partially unfinished forever, an embarrassment of riches, and a rich embarrassment, too: the char of boxes, latter survivors of those once kept in perpetual flux, stepward retained and remained by the sacred calendar always, immovable trunks stilled at the stairhead, the leftovers of the melted refrigerator, storaged waste the wilted LPs, textbooks and cookbooks and the books underlined only in ash, a disagreeing highlight, flaming white rounds of balls for pingpong use on a roll around the tabled remains without a net. The yard, which is the furthest preserve, or once was, of His house, the only parcel left somewhat unscathed, otherly harmed, give or take, we’re talking. And how He’d never noticed that, never will either — that not only had they uprooted and moved His house for Him, and its frontlawn, too, the whole lot of plot with anything goes strewn and the fence too low to keep in appearances with a gate without a lock…but how they’d gone and taken the backyard, too, there facing the windows He’d never looked out of, will never look down from — they’re shattered, sills a crack of cinder — and so the backyard surviving and with it, its twin appletrees, grown so near the ice they’d been forgotten about, withered, and witheringly forlorn, taken as icicles when regarded, if, by whom — as shadows, mere excreta of winter, wisps of remaining smoke, two mirrors placed to face one another, reflectively infinite with frost: Rubina had climbed them once hard between her legs, Simone and Judith had one summer every day of it come here to pick and cool; though all of their apples had long soured, then fallen far moons ago, only to be pilfered by Brooklyn boychicks out for a sin motzei Shabbos — now nearly a year dead, these two trees seasonscorched, still standing.

As for the Temple dimmed in the distance, its star a sixth risen above the smoke, it’s been foreclosed upon by the State in a reckless invocation of, pay attention, eminent domain: it’s theological, you wouldn’t understand, better let the rabbis handle that, your former friends and neighbors; then its site haphazardly converted, seemingly overnight, all extant of its one hundred and eight floors, and with its ritzy penthouse, too, the highest gallery of the holy once intended as the Manhattan residence of the High Priest, which is Him’s what they’d been thinking when He’s old enough, if ever — to laudably lowincome, Section Shmoneh (8) governmentsubsidized housing (who’d use it as a shul, as it’d been suggested early in the planning process, who would pray on grounds so presumptive, so irremediably, irredeemably tainted, was the dissenting thought), essentially tenementspace set aside under new legislation specifically for the use of young, recently hitched couples (parking included, one cart per family, plus unlimited use of a post for the hitching of horses), husbands studying days at whichever yeshiva they might’ve qualified for, and that statesponsored, also, most of the more respected institutions situated Uptown at Park’s edge toward Harlem with a host of others scattered north throughout the Heights; their womenfolk taking in what laundry and sewing they can, cooking for their husbands home argumentweary, come sundown to this, the penultimate floor, hosting apartments #s 102–108, at present home to the Marys reinvented Malkas: three Malkas, or perhaps they prefer Malcha, who knows how they pronounce it, Kotsk, recently married off to triplets named Ivan, greencarded in from Russia, blackhatted out in Brooklyn before, exhaustedly, being relocated here, and two Malkas Plotsk, too, incredibly unrelated to one another though the younger’s a distant enough relation, it’s been said (by them), to the elder Kotsk if you know him, then a Malcha Upstairchik and her neighbor Malcha Downstairchik, though the both of them with their husbands they lived on the same floor and right nextdoor, lighting the Hanukah candles tonight in their windows with views to the Park not quite to die for but appreciable enough, they’ll live; they’re in their kitchens deepfrying latkes, flipping, then flipping again as if the very flatness of their lives, one side to the other, a conversion if slightly burning in the head, and stirring how they’re always stirring away at these thick, gooseskinned burbles of soups and cholents that they have to remind themselves every now and again not to add butter to because schmaltz, gribnes, flanken it’s fleischig, don’t forget — these new words stirring their mouths to a spit from the turn of the secular year, the false turn to which they’ve already turned their backs and with a poo poo over the shoulder poo to the past how they’re stirring dreidel round and round from nothing’s Nun to Gimel takes all in (their stomachs as wide as their households’ deepest pot, a donation), even through the Eve itself never once stilling themselves from their preparations in order to reflect, even for a moment, a moment with its own pregnancy, too, in the glow of the gathered lights, altogether eightdue.

Hanukah’s octal nights the generosity of seven days that end this year on Shabbos, and only then may the week commence with corruption: though there’d been no party last night, no popping of corks with the tongue in the cheek, no shikkers out in the streets wild and naked and hooting inhuman as in years way past immemorial, none, no observance; it’s just business as usual, and in another unusual season, in this winter perpetual, perpetuating, quarter be damned, with a reported 99 % probability of precipitation by midnight at the earliest and yet everyone wakes and rises the next morning to that slimmest of chances that everything’s going turn out just fine, God abides: the sun rises from out of the candlemelt of newly heirloomed menorahs, to be scraped out then sent back to their cherrywood cabinets, exiled for yet another year without polish. And would you believe, that even with that new cabinetry and great custom builtins, updated deluxe, the refridge slash freezer state of the art, the selfcleaning, Shabbosmode oven below the rangetop’s upgrade platinized stainless, the retiled kitchen with its counters and cooking surfaces retopped, too, new windows and doors and the furniture reupholstered, gevalt — they’ve still had trouble renting this unit?

In Miami, this Sunday into a workday tomorrow, tonight, the night begins and a day begins, the night ends and with it another day begins, too — it’s work whichever way you slice it, a fat healthy slab if you’ve got the appetite or maybe slivered for those on a diet to pick at, a little less, no, really, I shouldn’t, no, go ahead, it’s fine every once in a while, who me, I won’t tell…no one notices they missed a turn, or calls them on it or kvetches cheat, you took a hand from the piece, pay attention. Here in this refurbished penthouse, atop an endtable — one of the only elements remaining, that’s original, this and the endtable on which it rests and that table in the other room, too, call it the beginning-table, if you must (once intended for workaday essing, just guessing), witness the sale’s requirements of new terms for new markets, more words for more money down…surfaces having survived the designers with all their samples, the consultants, their budgets: the old chessboard, it’s theirs, once was His. Its pieces now stand without benefit of players or game, not moving mind you, there’s no magic here; they’re just standing. On their own, as it’s said. As if waiting only for a mind with a hand. The board sits, as the pieces stand — all of it exiled, too, from atop that other table set in the diningroom, recliningly roomed on four legs slowly developing, with splinters, knees, furniture that’d been worthwhile antique even back when PopPop was living and unlike him has remained, having been remanded — the checkered chess’ surface unplaying to an empty house, topped with its ranks rowed unmoved — to this matching oak, mirrorhutched slab set firm in its foundations, you like, which are thick shag, wonderful, no, its gaming parquet lately draped with a doily (this touch, the agent’s), the entire unit moved up against the window, new glass, insulated like you wouldn’t believe, how much you’ll save a fortune on bills. Much remodeling is what, and minimal interest (though this she won’t admit, the agent blowing on her fingernails cupped around the phone), no takers and so, no heat: icicles hang from the baseboard, a condo frozen out of time…

History gets around. Everybody knows whose this once was.

A guest of a sun forces its way in, uninvited as always, muttering inlaw — the barging of its single breast. As shadows in its light that PopPop had once owned, at least had rented out to the hosting of others — and perhaps it’s only seeking a return on all the money once made in its name, as if risen expressly to collect, or if just to beam in aggrandizing apology, maybe, for the cancer it once visited upon the chest of his wife, or his own mother — then through the shades…here, the chesspieces are cast every which way across their squares; they’re scattered, moving, moved, in flagrant violation of every rule, moving at the same time both sides white and black, and in different directions front and back, in moves those pieces can’t make, mundanely don’t or shouldn’t. It’d been a game halted midplay, as PopPop had to wash, dress, then wash again, brush, down a quick capful of mouthwash, snip his nails into darned dark socks fuzzied memorially in his dead wife’s whitesoled slippers, to meet this goy Arschstrong he asked B earlier to call Uncle or Arnie down a flight for what He’s never thought, He’d never asked, there’s no one to ask now, anyway, He can’t. An attack without a defense, a defense without an attack, and all of it: intention, direction, stilled…except shadow, which at noon is none. The chesspieces stand only as pieces of chess. And then, with the passage of sun, hourly disappointed, afternoonly resigned, its light arced to holy with shine this two bedroom with eatin kitchen that the harried, scoldeyed realestate maid she comes and cleans at twice a week, needing this sale, even a rental, how she needs anything except this very needing to please: they’re small the pieces, slowly flung the other way across the board again. Hours of shadow play against each other the same game every day — a game of illogic, as a move of logic, or else those both of nature’s game…as a strategy the same day in, day out, and perfectly known, if only in its impossibility to master. Yesterday, yet another happily newlywed couple’d taken a look at the place, open and shut cabinets, tested the blinds, its and hers and theirs; elbowed one another as they smirked at the beds: husband an oliveoil salesmensch who knew a pitch when he heard one (but didn’t talk much himself — he’d just caught a cold), sneezing and coughing in the freeze while fanning his hand through his own product slicking back his hair; his wife a wife without ambition to more, a myope but bright and grinny, she had moles across her face as if a mappemonde to the temple of her smile — and yet how she’d complained how hard this building was to find (still, she’d be the type to always get her way)…they don’t know how to play chess, is what; I haven’t the faintest, she’d said. If they move in, if the husband ends up talking the still busty, redcheeked agent down to take the place at well below what she calls market (flirting with his frowning lips, how he’d get an earful on the long ride home) — will they keep the board, where it is, set up and played out halfway as it is…as a curio, or conversation piece, Loreta had said, today the agent, tomorrow the maid: as a piece of highminded, low upkeep decoration to set alongside the teiglach tray (every time she’d have a showing, she’d make sure to bake her best)? But before any contract can be claused for closing, the State gets involved, takes it, too, then stiffs her on any commission, her rightful fee, brokering herself nothing but personal ruin: the Administration has it proclaimed a landmark, then announces an initiative to refurbish it yet again, to restore it to its original state, and this after management had spent what it’d spent, gone all out to remove any sign of its former incarnation, its glitzy, silveryears style nearly three decades old, with the kitschy carpet clashing with the wallpaper, blue ugly below the slick vymura, wipeclean another and even uglier shade of winkly superannuated blue (and don’t get her started on the drapes)…any trace whatsoever of its former occupants Loreta’d pretend she’d never heard of them, didn’t know what they were talking. The idea’s to open it up as a Museum, another, of the horror, terror, of the deceit; they’ll keep everything where it is if that’s where it’d been, rehabilitating all the rest to an intimation of its former vainest glory, labeling losses, enshrining the mundane: requisitioned from the warehouse, one (1) banal couch puce and plump whose cushions once, if only for a week, not even, held the idle form of evil.

It’s depressing, enough, to lose this, too, she’d needed it; she hadn’t been to closing in who wants to think, too long, to tell the truth she’s never. Loreta the realestate agent, she used to be a secretary, Israel’s, if you hadn’t heard already: questioned in the winter of last year after he’d died then released, for cooperating (turning over files and tapes they’d been interested in only she’d known where they were, in which system they’d been filed, for saving certain timesheets, also, from the looters, plaintiff attorneys who’d come to claim the spoils of adversaries settled into death), the Garden had offered her protection, a unit in Miami, just downstairs — Arschstrong’s, she hadn’t wanted to ask whose. Knew to keep her mouth shut, what with a free roof above her head. Loreta, who down here couldn’t find work with any surviving attorney; who’d give her the references, the resume’s blank bottom: anyone who’d worked with her up north was either graved or Gardened, and so she went and took a nightclass, got certified and began trying to sell off units in this building and others owned by its benevolent management company, units 2br/1.5 bath w/ k.k. almost totally abandoned if not wholly from death then from its collateral flee, all around greater Miami, her territory down to Key Wherever due south, not that she’s ever been down there, she didn’t have the keys; she’s not much of a success or a traveler (which is what she’d wanted out of retirement, if ever), her life hasn’t been what it could’ve, not ever since, it stings. Loreta, the woman who’d spent the most time with Israel, the most facetime, talktime, minutes for the two together if they’d’ve been kept would’ve totaled to intimacy, she would’ve been billed the most total sum of his face-hours, his talkhours (for which she’d pay him in overtime daily), Israel’s wife and daughters and certainly his son who’s barely born, forgive him, inclusive. Loreta, she’s presently among the most observant, or at least convinced, of Affiliated converts, having with Israel’s death and the death of the firm, its partners and many if not most of its clients, too, was not only unemployed but also severely depressed, clinically a wonderful state for coming nearer my God, as her people would’ve put it (an idol of the Virgin not her once standing veiled in the corner of her mother’s room back home in Vineland), moping around that Joysey house — which she hasn’t kept: how it’s the only house she’s ever sold — in gray sweats from her stateschool alma mater, her disconsolate and sobbing while gorging on medications, pills for pills requiring pills, gallon after gallon of icecream melting under the Xmas firm giftbasket liqueur she’s hoarded, a cherry cordial she’d pour atop the vanilla scoops to get drunk on then fall asleep from as if melted herself on the fudging of the couch: hers the rockiest road, the chunky should be chippiest and yet the doughiest, too, without direction, no shoulder to cry on waited out, for her next calling called, the phonetuck, the onhold lean, scraping dry skin from her elbows, flossing nightly with her hair loss, showering less and gaining weight. To get up from the couch, only to run up the longdistance bills and in ratty weekend sneakers. How the phone would ring, then she’d trip over her sweats baggy to the carpet to pick them up and answer it, hello — you’ve reached the law offices of Goldenberg, Goldenberg, &…always the wrong number — Loreta? Nobody by that name here, sorry, now’s not a good time, I’ve been changed, my number’s up, it’s disconnected, please hang up and dial. Married last moon to the building’s super she’s lately Leah Weiss, and who doesn’t want to lay a Weiss — Israel, are you listening, are you out there; though he never laid a hand on her, not one, not even once a finger, not even on those longhot, palm-printed on her windowed memory afternoons summering late amid southernmost excruciation, when she’d lean all the way, way egregiously over to file who knows what away without doubt unnecessarily, extraneously so as to liven up the hours with just a wiggle of those two scooped loaves of hers up at him, their wisp of yesterday’s panty, her knocker knees in those wriggly heels of hers or the Friday boots up to her crotch, the ran slightly ripped dark hose worn three sizes too small as if to cut off circulation, not his, no, it’s that…he’d never even given her a mean word let alone a slap, a shtup, a good hard zogging; no matter, he wouldn’t live to regret. Loreta sits late at her overflowing desk, her husband’s, to be precise Evan Weiss (he’d mocked up a replica for her, for love, a handymensch, from memory, hers)…who’s downstairs just now, he’s checking on the boiler. In Arschstrong’s den made her showroom/office, she pores over dictation, with her fingertips like tears, listening over the headphones to the old dictaphone tapes she still picks and pecks, types the night away at this old manual, an antique Remington 18 Evan had purchased for her with scrip from their one of many Recently Affiliated Unions (RAUS) just getting organized, splitleveling up from out of the freeze all over winterized Miami. Easy on the manicure, diddle the platen, she scribes, taking the same dictation from the same dictated tape she’s taken already a hundred, a thousand times previous, and still, she’s never remembered…how she does this every night late, she needs to (who to complain of the clacking, as her husband here’s the boss and obviously no one lives above, or below), needs to hear him and his formulas again, again his formulations forever, dear so & so, in re: INRI: she’s thinking, and what a martyr, too, in that she most loves now those duties of hers that she most hated then, the fetching of an Elijah’s cup of coffee, makes it hard on herself and black when the cup’s not sipped how she tells herself it’s terrible…take a letter, says his ghost, a little of the martyr in him himself: then shred all and send its scraps on the wind, she knows these moods too well…with a CC: to the east, a little Latin, while lower down there’s to be a section sign—§, which symbol Israel would always remind her had been derived from the ancient letter gimel, the third of the Affiliated alphabet, from gemul, a slight antagonym, he’d explain, selfmeaning and, too, contradicting itself, a contronym translating alternately as Reward, and also as its Punishment.

Got it.

Read it back.

Hereby. Respectfully submitted, etc.

Sentence, his ghost says.

And then, paragraph.

Very Truly Yours, it says statickly, Me…and then how she’s to fill in the Me with Israel Israelien, Esq., over which he might, if he wasn’t too busy, in a meeting, on the phone or otherwise disposed with the trashcan in the corner of his corneroffice and tossing, attempted, crumpled, looseballed papers as if the flakes and drifts of their snoglobe weights above, or else in court and what with this letter, brief, or contract having to go out now — the mail’s at three — sign the same name Israel Israelien Israel Israelien Israel Israelien over and again in an illegible haste, a smudge of impatience, ink blotting blemish from the forge of his fountain (Loreta turned Leah had done this all the time, filled in for him, even once impersonated his voice, the one still speaking if only for her own ears, confidential years ago in a longdistance call to his father, who’d been crazy and estranged, according to him, though when she talked to him that once he’d seemed fine, decently sane and even, though she wouldn’t mention it, kind), smirching the remaining hold of firm stationary she’s stolen, 20lb. noncorrasable bond still preciously surviving; she’s already licked out of envelopes, has only two reams of letterhead left — she keeps them boxed in her oven, which is selfcleaning, when she’s not cleaning it herself.

How’d you spell escheat? she asks the ghost…though we all know that ghosts only dictate, they never respond, don’t sign for anything, and — isn’t it true that, they never know to spell.

Israel never did.

¶ Deposition of…she types now, held at the offices of Goldenberg, Goldenberg, & Israelien LLP, 45 East 33rd Street, New York, New York, 10016, pursuant to Notice, before Loreta O. Strozzapreti, a Registered Professional Reporter and Notary Public of the State of New York.

9. EXAMINATION BY MR. ISRAELIEN:

10. Q. It is our mutual understanding that portions of this record may

11. be read into evidence. However, all objections except as to the

12. form of the question are reserved until trial.

13. A…typing out depositions of deponents long deposed of to the dead. Her tears tap the keys, sticking, jumblblbling…she types: hereby stipulate, types, pursuant to, then the ghost says again as she rewinds the tape to a garble: ottnaus…pursuant to our discussion, let’s talk Hanna would always ask, would demand, about the hours you’ve been keeping: her not suspecting him of infidelity, rather of the opposite, of being too faithful, too true to his work, fathering not their kinder as much as husbanding time, and whole sheets of the stuff as null as the day’s sky, turned down late into night — absent, the faceless face of the clock: how she’d kid stripped before bed when he’s coming home midnight from a meeting, I’ll get your partners to represent me, sue you for nonsupport; billing twentyfive hours a day, eight days a week, an hour for only a moment of thought in the shower, his practice fair or not: a consideration at towel’s length, contemplating the tie of a tie four in hand with dimple, or a shoe’s spit knucklepolish, then a quick kiss to his wife who she’s still sleeping and he’s out the door to his car or the train. Argument for its own sake, an appeal for the sake of appeal — him a lawyer at first for building contractors, for plumbers, autoaccident victims (his covenant, you will receive a cash settlement or I get no fee); he’d done personal injury, workers’ comp, liability, then moved himself into the corneroffice’s corporate work, mergers & acquisitions, late nights at the kitchen or even later into morning the diningroom table poring over his own scrapheap obsessions, Latinate and private, a personal edition of the most secular of Scripture. Notes on Promissory Estoppel in Collective Bargaining Agreements 1:1. In the end, Loreta has to think, how it’s all estoppel, isn’t it, detrimental reliance, we know it as delusion, the enabling lie: taking certain measures contingent on the veracity of information provided, on the faith faithed in promise, assurance, oral contracts taken out on the given word we call them. Non concedit venire contra factum proprium, give me a break, who says. How she thought she’d had a future there, was once even thinking about trying out for paralegal, going for broke on a cooperative investment expecting a raise, if wishful — for the better, though, as the co-op, with the death of its management, it’s turned out to be a coop, like for chicks. Israelien v. Greater Miami Food Services at 9, she’d handled that; it’d taken months. Damages, I’m due. Too much and probably pregnant, too. And old. Either express or implied…how I’d buy Hanna flowers whenever Wanda would call to remind. Didn’t once forget to send even his father a card. I’d sign it, Loreta—he’d never. She’s crying, lights another candle on the counter in the kitchen, a line of them between her two dryingracks, the meat kept kosher from the milk. Seethe on your own time, but separately, if you can. How is it she still feels his presence, his eyes on her, and hears that voice…her new religion, if it even is a religion and not a, forget it, asks her not to ask; and how her husband who he’s her despondent, too, he serves then clears the courtroom of their distance, later at night and in bed reminds her, nu, we don’t even believe in ghosts anymore, not supposed to, not as such: more like possessions, hymn, as in dybbuks, incarnations or usurpations, but ghosts, no, I don’t think so, Leah, but I’m no rabbi, yet — that and in the morning when her brother down in Texas calls, he reminds her better, that before she converted she always said she hated the schmuck, it might be best forgotten. The again overtime, the weekend hours how he’d never work Saturday but she’d come in on Sundays, too — you think she ever got Shabbos off, forget it. She loved her job she says to her brother-inlaw, now named Israel, too (so few names with real kavod these days, true yichus or zichus she can’t remember which, and with so many people wanting them: her brother, he’d chosen late, last pick), who he’s still wrangling cattle but as of last moon for a kosher concern…and thinking — is what he says but she’s not and not listening either — about opening up a slaughterhouse outside Houston, if he could only glatt the backers into reviving a trusted brand; she did, though, love, don’t get her wrong, she liked: it paid well, her job, then the benefits, and Israel, though she might lionize him in death, as a tamer or taskmaster, he’d been pleasant enough, better than expected if only in hindsight, though her eyes are going what with the small print and miniature night type; she says to her brother, her brat, her ach: Evan wants me to burn the tapes, I’ll burn the tapes, I promise — tomorrow, first thing before I daven (tonight, she still has to summarize a brief); but don’t think I’ll ever stop hearing that voice — which would shriek down the phone though her desk had been cubicled just beyond the door.

As for the office, it hasn’t much changed; not the layout, only the furnishings. Inevitably, a sheaf of magazines have folded, or have been desubscribed to, stolen or moved around, flipped through then restacked again out of issued order; the glass has been replaced out front with another slab of blank clarity because they couldn’t add etch to or scrape the names from the old convincingly, or cheaply. Though Goldenberg, Goldenberg, that walled sign over reception still reads, then & Thronrauber in a different font, pretentiously with serif, Attorneys-At-Law—at your service. Call it continuity, despite. Nobody by any of those names has lately hung a hat here. I’m Mordy, but when you’re calling ask for Guy. Too early in the morning and with no brunch in Him, recently sleepless what with the fear inspired by the little He’s asked in return for His bed and board, miserly, too, and provisionally He thinks in spite, He’s leftover the holiday attempted to an exhaustion matched only by that of His purpose, both as mated to those of this family’s most demanding personalities (mother, wife) and, as well, in light of a present piety that’s damning of all senses and ambivalent toward dream…B’s arrived here with the proctologist and his wife, and her dressedup something like a weddingcake already, a healthy portion: with an icingly pink pillboxhat over pinker wig, frostpowdered face, the bride and groom of her bosom sweetly perfumed, and their daughter whom they’ve been calling Eli — you might’ve missed her, don’t beat your breast about it: anyway, how she’s been too shy to tell Him her full name, whether her new name or old, anything about herself, really, also she’s not quite allowed to be alone with Him for any appreciable time — that is, not until, we’re hoping. Holdingout. Eli who’s crying because being here’s mortifying, and how He wants to know why, suspicious, but every time He leans around her mother to mouth entreaties at her eye her mother keeps leaning forward, her lips sloppily filled with complimentary jelly and curd, asking B if He’s feeling well, hungry or thirsty and Him not understanding, only how much He doesn’t want to…what’s He here for is what meddles, only that the proctologist had forced Him into a doubled doublebreasted suit he’d managed to impromptu along with a cardboard belt and tie ensemble, then a cart down to Mitteltown to take care of some things, he’d said, a bit of paperwork pertaining to your status, get you legal, keep you safe, secure, and how He thinks — no problem, the mensch’s been good people so far, so good, soso, and how the daughter’s not tootoo…until now, Him ending up in this office, which hasn’t even merited a plaque: keep waiting, it’s on order.

Though not just any office…B doesn’t even know He’s in it, how deeply what this was, His father’s, what could’ve been, all His with tasteful lighting. The lobby’s plush if haphazard: the looting of a year ago’s still in evidence, desuetude, loopholes and gaps; the furniture had been purchased all in a lot to replace the antiques Israel had selected over the years, Empire in its Americanly acquisitive origins and devolutions both decadent and proper, staying seated if occasionally refined, preEmpire, nearEmpire, once risen conference curios by the time of their disappearance, fallen, wingchairs become clipped, corrupt, today made a host of the foldable, cardtables collapsing to the filed thinness of pending suits: seats unpadded, but the tabletops, they’ve sprung out extra makeshift legs to warranty such vinyl. Stacked reference materials, stools of crate and barrel. A bell rings from down the hall and this mensch emerges from behind nothingness, just a foldingchair unfolded from the grooves where the receptiondesk had been, asks B and the proctologist to follow him, right this way and huffily selfimportant: taking their leave of such a worried, Hadassah/Sisterhooded wife with a tongue like a subscription renewal insert (busying Solitaire with her membership cards, just now too concerned with her cascade), her reddened, promised daughter, then down a hall whose walls are still white if, could it be, snowed a little brighter, and this despite no new wash or coating, if only in relation to the stain retained of photographs removed; a coatrack wilts in a corner; the watercooler’s empty, webbed with the industry of spiders. A grove of plaintiffly withered plants scattered about here and there along with sorry files, paperaeroplaned whiles, with no bargain pled of access or negotiating passage, they have to compromise high toe heel along their ways. To avoid a slip and fall, them suing, a settlement for loss. Bad shape, and that’s my closing statement. The prosecution rests, to honor shiver.

Everything’s underheated if not unheated totally, with an icewind down the halls…then the hall down to the last offices and there the largest, too, cornered at the edge of the building, topfloored thirtysix high above Mitteltown’s marked drudge: papers gust through, and more files, merging and acquiring then winding apart, everywhere draftily whirled around with the Garden’s ash duct in, what sustaining smoke, as if an interior night (that’s if it’s not just the electricity’s been cut here: nonpayment, moons overdue), now starred with a raided suppliesroom’s worth of miscellaneous office staples, paperclips and stamps, their edges and those of the sharpest papers, too, and then the folders for files cutting them as they pass, slicing them raw, as if unfolding their flesh to the cold. The mensch leading, how can you trust him wearing such a bulky trench indoors. An opened office at hallway’s end reveals a glaring glass, a window the length of the wall, and to Him fishbowlish, though the wet’s still kept outside, upsidedowned and floating in the sky. It’s fronted by two menschs, sitting in two chairs set uncomfortably too close to each other behind their single, small desk, which is little more than the old office door fallen to rest atop sawhorses dirty, scarred, obviously filched from the reconditioned street. At work, in progress this regression. Don’t bother to get up, on my account, no good here. Better you should shvitz.

The heat in the room and only this room is up incredibly against the prevelant outside, what weather let in through the halls: how hot is it that the two how you have to convince yourself they’re lawyers, and keep reminding, are decked out in suits, with jacket, vest, and pants, but how under these there’s nothing else, apparently nothing underneath whether worn or mended, borrowed, white or blue, only these two suits of three pieces each as slouched right off the remaindered’s hangers, tailored too loose from the skeletal rack; no shirts are evident under their vests and jackets, no underwear in evidence under the pants under the single shared desk (the bulges are too conspicuous from both sides of the metal’s median support), no socks around either, shoeless. What else, this unbecoming, it’s just a hunch, a feeling: how they’re the kind of lawyers who can never take calls, who let’s say regularly shut the lights then hide behind the cabinets for linner, which is houred to encompass the entire afternoon — a splurge on delivery, let the secretary tip, or else to send her freezing for their takeout, then forget to remunerate receipts. Waiting as if patient for any client paying even only one of them as they’re only billing each the other, selling short and fat the one, the other tall and overcharging, one wipes his brow with a cuff of his suit while the other examines his stubble in the reflection of a nailfile, which could be used to split wood, or to cut the clouds, make rain. The proctologist gives B a wink that says, they know me here, or maybe there’s schmutz in his eye; then, he tugs on an ear, as if that’s a sign, too, for what and not just nerves. Trust me, I know how to talk to these people. That’s what the other eye wants to say, many times unwinked. Whoever they are, whatever they make…Goldenbergs, Thron, & Rauber, He suspects they’ll be anyone you want — if you can pay, in cash and preferably today.

And what can we do for you, the fat asks, Mister…

Jacobson, says the proctologist.

Please, Mister Jacobson, says the skinny, let the boy speak for Himself…I’m not Jacobson, says the proctologist.

And so you’re here for a change of name…

No, says the proctologist, He’s…accusing with an ungloved finger he still uses for you shouldn’t know what and enjoyably, here to be, what’s the term—Confirmed, so that He can finally go and marry my daughter, get her out of the house if only for a night…during which, let’s hope, to make a zeyde out of me.

And so?

I’ve been told by my rabbi, he goes on, undaunted, that despite His assurances His, nu, covenant needs to be checked…independentlike, thirdparty and all, but you’re the professionals, aren’t you, I’m paying you to be — to demonstrate proof of His circumcision is what, and cough, in the presence of at least two witnesses, preferably lawyers is what he said, or a notable notary public. A mensch down at my mikveh, Shearith Israel’s, gave me your names, Little Jimmy Mizrahi who handles for me my malpractice, said you’d give me a good deal if I mentioned him.

The two menschs turn to stare at each other; then the skinny turns back to calm a yawn into his fist.

Mister Jacobson, he says, it’s standard policy to ask you to leave the room for the purposes of this inspection.

Say no more. As if to say even more. Keep everything in confidence except my confidence in you.

I assure you, says the fat, it’ll only be a moment…and as the proctologist rises he asks after him, as if unconversant: just look at the thing, that’s the Law, that’s what you want we should do, sign a piece of paper, give you a stamp, a large one we have, your choice of inks in every shade of red — the skinny adding, we don’t have to touch it, I’m just saying…to say: we might get our hands dirty for the money, but dignity’s the rub. Don’t blame, or accuse, they’re only assuming, with blushes. May it please the court, they’re new to this if greedy. And though the proctologist’s standing he’s nodding dumbly, stalling; probing around obscenely in his pockets front then rear for a wallet, which he eventually samples from his pants, tacts from it a stack of new bills he lays on the seat of his foldingchair. Appreciated, he says and then why not lies a businesscard atop, one of his own, you never know, tempting the cozen of professional courtesy, I’d do well by you…then turns to leave them alone, a schmeck privacy their privilege: he’s escorted out the doorway in the company of the receptionist who’d showed them in, a mensch they’d had to hire because of their frummier clients, the more religious who wouldn’t deal with a woman unless a relation, then how it’d become too much, this hiring of everybody’s kind and gifted sister; and so this haughty, hubristic, hospitalityschool dropout, he heads the doctor back down the halls to the lobby, its newspapers, magazines, wife, which none of them ever change except in their moods, her using the frontpages of today’s still crackling Fire! as a crumbly napkin, a dozen or so deep into the complimentary refreshments: yesterday’s coffee, the rugelach of last week, disappointingly fruity ever since they’re out of chocolate.

The two menschs behind their sawhorse desk cleaning their glasses without glass with their ties, which are untied one starred the other striped, and frayed loose at lesser ends: their unfocused squint as if they’re always thinking, never not; then, replacing their glasses of only frames and then their ties, too, the greater end of each’s thrown back over their shoulders as if silken wings or the pursy ears of sows; they sit unsettled, hunched over their common desk of the converted door with its knob still installed at middle, which they both take turns touching at and turning, then both have a hand on it at the same time, on each other’s and how they’re stroking almost in reassurance, shvitzy to stoop forward and even nearer to one another, then to B, with their other hands holding up their heads: the listening position, it’s known as; futz conversate, though, the consultation’s theirs.

Stand up, please, the skinny says, come closer. And loosen your belt, says the fat…don’t worry, we don’t bite. Your shver, the tuchus doctor — he didn’t pay for that.

B approaches the desk, standing it feels to both a floor tall above the seated lawyers, staring out through the extensive glass behind them, with its view to Mitteltown’s rushhour…at the snow falling in a whitewashing squall (as if provender to livestock), at the sacrificial animals specied to servile dray: the mules, donkeys, oxen, horses hamed; the carts certified push, pull, and peddling, then those of the milkmenschs, too, the trundling delivery boychicks, the streetside prophets and the unrelieved, allrevealed schnorrers, the roiling moil of forms clad in daily black…and as the skinny he’s saying, nu, so drop them, a clattering comes dull from just behind — one of the two menschs standing amid the gusts of the doorway has let go of his pistol, and holds up his hands in defense; the other, however, ignores the order and the response of his partner, ranges his aim wildly around the room at the lawyers then at the tushy mensch between them with His hands on His corrugated belt, as if about to let loose with whipping…hymn, Hymies, they have to be — at least operative under an Affiliate acronym. As the first one who’s the second in command, he thinks, his partner’s assured him, backs himself from the room slowly with his hands still raised bearing too much white mortifying the cuff of his shirt against the suit’s black, dynastically classic and official as hell…the other’s still yelling at them all to get down, mutterfutzer, don’t move, freeze — it’s already frozen, makes no sense, this fall yourselves down upon your face, humble, scrape prostrate already shoeless, they’re stood on hopeless ground…and so the two lawyers lie themselves flat on the carpet unvaccuumed, their hands held behind their backs, the two of them yelling at the other two whichever variant of We gave at the office. Shut the futz up, which one of you’s which. B doesn’t lie down or even turn around, rollover, and this despite their orders armed with aim. Rather, He cradles His blackboard as if it’s His newborn, and then with head bowed down to chest as if to deference its breasty idols, vaults up and almost over the desk doored before Him but goes through the thing instead and flying, only to shatter Himself, too, stumbled through the window amid a nimbose explosion of glass, to fall through the air then down a floor giving way to floors after floors down through the weather and its own floating fall — to land unharmed atop a snowdrift, within it as an oversized flake foundered upon a swaddle soft and loosely packed. B to rise up gevalt the knees amid slateshards, the window’s wood and glass scattered across the walk, to leave His broken board, His bitten chalk, and huddle disappeared — seethed into Park Avenue and its heedless herds, the Mitteltowning swarm.

Though many think, all are right. And though many know, all are wrong. To think through His disappearance, to ask amid everything questioning else where He disappears to, when He does, and how exactly might He do it — that is, to create. It follows thusly — to purport to know Why? is only to destroy. To answer, therein lies the sin, unequivocal. Here, we’re creating a canon of our own, at the very least updating the one we’ve been born with, were born into, and so giving it life, a future if only in His death. Let there be a negative tradition. An inheritance owed. And it was, and still is. A living life against. Be not discouraged, though; interpretation’s acceptable to any question asked, is actually encouraged, rewarded in its own time, even if it be posthumous, praise be to He, Hallelujah…however, answers are still forbidden: they shall be destroyed, scorched by the sun of days, left in the valley to blacken the beaks of our vultures.

History is His, is ours, and not as a fixed sum, a known, but as a continuum, if darkened, a forever beginning, an unvoided void. And so it’s with a mind for this history, this past we might date and time by the deaths, inevitably, joyously, of our many martyrs, that B plots an end of His own. A Zionless plotz. Without these losses, no gains might be ours. Immortality is abominable to memory, also to banks and to the capacities of even our greatest synagogue and shuls, their oppugnant schools. But how to have an end to call His own, having been forbidden from calling, without tongue, His mouth the grave of a name. A death itself shrouded in the as yet unknown, graven upon tomorrow, buried in future, a coffin if falsely bottomed to the day before that…the thought now is Polandland, far toward the east, it having become too dangerous over here, too hostile, exposed. America, what’s next. America, vot ken you mach…and there, what — to begin again, to honor your self and your stubborn ambition with the perpetual promise of newness, the always novel, the once failed now all over again, there on the other older side of the ocean, here upon the olden, othered side of the sidereal deep in which His parents lie, and His sisters, His people fallenflung in a tangle of millions, sunken and yet still twinkling however many depths down or above, only to become swallowed up into the netted bellies of the fish swallowed by the fish that constellated constant Leviathan will upon the arrival of the next Flood swallow down into its belly of net, the underside of the moon without rainbow.

Polandland, where everything began, there it would end, if only for Him, if only for now…spin the globe, point a finger; on a long Shabbos afternoon to idly flip through an atlas, then stop and, po or sham, that’s where history hails from, promise. Polandland, where everything’s, what’s the idea I’m thinking here, the ideal I’m saying, the word without chalk or board…where He can get Himself perspective that’s what, a sensibility, distance, remove — the wart of the word on the tip of the tongue, the pickled silver sliver of flesh, fishlike if headless, stilled, mounted in its setting of gold, having been excavated from the ruins of His house, dug from the scorched mouth of the earth — only for it to leave its limited time only exhibition in the Museum in the Park north from the Temple’s conversion, to make the rounds of every major metropolis, wandering city to city in its lingual stump, an equatorial twisting…to outlive infamy, outlasting even reality, on its way to becoming a symbol — with the mensch to whom it belonged to be remembered as a relic Himself, to be embraced but only in His toothy demise, its humiliation, whiteshrouded. A sickly veil. To then ask with this severance of His for another, if only He could, to wag its length into a question, to curl it, even at this remove, at such a sunder, around what appeal: to ask with it permission to leave, for leave to escape, to beg, beseech, bow down, to humble myself in the midst — a tongue that would be the brother of the snake of Eden treed before its Fall, a tongue with knees, I’m talking. Think of it, how to leave affairs all up in the air, rain-bowlike and at their highest arc, promising only the undecided unmade, the still unthought and forever unknown…redemption necessary to any expatriation, Him needing to be released from this bondage before He binds Himself anew (don’t begin when you haven’t finished, or — Hanna would often harangue along these lines); it’s maybe pitiful, perhaps abject, but faithful, respectful, honoring — this seeking of maternal permission, this wanting of a brotherly consent. To obtain His freedom from any Pharaoh with a heart significantly unhardened, melted to any sympathetic wet. To ask with a burnt, coalslowed tongue the only question to which an answer might be permitted, the answer of — do what you want, what you will, up to you. Affirming maturity. Independence. You’re on your own, grown up. I have a response. Anyone have a query? And if none would oblige? I’ll let myself go. Even more than I already have.

It’s tenable, many think, it holds — though so very difficult, involved to argue, but since when has that stopped any of us — that all of history’s happened to effect Him in the negative, much as it did Adam, time’s wearying wear on the first mensch, with everything his fault, faulting him, nothing to blame, with no brother whose mark would keep him; that when another first of a kind, Napoleon, suppose, he rode through the desert upon the horses of the great Alexander, thinking to conquer the bondage that was Egypt if only to bind it to him, to the West, then, and so to a few argue an even greater oppression — and you won’t find this in your al-Jabarti, try as you might — that one of the goys in his army went and stole a date from a stall huddled up against the edge of Cairo under the citadel of Saladin, stole a date that was poisonous, a date that it’s said killed the goy when he went to it for sustenance, this goy formerly a Venetian sbirro who’d been courting an Affiliated back home in the Republic once serene, them groping each other on the outskirts of the Ghetto Nuovo no longer gated what with the emancipation and this thanks to the campaign of that very conqueror being served in the east — the two of them Venetian and Affiliated still sheltered, though, hidden from all, declaring their love for one another under the protective ring of the Terza, a bell echoing far from the San Marco campanile; him stealing kisses and hugs and loving words from this ghetto maydel who after having waited for his return from the fight and having had none for a while went and married another Unaffiliated, who he was the dead goy’s brother who’d urged her to give up on his own brother for dead then took her soon pregnant west to an America that promised an ocean between them and the continent warring, which union of theirs and its consummating birth upon Manhattan Island led directly, some say, believe it or not, through splinteringly infinite causes of causality, gevalt, and through subsequent effects too numerously and, too, numinously insane to even allude to here, ask them, they seem to have all the answers, the charts and the trees, the graphs and riverflows — all leading to Hanna and Israel, a Developed cedar far from its Lebanon, palmed nearer to New Egypt, Joysey, and its tiny pines, branching out to bloom Him with the winter…a culmination, if culminating in disappointment, and for at least this Garden’s root, this trunk, final, that’s that.

And not just the past, others have argued, not just our history, no, that in truth everything’s been created for B — B as culmination, as the created creating, natura naturans who He hasn’t yet exorcised that particular endowment, impotently, a potentiality shed; B as an apotheosized beneficiary of all mundanity from Bereishit’s beginning to now, an old heresy: that even Genesis had been begun for His sake alone; that water, too, had been created then divided upon the division of the second day expressly for His tears at this, His departure; the moon made only for His night, the sun made only for His day, then the air smoking around Him, it feels to Him, American Him, decadent as excessively holy and holying Him — and then shoes, hymn, them as well, having been created for the sake of His feet alone, though cobbled too tightly, nu, though loosened without laces, the proctologist’s spare pair He’s walking in on His way south through what once was the Village; and then the snap-brim cap on His head, how that’d been taken from the proctologist, that also and maladjustedly tight, had been created only so that it would fly from His head on the wind as He makes His way down toward the Battery — His head uplifted, Him passing questioning unquestioned through the gate new at Wall Street, which had once been a wall erected to keep out the natives of Manhattan raised again with its name remained to limit the traffic of the Unaffiliated from the marketstalls trading Downtown; domain of woolybearded carders and dyers, tanners and tinsmiths, the young, fritcheeked blowers of glass and they, too, who drive no trade at all save that crazy and begging — that indeed, many believe, and though only lately, which is too late for most, that life entire had been created for the sake of His life alone; His existence in the world the world’s justification, its one and only its hosting of Him’s the heretical thought: interpretively, He didn’t die for our sins, and He won’t — it’s even worse, He’s lived for them; and the evil in this is that before He can question, He believes, becomes His own answer, and so swears by His own singularity, this deathly uniqueness, Hanna’s baby boy reflected in the mirror of sewerward ice, Israel’s special son in the shopfront windows that store for a moment His passage — this one life of His that’d once been advertised to all as a model, exemplary as itself emulatory, marketed to ever as symbol; an idol to be held high, Godlike exalted, and there worshipped as ideal, and yet still one life again, immortal, He’s thinking — the alwaysliving, don’t tempt, it’s mine.

To the port then, its pier. There to slip away, stow His flee, wharf a wander — to vag off baggageburdened, though there’s only a single small lawyer’s attaché in His hand, brokenclasped. Thanks to a deal brokered by the proctologist’s jilted daughter and a mensch who’s gone by the name, it’s been said, Laser Wolf (alias Hugh Bris, alias Nicki Noir, alias Anti O’Chus IV, alias Malachy Malachym, AKA Gory ben Davidson), it’s stuffed with the forge of nine nationalities, passports taking Him passage and without reservation under whichever names had been available lastminute — the shorter the better, how long it takes to memorize the newest pronunciations — their photos imaging the face of the most minor god known: a no one with nosehair, an anyone with earhair in the blurry, brutishly lit shots snapped in a booth west off Port Authority; an attaché lined with six diplomas’ worth is what it takes to read them of papers hermetically furled in fists and ribboned don’t forget me fingers: mutiple signatory honors and testaments, letters of attestation, of introduction, recommendation, resumes and titles, citations referenced to curricula vitæ—all dishonorably promoted to the nth degree, beyond credulity to hope. Never such a thing as too prepared’s the ticket, how B’s taking showy, matinee precautions: this false beard slash moustache ensemble, over the top then elasticized around His real, also from Eli, whom He’d contacted by messenger, a singing telegram He’d intended to cheer but had instead settled by cost for a mere note to be brought her by his brother, a quicksilver midget mensch in a red cap whose nose even redder below resembled an infected bell, that and the hands wrung overwrought, to say to her no hard feelings, to go soft and explain Himself, who He was and is, and then how generously she responded, with an uncle’s grandfathered briefcase she’d found in the closet, genuine calfskin as delivered, babied around in a new wardrobe Big & Talled it’s all sewn up, with her stitching into an inseam her best wishes in black thread; she’s helping out with the finances, too, scrimping everything her parents allow her, scrounging prospective dowry downpayments never more than bribes, bridal layaways her suitors hoping; that and any spare she manages to take in from knitting for the neighbors twinned with newborns just downstairs: just enough to tide Him over plus a few days, maybe a week at most from Sabbath to Shabbos then little more — nothing much leftover after paying passage, the grease of gratuities involved, the price of thanks to think, maybe a meal, I hope, a night in a room…

Manhattan’s tip, the prick of its tongue — it wants to say more but can’t because of the ocean, too bitter to speak. B makes it to the edge of the island from which He can’t find His own, disappeared. It’s a cloudy day, caught in overcast nets of smoke. The port, an immense planing of planks terminating in the ice’s horizon — ending as it, clouds tangled in rigging encrusted with barnacles, greenwhite stars, wispy cirri winds. A hawser choking the rust from its bollard — which the raincloud and which the snowcloud who can tell. And then, spearing the clouds, through the smoke, the masts: uprooted trees, made to wander upon the face of the deep. Through a lippy and bristly bustle of fishmongering, fishhandling, fishhaggling, fishy dealmaking, the hazards of floppy, soppy hands, fiddled fingerings, promises, swears and oaths, an immense dingen, all this thinging around, something stinks around here, something rancidly rotten; through a liveliness of livestock herded two by onboard bound for where, chaotic, this loading and unloading of slavish dray, from carts lade with variegate crates, a profusion of boxes stamped in languages as numerous as splinters in the planks, which way up and what’s labeled fragile on both sides of the frenzied line of ice chunked from the surface of the water then hauled handed in from one to another, to keep fresh the catch; bleeding puddles…

B makes the end of the pier, to a gangplank of sorts, wood flimsy and narrow, makeshift, which is the pier further, just lain. He lifts His head to the good glaciate ship. The MS Yachtsmann, it’s been called; most pronounce it guttural. It’s white, and hugely hulled; a ship heated from within: by its heaving stow of bodies, its own human cargo, the lives of those escaping, inescapable — immigrating, emigrating, depends who you ask and when…their bilged warmth to knife the ship, slicing it through the ice to an outermost flow, cleaving toward the open ocean, in which the waters once divided mingle, flow freely. Or else, such warmth’s from the engines rumbling the moods of every sinner, their appetites, too. Because He can’t seem to find anyone else, though, He stands out on deck alone. To board this boat bound for Polandland, over His family left sunk without wave — His people who were once as plentiful as the waters of the ocean, sandsleeping as dead as the stars whose light’s aged the sky, these however many thousands of years. And, to cross the ocean of our Columbus, you know him: a landsmann of His, landsleit removed, that crypto converso, Saint Marrano he was of the stilled, stilling depths; to travel his ocean in reverse, discovering all that’s to be discovered in the direction opposite, windopposed, the other wayfaring around — having had enough of this exploration, having been barbarized and conquered and settled and exploited enough, enslaved for too long, His life, and yet only now to give His testimony against it, through living against it: to be called to the stand, which is the mast, as a witness bound at the bow. And then, to shriek into the mouth of the wind…what would you say, B, if chanced with the choice; how living against Himself is to prophesize, if only unconsciously, what’s to come, what’s to be. He ships past the smoke clearing, a cloud lifting the clouds, and only because He’s going through the smoke, then through the clouds of the cloud and then — past the ruins of His house out on the Island to be spied land ho off starboard, off port, I don’t know but how could I, left from right from my, Liberty in her soiled robe with her burnt and waterlogged book, what surviving pages stuck fast, her Messianic sandals down below, doesn’t she ever get cold — and up above the scrapers and City Hall, her torch held heavenly and shuddering, a beacon of compromise, perhaps: not sun, not moon, but what; only pointing Him out, directing Him away, a semaphore’s banishing…brandishing that snuffready flame as if to hasten His shipping’s slog — the vessel’s stubborn stub atop and through the Hudson’s ice loosened to melt beneath its progress, toward the verge of frost, the drifty shuga, then a creaking crash to the waters finally unbound, crystalline. And beyond, distancing as far as can be sensed by wind: a lulling swell; as far out as can be imagined and, go further — amid the ocean, the true ocean, not frozen but merely thickened, slushed, an expanse of slowgoing swell: monstrous floes floating elementally in white, bergs hazard blue and serene.

Icesick soon, seablued, seagreened, tempest tost a stomach up through His throat, this vomit’s tongue, I’m feeling. He’s a Lazarus, a wretch risen only to Himself, through Himself, heaving up His resurrection; pacing the deck alone, swabbing the slabs with this tossing, hurling His throw into vacancies available: bulwarks, portholes, lifeboats topside readied to evacuate all of no one. And the ship itself seems alone, as the only vessel to the only horizon, buoyant to bob a rippling shadow, the ocean’s only; any other passenger, B thinks, must be a refugee, too, how they’re staying so low, hidden, out of mind, out of time; no manifest’s survived, to be logged with our losses, such records have been wetted to smudge…and then the crew, a thirdmate, a bosun, a captain, He gets only shades of them, flickers: scuds of mist huddling around corners, puffs gathered at the capstan, the babble of voices always a deck above or below — not a crew it feels but a force ruddering, steering, what power plotting the plod of His course through the cold. The weather, then this sickness, the hollowed throat, that and the stomach an empty purse contained in indigestible coin: a miracle, He doesn’t even showup to meals, if meals are part of His package, part of anyone’s package, if they even are. For the first week until the next Shabbos, He stays berthed in His cabin, rousing only to pace the deck late, drymouthed on water, and knotted in nerves, venous strands of them: salty ties bent to ends loose and capsized, bloodied bit bights with the remains of His frenulum and anything else sublingually left, tangled intricately, mucosal, scarstitched, hanging a fraylach from the stump of His face. The wind echoes in the bell of His mouth, then resounds in the clap of His tonsils. That Friday late, He bows over the railing, over the side. A Kiddush’s sip, why can’t I, only a sip.

O the Kinneret, which is the lake to be found under the Sea of Galilee…the Mediterranean Nile, the Mississippian Jordan, the Sambatyon, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea of Reeds — there is no greater justification of the Fall than our naming of water. All our rivers, streams, lakes, and even the seven oceans, too, are but a oneness of an ocean and God. There is no better evidence of our corruption than our calling of water by name, no better argument for the sundering of the covenant, the flooding of creation again. And then there’s the weather, the question of what to call that, also, of how to give name to a flux, not to instability but to its opposite, stability, the greatest — which is a station founded upon motion, fundament on wandering, on being everywhere at once and so nowhere, forever. How to call a cloud, a nesting of cloud, clouds, a sky, a giant rumbling then a flash bound as one. Though we have the name Storm, we are still destroyed, foundered upon the world we call rock. No invocation will save us. A sky, get inside; stay there and stay honest. Rage all you want with wind, with light and with wetness, there’s no saint to invoke, there’ll be no salvation. We call it a crow’s nest, though it’s crowless; that bird is off mating with the doves in a land not so cursed. Its perch eclipses the moon — and the world finally, opens. An immense downpour at middlenight, suffusions of lightning like daylight, and the ships shakes, rocks, is thunderously rolled to a sink, hits near a glacier then gets turned around, hits another then is turned round again, swirled as if at bottom’s a drain or a flush — prodded then whirled in a hurling, thrown up then dashed back down to the white of an ever new wave, again. A Shabbos midnight of rainsnow, of snowhail, howling around the hull’s nidified mute…and then settling with it — gradually locking the ship, stilling it in ice made. Immovable. Through the night as the temperature drops, even into the next day — to be captive to the calling above, its lash at the foremast, its whip to the mizzen. Then, toward evening of the end of Shabbos, which reigns upon sea as it reigns upon land, which reigns in the air, too, and then everywhere else there be God, there’s a last bolt of lightning: it pierces the sky, strikes down to smash the ice up ahead, splits the ocean entire…sundering the horizons one darker, one lighter, while the middle melts away into grays — into soon, a steady, steadying pure, the moving water moving, again. And one tribe, and only one tribe, may pass.

Shalom is the name that follows next, meaning Hello, and Goodbye — and so going both everywhere and nowhere at once, but in Peace. B’s ship, He’ll think of it as His ship until another makes topside, floats Shalom in the middle of the peacefully immovable and middleless water, moving at middle: Hello and Goodbye, they’re mingling, the waters wetting each other as if always made undivided, never been sundered, never foundered between those above and those below upon God’s second day. A flow of stasis, under the bandage of the newly calm cloudless sky. It’s here He loses the winds of the world we call New, trading in those for a species of wind that doesn’t blow or push as much as it pulls, tugs Him toward, the meridian east: the brightkindling bow of the ship set amid the middle of the water without middle, it now parts each sucking, hollowfaced gust — pierces; to where the globe turns its cheek, to the face of its father the sun, is then struck with a kiss, lightsmote to blush itself humbled, a sunrise, as you’re flung down to the other edge of the round, where the flatness begins, the vale of the lessdimensioned, divested of west, the endless dark world we call Old. At the landed crown of the rounding before it’s rubbled away to flat, a last standing shadow, lengthening with the thrift of the day; it’s a female form, if not emblematically feminine. A ship’s figurehead stranded, could be, straining from her perch at beached prow. A maydel not too young anymore, she’s Eli the doctor’s daughter appeared sullen at the pointing, way out on the accusative tip of Manhattan having followed Him, if tentatively or shy: she hadn’t been sure, has to make her lastlit goodbye, maybe even she thought to convince Him, to remain and be hers, impossible, perhaps, this she knows, too late; she’s waving a headkerchief she’s abstractly embroidered as if with the fingers helpmating of widows and kinder unborn: with its wave not exactly bidding Him anything besides her heartache, commending it unto Him if that’s the mood she merits, as if — aval aval, it’s not a headkerchief, it’s a cover for challah, a coverlet for the swaddling of the two tabled loaves from last night, she’d baked; waving, more like she’s shaking out the crumbs her father and mother’ve left her, miserly few and what there are, greasy: she follows the lone ship, her cloth a sail forsaken by wind, sagging Him far, then gone. Out of her life, this gust: a sigh older than God. Had a few prospects over last Shabbos, again: nothing she’s interested in, no one redeeming, forget it, it’s worthless. With Him, He was different. Same old. How her father had said he’d die the night he’d marry her off. Finally. That or retire, or both. And in front of company, too, two corporate attorneys who’d also been patients, calling on her one with a new duster for a present, the other without flowers either. Dad had been calling the both of them Son. One touched feet with a wooden paw of a leg of the table under which the other’d held the hand of her mother. She was going to spit the cream in their coffee, but her mouth was too kind and the maincourse was meat. The last vision this puffy, darkeyed Eli has of His departure, it’s a reflection — the last to be imaged upon the waters of her face with its fallen nose, and those warm, rounded lips — it isn’t the ship, but a huge solitary head rising from the east, as if His return, but lifeless: the new Shabbos’ sun, sliced from the neck of horizon.

In the eye of the Shalom, in the very mouth of peace, B stands still through the storming, the weather unnamed and unnamable, having held fast to the wheel with one hand, with the other at the ribbing of His stomach, the ropes of flesh taut with hurt that wrest Him in, still sickened. To survive, and to rejoice in your own survival: to open your mouth to the last lingering patter, to open your eyes once shore’s distanced behind you, to catch dew upon your lashes, manna’s fallen balm. And then into the slowed heart of this quiescence, this lulling, ship’s loll, to be hit with one last and ferociously whiplashing force of night’s wind, a remnant, a reminder of the darkness left behind and yet in front of you, too — and, flying across that sky a fish lands on the deck, at the forecastle, the fallen castle, amidships, who knows, not me, I don’t care. Which fish don’t ask me either, whether kosher or not, only that it flips, gives a flop, a silver sliv of ichthys out of water off land, over and into a ship that goes forward while on a ship there’s nowhere to go, that’s what I’ve got — it goes onto the planks of the deck netted in kelp to hide its nakedness from the blush of the clouds.

B stoops over, scoops it up in His hands, it squeezes out, pops a plop, flubs on the deck, paddles planks. He stoops over again, scoops and again it wriggles free to what has to be its death, scaling the skin from His hands. And finally, with hands hardened with strength enough to fist it dead Himself were it a weaker fish and not a fisher of sorts itself, He bends and bows and holds it tightly, then rights Himself in pain against the slice of its fins. A slitting, the gut of His palm. Then, steadying against the ship’s pitch, its scuppering swish, holds the fish lip to mouth, staring depth into its one good mush of eye.

Nu, the fish says, after a moment graved gray within the jellied slough of its socket, vos machst du…what’s your problem, I’m busy; hymn, I’ve got a two o’clock with a hot current — no seriously, what can I do you for? and when there’s only silence amid the winds, with the stump of His tongue salted to tack, a stiff and soundless flag, it gives out with an anything but fishy, fluenty, Oy! it’s a goyische kopf I’m dealing with here, all the luck — alright already, so I’m a prince, what’s it to you…then spouts at Him, up, under His glasses and into His eyes, and it stings like watery fire.

Three wishes you putz, mamash, the emes, but be quick about it.

He’d like to take His glasses from His face and wipe them and His eyes but how when you’re cradling such chub.

Genug, hurry up, I don’t have all day — what do you want, that I should swallow you…hahaha, and it coughs a gurgly bubble — joking aside, who has the time…your wish, it’s my command; you name it, it’s yours, simple as that, sof pasuk, pashut.

Work with me here! You’re new at this. I can tell, but I won’t. Ken zeyn, here’s the deal. I grant your wishes and, in return, you throw me over the side. Or else, keyne hora, and it winks that one appreciable eye, you’re out of luck, and I die of exposure. Maybe you’ll be one of the righteous, a tzadik — just place me in the water from a porthole, lower me down from the what do you call it, the gunwale, efsher…the last goy almost ripped my gills with his toss.

You with me? Farshteyn?

The fish flicks its tail. Wish I could help you, but it’s not mine to wish…

To tongue for a tongue, how I’m futzed.

Listen, I’m no prophet, no rebbe soothsayer…nit heint, nit morgen, what’s that they say, noch nicht — I’m only a prince who went wrong…

B nods in sad understanding and then, a dearth of them say three steps running rail to railing to put a pretense of momentum behind His throw, gives a sissying heave, mocking a hurl in return of the fish overboard, its sterling arc disappearing under the surface, a watery veil; then, with tailspray wholly disproportionate to its size, and perhaps, too, a little too late, soaking Him anew, as if to further mortify, if anyone would ever happen on deck, and if not, then in the eye of His God. The sun, a beacon of light cresting His head on its way to set yet again. A gloriole. To wait out the remainder of His passage, hanging Himself out on the rigging to dry, knot after the moon’s, His body an uncertain sail. To ship forward, though, without any idea of remainder, of passage, of future, and so denying any navigation, doubtful of any aground upon which to run, minding only the water until, having almost forgotten the very ideal of land, its ancient blind and deaf captain that is time, He arrives at doubt, which is itself without shore: denying the presence of a waterless world, a world that’s hard to the touch, that’s rough, too, and that when knocked knocks back ever harder.

At this, the ship — as if questioning its very substance — hits, slams, and He falls over the railing, tumbling into the air as the hoopy heap bumps, bucks then, rollickingly, steadies itself against a slip of wood drifting…on which He lands, from which He rises — a castaway from a ship wrecked on the shore itself for purposes of convenience and yet still, despairing, scared. Without romance, no liberate welcome. Only a pier, another port, another older here — it’s been a while, B, you’re next. To further image this disembarkation, corrigendum corrupting, we might offer this: that water cannot be stamped, but that land can be, and faces, and paper, too, a passport of His marked in the reddest available ink, predated beyond all comprehension. As for the land itself — it’s stamped with Him, arrived if only to fade…

O gather all ye geography mavens, ye country collectors, and experts on topos, habitus hoarders, connoisseurs of blending, masters of the hide…hearken ye sons of inconspicuousness, ye gods of lyinglow — languages are yours, borders our birthrights, to cross into evermore outcast estates…I welcome you to Polandland, Shalom, dwell as you may. Name, please, Date of Birth, then Country of Origin. At the slips and stations around Him, there’s a mess of muster, of unmarked cargo being roustabouted into endless trains routed to the furthering gate. Thieves with oily hands and twitchy eyelids, made gypsies of necessity wanting only for night’s stealth. An examiner of imported “produce.” Disbursing half into his pockets for the wife. Hutched, hunched, an interrogator who already knows, but wants to hear you think (anything you answer will sound like a question — clasp hands, pray for deportation at best)…gabbly groups too afraid to address their fear to an official nowhere to be found uniformed the same. Upon penalty of what again, the windy confiscation of cries.

A heelshaped barrel they’re unloading from His ship drops and breaks, the staves pop off like an explosion, but it’s empty, there’s nothing inside and the pallets, they’re lonely for schlepping.

A woman leads a group (young): splinters of strangers gathered out on the dock. She says to them, This was the kind of ship they used. To immigrate. To emigrate. Anyone remember which? We just had it brought in. We shipped in a ship. Just this morning. This is how they got away — back before aeroplanes, remember?

B’s ship’s being boarded, condemned.

With a hand hot in His pocket to keep guard over what wad there and with His suitcase held in the other, He goes. Where a chalkcircle praying oneliners for the weather to stop, how it’s followed Him here even worse. Where a chamfered streetcorner and told just to wait. A night, a day. Where a whore’s room He’s renting from her and for her, and which He quits after only one night, leaving His deposit behind but taking the room with Him, hung around His neck on a rope of her braids, hiding the shame of His sex…Polandland, historically where. While many of our scholars have offered up the image, famous enough to have become truism, Edenic enough to have fallen from favor, of the snake, which consumes itself and yet like the bush inherited from its gardened tree is never consumed, its tail to mouth poisoning, others have settled on a like form, more felicitous because nourishing, because sustaining, enabling, this image of our bread, daily broken. A bagel He’s in, or so they suggest in this leavening of history, Him baked deep within that circling circle forever void…a great onion and garlic and sesame and poppyseed salted snake tailing itself, and then swallowing — the eternally returning Everything varietal, the glutinous fruit of Viennese merchants first made for and presented to Polandland’s King in thanks for his help in fighting the Turks out of Austria — its name from an old German word for stirrup, Bügel, in honor of Jan III Sobieski’s great horsemenschip, in recognition of the shape of the thing: stick your foot in its mouth, then ride off into the sunset…Him atop less a kingly steed than a sagged, stickribbed lowly roan (He’s renting off a gypsy thief, a pierside hustler in cheap dark denim), His bügel more like tourist-traps, to hold Him high while the wind empties His pockets, gusting through the holes. As arranged at the port, this horse with goldteeth — with its gypsy leading with the horse’s teeth dugout, stuffed into his own kisser — it’s leading Him inland, ever deeper, and marketed ever darker, too, what with the sun’s set toward the west…where, headed unto the mythical Souvenir Stand, just over the mountain yonder, there to shop for a store of local specialties, a wide selection of indigenous folk art, Handwerk’s kitschy dreck, tshirts hung with medals unearned, dolls inside dolls, matrioshky they’re called giving way after their disappointing smallest to an emptiness maternal it’s impossible not to feel in these parts, the numbly dead, the unmade. And then further…with His gypsy leaving Him at a wall, at a gate, an incredible inroading — disappearing after the money’s gone, with the horse gone, too, and with His suitcase in its mouth, that and the bundles and bags of His purchases, keepsakes kept safe from Him: left alone, without tikvah, that’s hope. To wander east down a narrowing of streets, a muddle of ways, cuts short and long, all huddling to this one wide street, a vast opening eastward toward the void at middle, always the hole at center’s core — the Square wherever this is, I’m never sure, just shocked…without language. Consonants stuck in the craw, a mouth shaped like a vowel, and speechless.

A bird executes its spirals high above the parapet of a Town Hall; it’s off to the cupola of the Church when the hour strikes…frightened, a mortality of wings with the span of a psalter. A stubby stooped who knows what, whether conjugated masculine, feminine, or both or neither, and just old — old the same appellation as this part of town, Old Town — sits on a bench, cadastral registry #1492, done with his or her scattering to this bird and others, them all: the bird, or Bird, however it’s registered, Spinozist, Platonic…a handful of soapflakes this tubby lubber thinks is feed, then sips at a cup of groggy med, dabs lips with cuff and in words no one understands, are they even words how should He know, addresses the problems of an earlier regime. This person, too, is on payroll, you have to think, be cautious, aware, they all are, and Him as well, maybe, I hope not, what’re they making these days, let me sleep on it…perhaps even the dead are in on it, too, the stones underfoot unmarked as their graves: pavingstones marking martyrs, cobbles sufficing for cowards. Memorials. To memory. Statues to shrines, plaques to yesterday’s plinth upon which rests the day before that. A reparation of time and of space, if that’s possible, to make up for…to stand here in the Square, again. With an ache in the rib, in His spine, in the rib that is His spine and was mud’s, watered from dirt downed from stones, from the cobbles, the pavings chiseled to pillows…a dream, telling Him go further, gone not far enough yet — to arrive, only to flee.

In the echoes of the hour just dying, the tolling toil of metal amid the eaves of the Church, another noise fills the Square, scatters the birds, sends the vendors scurrying home, abandoning their carts in midsale. A siren, it’s summoning. And in a moment, a host of auscasts and untliers and the strangering such emerges from the alleys, they invade from the sidestreets, occupying the Square; they attempt to march in lines, inline, they stumble like foreigners, they are foreigners, they embarrass only themselves, shame silence with greetings, warning, farewells: it’s American, no doubt about it — when you open your mouth, B thinks, how they know who you are; better to keep your mouth shut, best to have no tongue to keep. They’re the tourists, fellowtravelers, equally estranged, from Him, from themselves: vacationers amid death. Theirs is a forced march. One attraction to another, step-by-step then stumble. Take your time. A crunch of boot on hand coming down, crackled middle of an adagietto keyed in the minor: right at the height of an invisible violin’s tessitura, as it reaches for — a voice hacks out of the PA’s speakers nailed to spired poles, as sundials they shadow the Square; its message arrives Godlike, and Himlike, too, uslike, within a whirlwind of our own making, and in every language sounding at once, which is none. Babel on a bad day. Come again. Welcome to Polandland, it says. Please Stay In Your Lines. Welcome to Polandland. Your Guide Will Be With You Shortly.

A pleasant, neatly bearded mensch carrying two umbrellas, practically, for identification, one umbrella for him, the other for the umbrella — welcome, he says loud enough that you suspect a microphone, you have to, whether clipped to a lapel or to the clasped brim of his hat; a prophet might be lodged in his mouth. Hope everyone’s rested up from their flights, keep it light: O there’s so much to do today, so very much. I think we’ll begin with a bit of history, how’s that sound? Can everyone hear me? Raise your hands. Or not. Everyone can. Great, he says, now in the year…I step aside, allowing them to pass. To limit, to make shadowed scarce the hated half of me, the symbolic half, the witness half, the kalb halb, the part of me that’s past, that’s of the past, that is: a symbol to history, here a witness to history all over again. Not being commented upon, but being created. In black & white, I mean, in black and white and in red. Now, the Guide guides, if you’ll just follow me. Right this way. A rainbow fallen, becoming streeted into a Square’s inmost circling, bleached of its colors, graysullied, trampled: I’m talking registrations and transports, this stuff happening again, we’re talking monomaniacally all over again, by the book, same as before. That’s right, the Guide approves, that’s right. Approve this! To follow is to lead from the rear. To lead is to follow from the front. What we’re saying is — there’s no way out. There’s no solution ineradicably final, not even that of death, inexistence, which itself is actually existence finally secured, rooted, made fundament, delimited totally — at least, that’s what many now hold. They say — stay in the middle, you’ll survive. They mean — don’t lead, don’t follow, just be, good advice. Now, to the left, the Guide says to those gathered, the guided and guiding, to the left and so left they go left, then go right, which is east, as is left. And a square’s darkened empty, the Square is, save for a bird alight atop a church, the Church, a bird up on high — it might merely be stone.