Witz

Preparations

At home in the past — these days, who isn’t?

Hanna schlepping through the door and leaving her keys hanging from the lock their psalm, she’s rushing her perishables into the fridge: that that goes to spoil, its propensity for turning, only a matter of time to expiring’s sour, the date best sold by, the date best used to consume by, who knows the moon, it’s always better to be careful, there’re too many warnings, a wane of time, not enough: then, arranging it all in the fridge in the kitchen, which room’s existence she often calls the Kitschen and then laughs to herself a slight snort, with her hand over her mouth smelling of armpit and onion, it’s her humor, her house. Here in this Kitschen, then, amid the kitsch of the kitchen, she’s perpetually at home, eternity and its preservatived roof, vacuumsealed. The bread the flesh of potassium sorbate, broken on the ziplock track of her tongue. Here, she’s always been here, even when she’s been out rushing her errands all over the place, overscheduled, hectic, in two places at once at the third, though who’s complaining — her, too. Here, she always returns here, always preparing (shopping for, cooking, cleaning) that meal neverending, our interminable, immovable feast; such course after courses amply couponed, savingsclubbed, dish after dish after this new recipe I just thought I’d try out.

Never one to waste, she cleans even as she’s still cooking, but no, it’s never sufficient…no sponge could have enough capacity, no wrungout rag; the mess always wins — it’s that that’s eternal, that’s what she knows from…

Known everything from their recesses, by them — how Hanna can find anything, whether by eye or by hand: that shelf of bowls longneglected, chipped into veins clayed with dust, dishes with their rims coursed in binding vine, perched upon by stilled flutters of bird, who knows from where they came forming below the molds of fish and of lion and star, whose Zeyde’s rusted samovar steeped in disuse, antediluvian steamers and strainers, their rust and, too, the most apocryphal of utensils…these distended, sexualized ladles, torturous forks tined in knives, fivebladed cleavers with their handles as thick as her grandmothers’ arms, they must be Old World, an inheritance, legacy served on a silverplatter, though lately she’s preferred Asianmade; plastic-stuff she got through catalogs, over the phone 1-800 the drier and smoker and that juicermachine dingie, the crêpeapparatus, the sandwichpress thing and the wok. And the progress, the history even here…the utensils shelved and drawered then underslung hung, in every volution both efficient and cheap — sharpened on light from wood to metal, then from metal to who knows what spaceage polymer hyperbolic, the synthetic promise…as seen on TV: a guarantee money back, but not time; that and their storage she has, too, in all its advances tuppered and tamped, with the leftovers keeping for longer, maybe forever, their preservatives and then the plastic atop in its suffocate wrap holding everything in, to be freezered or fridged. And the marks this life’s left on her body, the cling: her fingers’ calluses, the burnstains and blademarks, brunting, the handlestress, kiss it; the tough of her palm holds a knife even when she’s not, the imprint, its mark.

Kitsch, what’s to expect: despite how new or improved, however much on-sale or off, everything here, all this stuff, she says, Dreck — it seems old, obsolete, no matter what dated past use. It’s terrible, this being bored not just with yourself but with your own special things, doing what you do every day because you’ve always done it and now you have to, forever (the tunasalad always made with shreds of hardboiled egg; the eggsalad always flecked with paprika — we’ve come to expect nothing less), and that making you feel over, old and done with, as if yourself obsolete, backdated to what my mother had been, what I never wanted to be, what I told myself I’d never become. How I’m kitsch, how everything is…existence itself ’s what she’s thinking, tradition this ritual reliving of what came before, it’s enough: the very moment that a thing begins to exist, is cooked from out of the ether, reduced simmering from the manifest of infinity or any other way’s brought into our world — it’s kitsch already, no ifs about it or buts. Immediate and total, kitsch forever and ever. As who I am, she thinks if with less form, with less apparency than can be evident in the embodied cause of this accusation, my purpose, my standing and station, my wifehood, my motherliness — how it’s just kitsch from the glimmering getgo, from its very idea, as possibility, as potentiality, it’s gone, eternally hopeless, over before it began. That it’s not the frequency, the regularity, the manywashings, the rinse and repeats then stirs again of digital clock time that makes the kitsch, that denies the dreck, births the disappointment, the failure, and so accepts anything as is, that takes on any task, that grants any request, obliges such favors for all: it’s more like my pure being, my Hannaness, she thinks, there you have it, there I have it, here I am but still, nothing but dated and doomed. Thanks a million, come back soon. I might as well make the most of it, though. Might as well follow it through.

Hanna the Bride-Queen, the Queen-Bride, whichever, or both, folded then stirred, into one. Too much for this she thinks too short, heavybreasted body. Two loaves of her rolled, kneekneaded. Stuck in this kitchen as if honeyed to the floor. Now, take all of her worry and thinking and rinse, sprinkle liberally with allegory, just a pinch of parable, pat dry then let sit overnight on the porch amid winter. Wait for the rise. Hanna’s preparing a meal for her intended, for her groom and her king…least she could do. Israel, her husband, and her Messiah, too, in that he might not be a savior but he is always late — forever, I mean, he’s taking forever: he’s been arriving it feels for as ever long as she’s been cooking with the ticker, the timer’s long stilled. A watched pot never boils, only blackens. How once she’d dropped her birthdaywatch in the pot, then went out to buy a new exact one so he wouldn’t think she didn’t like it, or lost. King and groom, whichever I’m saying he’s taking his time. Bound to her bind. And if he’s to be her Messiah, then this kitchen must be her exile, too: as far as dispersions go, luxurious enough, though gone to waste in her longing (the entropic pleasures of a homegym, replete in its deplete with adjoining mediaroom) — houses and schools, then those places of worship known as nondenominational Temples, they ingredient themselves out of mold, whip and whisk themselves up at the outermost rim of the range, the stovetop the manual says, how she’d thrown it away, the accidental trash…lives line the brass burners, burbled from grease, congealed from years fat and day’s oil; roads paved of grout run the length of the middle island, gas and electric link the further exurbs of tiling grid with the hum of the refrigerator hub, lit under the whirring, whirling sky, which is the hood once the bulb’s been replaced. The longing hum of the fridge filling everything with an eerie motion, an activity, a progress, the formica, the metal and tile, sets their mixtures spinning, aswirl, stirring up these new kitchens in new houses grown within and as the eternity of her own kitchen, her old home, rooms hacked out of groutrot, faience, spiced earthenware, and the cupboard with china: kitchens sprouting up from the neglect of her Kitsch (it’s so hard to keep up, it’s so hard to keep up, it’s so difficult), to fill her house, which is the home of the world, with scents of their own, a whirlwind of waft: cooking, she’s cooking still, which is stirring then tasting then stirring again, all the while judiciously laying aside the best cuts for him, for Israel her husband and — and he’ll come, he will, he has to, imminent, it’s arrived, the kiss of his keys at the cheek of the door by the side…when the kitchens’ timers will become aligned — then stop all at once, stilled, their massed ticking will unravel hands of hands both chapped and chaffed, ungloved and how time will mean nothing anymore: no more preheating, defrosting, no more of this letting sit or soak overnights; how everything then will always be ready, in a preparation suspended, preparing into itself, weeping within ever deeper, spices of spices, tastings of tastes, and then, suddenly, the phones ring out on all the lines pitched as softly high as the smokealarm or the light, individually yearning, but when sounded simultaneously bringing only darkness, thick spoiled noise. Grniinrgrginnigr.

He’ll be late.

Goodbye, kiss kiss the hugging of lips, I love you, goodbye, the polymer baby’s replaced in its cradle; and, soon enough, late’s no longer an idea, a recipe’s template or mold made if from scratch, the limited, limiting face of a clock set as wide as time but wound tightly in spite: it’s more like a state, this permanent not — though soon, please, God, I hope soon. If it rings again, let him leave a message.

It’s been given over somewhere or other, I don’t know, go ask your mother, that when you die, and you will, when you leave, finally, this terrestrial kitchen, that you live again, and in some other otherworldly kitchen, and there with every object you ever broke, cracked, destroyed, ruined, or otherwise defiled in your entire life at your disposal, and only those: and so Hanna, to drink her own spoiled milk, deathmilk from Israel’s clubby bachelorhood glasses sharded together from shatter, to sit on a chair missing a leg at a table that wobbles, to gaze out over Paradise from the platesmashed window of her brunchnook, shabby in skirts without knees, frayed hems, heelless solestripped athletic shoes, not so white anymore. At ten in the Eden of morning, an hour she’d almost never wasted in such reflection, with the kinder off at school, Israel at work, she’s at table, at herself idle, not hurting anyone anymore: having destroyed, if only objects, having depossessed possessions, and she herself, dead (the cancerous sunning, the fibrotic breasts, the two lumps ignored, she’d done it to herself, we all do or our parents)…or else, in another interpretation, this is life — and only death is when everything’s fixed, where all’s mended again and made whole: with glue on the seams of mugs, raggedypatches on the elbows of sweaters, sneaky shoelaces tied together to tie once again, with no more worrying knots to finger at numbly, what with the arthritis healed, that third breast lump gone and as for her car, its door’s intact and its fender, too, she’s sure he’ll never notice. And all the promises, all the vows she’s ever made and those that’ve been made for her and to her, fulfilled. And yet she’s still waiting, and waiting.

Though he never promised, just said so: babele, I’m coming…

It’s less him than the pain, hers, though all of it hurts. Tears are her eyes, pregnant pouches. At table, Hanna’s stomach gives a growl. Who can eat…quickly, she doubles herself, folds in, rocks her gut, the loose swell of her emptiness, the bag not paper or plastic but me — cries loudly for help from her kinder, her who never needs help or wants it; this is It. As there’s no answer, and sensing the timing, the ineluctably slow ticktock of the heart, she tilts toward the laundryroom, grabs a rag on her way through the kitchen to the hall — once inside shuts the door, her hand to feel shut the seam.

It’s here that she births herself. Insideout.

It’s all in the hips, their bones softened in her own churning water, a heavy flow like the chugging of laundry, the colors, the whites and the deathblacks, a night. A give in the womb. Her lips open, her legs come through, but the inside of legs, their insides, ligaments to tendons sucked up then out feetfirst, coming through bound in veins…then, her thighs follow, their fat greases them through, here the bulge of her waist, there the lower half consuming the upper, the teethmarks of her panty’s band, their elasticized chatter; she leans up against the warmth of the washingmachine, which is on, the sounds of which, its regular rumblings turned shudders, are louder than hers, conceal, consume, the shakes of the floor, flakes of basement’s ceiling, plaster-skin peeled and the heat: Sabbath upon Shabbos of this has accustomed her to the quiet required; still, her bottom lips tend to bleed. Her breasts come through before her arms, the underneaths of inverted nipples, their reversed areolæ like drinkcoasters on cedarwood, wet, how she’d always have to remind, Wanda, too, don’t put a glass on the wood — then the arms, their fingers to elbows to shoulders, and at the last moment of hold, the last stain upon time, she throws the rag she’s been holding to her mouth to the mouth of the thrashing machine (later, to that of the dryer nextdoor); she opens the lid, the cycle stopped, closes the lid to begin the rumble again, and the heat. Her limbs aren’t broken, they’re too weak to break — complaining, overcooked — gone is the fatty droop, their deflationary birthdayballooning…and the batwings, too, the darkening cystics of their wens: first the fingers of her servinghand, her slicinghand, her fork and her spoon hand and that, too, of the knife to carve in the kitchen not to cut with at table, these without nails, stripped of their prints; and then, her elbows push through, are pushed knocked like her knees are into shoulders, her head nods through insensate, serously, viscous strandings from scalp, placental skull, the sac of her mouth a bubble to dirtily burst with a thermometer’s pin, a dimpling thimble, get a lick of soap, wash it all out…hair down the sleeve of her throat. The inside of her face is amniobathed, bared gel the quivering skin of the eyes, her nostrils denuded, flaringly roused by a smell like the scorch of detergent, a quick bleaching, a twitch of a moustache her lightened lashes and brows…her lips lick themselves as if she’s eaten herself, not quite, more like she’s gotten only a taste, a free sampling, and wants more, needs it: she holds naked fingers to her lips insideout, gazes beyond her blind to the crack of light coming in from the door’s draft, where it should be, should’ve been.

The Table

And then the table — you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?

Our sages tell us thusly: that she sat on the earth, as if in mourning already…as one authority holds: mourning herself, her kinder, the world.

And that then a root grew up inside her, filling her up.

Others say the following: a root hung from the lips of His mother, those lips some say — how it hung like a tongue, prideful, waggingly wild. As it itched, she scratched, the mouth of those lips, and at her womb, too, full of dirt. Mud, which was the dirt wet from her, which fell from there according to some, here where she walked wherever it fell, and that she followed this dirt feeling dirty, as still others interpret — as if hope upon hopes the trail would lead to somebody else, would track yet another, a fellow mother to dirt…to mud, to filth, though she seemed if she ever existed to be always behind her. As she swept herself, she followed herself forever, swept up after herself and before herself, too, a monstrous mopping, as she circled (and circled) the barren of garden, swept herself with a broom bound of thistles, a mop, while others say thorns, then scrubbed at herself with the sea, the scrub of a bush — most say it burned.

All agree — she was not yet His mother; as per tradition, not anyone’s yet but her own.

It all began with an itching: when she awoke in the mornings flat out on the earth she had scratchmarks, manicuredeep, on her thighs, then around the low of her stomach, that she’d scratch at these itches, then how she’d feel suddenly huge, and ashamed, and then vomit, which made her feel better, a little, vomiting dew the texture of morning, that she’d then in embarrassment — though no one else was around — wander away from her mess, further always to the root of her home.

And that the root then grew up to a trunk, that the root then grew out to other roots, too…the roots hung there in the air, the air was rootrent — that she walked around the undergrown garden, which was too sparse with growth too small to hide the huge of her nakedness now, and with a tree sticking out of her, treeing up…its trunk protruding unwieldy, must be careful, she’d fall.

That she’d stroke the trunk through the night, a new limb.

How its slow branching made her bleed, O the cut of its bark.

She was impure and had to immerse herself, she had to submerge herself and her tree in the ocean, to water it, then, to scrub from it its bark dead like a skin — to shed, it’s said, the snake of her limb.

There was a hollow inside, and how despite that she’d complain of an emptiness…the form of its hurt, and not hurt itself. Hard to explain. How she couldn’t stand, and so she’d lie down in the grass; she couldn’t bend, couldn’t lean, only lie. That was difficult, too. When wet, the trunk would swell inside her, and so she’d throwup into a basin, now a river to island her garden — or, how she’d vomit into the sky according to some, vomiting the sky itself others hold, constellations of mouthstuff, acidic stars.

One night, she was flung high up to the air toward the sky, as the tree grew to height, took root deep in the earth down below her up high, cubits above in the treetop, atop sore and there swayed by the wind.

How do I get myself into these things?

And how out?

She found herself talking to the tree, her voice was the wind.

And then she slept, head on moss.

And then woke.

She stood emptied out on the sturdiest of her limbs that she’d slept on, atop the tree she’d just birthed, and gazing out over the lie of the land.

And its beasts.

There was a husband in the distance, too, years ahead, decades and menses — in his hands, he appeared to hold loaves.

This tree is our house — it’s more hers.

Of the tree grown down from within her with her on top of the tree grown down and then out of her up.

One morning, she began her descent: plucking the stem from her navel, from the highest of her tree’s branches the umbilicus bud, the soft, downy, prettypink petiole blooming in white, pricked and ripped — then slinking her shimmying way, down past boughs wet with her, in a pomaceous tumble soon splitting her legs and, trunkhugging, the tightening hug of such thighs…until she touched ground, a firm footing, arrived. An apple as if a breast of hers or another belly went loose with the rock and the shake — gravity fell is how, and the fruit hit her on the head, then hit the ground and rolled over the horizon, the sun. She gave a yell, he heard her yell, then turned his head to her and realized by this risen sun how late in the distance he was — that he had to arrive, must…he’ll be late soon enough.

Her tree grew down ever further, then, how it drunk down even lower to stay: it branched into the earth, roots to vein the beneath, seeking a wet other than hers, its very source that had seeded — down into the sidewalks, the breakyourback cracks, down into the asphalt, the now landscaped lawn of the garden.

Knots widened into plates, boughs wound into bowls.

Kinder, which were leaves fallen in the wind of her yell, ribbed in fall — they went out to retrieve them, the many plates and the bowls, and then to forage for more, with always an appetite climbed up, clambered down, scavenged their meat placesettings from the northernmost face, dairy scarfed from the south of her round.

As it’s been said, her tree was their house, and still is: this room here the lowest stump of the trunk, the diningroom, the room in which we all dine…it’d been hollowed out by the kinder, woodstuff taken to dust fluffed their pillows, which’re buds never to bloom, for night’s sleep within their rooms ringed of grain.

And from all that, from the root, the first and the strongest, the taproot it’s called — only this table remains.

The rest having been sided in plastic, roofed in who knows menschmade or synthetic what else.

A table of room hollowed out from around the table of root, that’s how it happened — we’re told.

But, the question the scholia still ask, a table tabling what — what comes cosmologically next, the penultimate celestial course piled on?

What’s to be served on the table — what savory dish, what sweet sacerdotal…what are we having, what’re we having, what’re we having, Hanna?

Ima, all your kinder want to know. Tonight.

It’s been handeddown, then tossed around hotly, thrown in rage — that the rock of the Dome of the Rock, which is the domain of the Akeidah, the altar of the sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac, and, too, if heretically, the purported site of the ascension of the false prophet Mohammed, due to an unfortunate leak in the minaret’s tip, a smallest sliver in the gild that let in the morning manna, was gradually eroded away, down to a grain of sand that, upon one morning’s dawn, went and drifted away on a westerly wind: and so what’s left, arching high above Jerusalem, is merely a dome, gilding nothing, stillborn, an idol kept from spilling itself to the street by only a wall thick with moss and graffiti, its cracks crammed with prayers suspected to be the only things still holding all up: the Temple’s precurrent platform, that dome atop, and the heavens themselves. Heaven. And it’s now and now only that reconstruction begins, with scaffolding and spackling, insulation and sheet — a different concern of conversion; according to our sages, they’re still talking, taking proposals, accepting suggestions, contract bids, a little help here, any ideas. We’re open, I’m saying.

Welcome to Palestein, the Resort State — a paradisiacal refuge once forsaken for exile, the diaspora’s good life.

And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the second assistant frozen foods buyer at the best, most centrally located supermarket in Greater Tel Aviv and verily said to him—

Have you seen Him?

And the second assistant frozen foods buyer at the best, most centrally located supermarket in Greater Tel Aviv verily said—

Nope.

And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the weekday resident pro at the Par-Shah Private Country Club and verily said to him—

Have you seen Him?

And the weekday resident pro at the Par-Shah Private Country Club verily said—

Sorry.

And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the head dayshift usher at the Mullah Moolah Multiplex and verily said to him—

Have you seen Him?

And the head dayshift usher at the Mullah Moolah Multiplex verily said—

Don’t think so.

And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the thirdline buffet chef trainee at Tumbler’s in Jericho and verily said to him—

Have you seen Him?

And the thirdline buffet chef trainee at Tumbler’s in Jericho verily said—

Wish I could help.

And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to a roulette pitboss at the Vault in Hebron and verily said to him—

Have you seen Him?

And the roulette pitboss at the Vault in Hebron asked for an afternoon to review the surveillance tapes and talk to the host, I’ll get back to you then verily said—

No, but if we do, I promise—

you’ll be the second to know.

And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to Him in the form of a bird I think a dove it was with the wings of a fighterjet and with the beak of an unmarried, unmarriagable virgin, and verily said—

Have you seen Him?

And He, verily — what could He say?

I heard nothing.

Not since has there arisen a prophet like Him, and never again…or, at the very least, not for a good long while — which is time enough to forget. Strangely or not so much, meaning expected, the holy and holying methods are proving inefficient, ineffective, too, until His God, and maybe, heretically, made in the Image of most of the other parties formerly interested, previously in pursuit, not a few of them no longer powerful, since ingathered into purgatorial failure — He just gives up, like He tried…abandoning the search just as B, Himself, once was abandoned, left limited in credit and options, unbasketed along the banks of the frozen Atlantic — not so much no longer believed in, but more to no longer believe in Oneself.

Walled in, and yet of the wall, too, towering majestically above the valley known as Hell…O the dwellingplace of Moloch, as has been most famously, as it has been most loudly, lamented by the prophet Jeremiah: this sepulcher doming the Cœnaculum within, alongside the tomb of King David, the Psalmist of Zion. Here let us sing of three rooms, communicating stonily mute, rendered dark by the cloying cloud of the drapes. A moon prior to B’s passage, twelve of them notables all take their seats around a table in this hall made of the rooms of the ultimate dindin, the Last Supper it’s known as, served upon the Seder of the first night of Passover as has been chronicled, too, in books finally forbidden, that and the site of the Holy Spirit’s visitation to the disciples seven weeks after, the day of their old Pentecost, unmarked, burnt from the calendar, its ashes forgotten. Apostles of a sort, He’s surely not among them, not gracing. Not fit to sit at table, to knock around ideas on last knees with the likes of His once could’ve been but now never future father-inlaw, Shade, no longer president of his nation, presently termed for the life of him the president of its Sanhedrin, with Congress converted. A Schade, though in losing his title he’s only gained power. What’s in a name: the new businesscards, for one, they’ll be back from the printers tomorrow.

An eternal, eternalizing idea, it’s said, Shade’s that of their Iscariot: we become humbled to prevail, we sin only to merit. Along with the envoys of Abulafia & Sons, Inc., their heads bent low, he’s in discussion, not prayer. Their muscle, enforcers interested both official and private, sit one room over atop the tomb of David itself, idly oiling their pistols, and smoking cigars as big as whole pickles, making their toilets and moves: ogling these newly Affiliated exnuns, here of the former Carmelite Order, old habits exchanged for new, bustling in and out of the meeting with ample vorspeizen, appetizing trays heaped with savory outlay: toothpicked olives dark and light and pitted and with pits, too, alongside platters of pickled everything else you’d imagine; plates sweetened & soured in every verity known, with many of them only dreamed up by catering last moon — though all of them new and old tending toward salt, their sweet more like halfsour, cheekhollowing, budtart, new green and dill, yes, though not only those pickled pickles, no, there’s pickled babycorn, also, and beetroot, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, mushrooms, peas, peppers, pomegranates, radishes, tomatoes, turnips, and watermelon still in its rind, the delicacy that is the aubergine pickle, as well, that’s eggplant, if you weren’t sure; the reformed nuns stooping to enter the room, still sexless and humbled, musty and modest and decalced if only from personal preference, each time coming and going back and forth and back again in barefeet they’re tripping over the threshold and scattering all: the room, the rooms, pooling in brine, both vinegary plain and whitewine, and so out then in again with them, and then again with another tray, yet another of them to drop, to scatter their heap; they’re wading through the thick wakefoamy juice waved by their long logged murky skirts patched out of wimples, trying to serve their refreshment amid the spicing flotsam of bayleaves, peppercorns bobbing, dried red chilies, celeryleaves, cinnamonbark, vivisected cloves of garlic, coarse salt, coriander, dill, fennel, ginger, and horseradish, onion, parsley, and thyme floating atop the floor’s pool. At one end of the marble table’s a projector, this paleotechnic failing machine whipping its exhausted fan intermittently on electricity wired from the bulbless socket above: it’s projecting transparencies onto the opposite wall, miscellaneous surveillance images of Him, and of His former owners, Master or Hosts if you want, the official terminology’s TBD, interpreted — those of Laser Wolf (LAW), or he might prefer Glazer, those of the proctological family, too, them and their lawyers examining, then vague resource maps (oil and water) extending outward east the furthest known to what’d been Asia, an assortment of topographies and graphs, a Babel’s baffled charts; the bulletpointed, sevenday itinerary of an upcoming goodwill tour of Polandland entire, to be undertaken by Shade, and to be replete, they’re talking, with performances by yeshivish brass-bands and miscellaneous orphanages’ gleeclubs and choirs, summits with emissaries from seminaries, and meetings met with imported intelligentsia, promoting what they’re officially calling dialogue, cultural exchange, I don’t know…Shade, senior member of this assemblage as head of the Sanhedrin soon supranational, he keeps ducking down toward the table then almost under it as if he’s in the way of the image projected, fingering spiced at his nose, the shvitzy pimpling of forearm to forehead, tugs at the pants of his suit wetted through to the knees. Thinking why’d he go and agree to this meeting, this location, and with its timing so off: a tick too late of shade, this career’s blot, a soured stain; how he mustn’t lose the sun…it’s that he’s trying to follow its beam, windowed, slit, this ducking, dodging, feigning and feint, to stay within its lighted coddle. To keep low, if still wary of warming: the US of Affiliation shouldn’t know he’s here, or, if that’s impossible, then especially they shouldn’t know why, his purpose — his sitting down to break bread as much as covenant with these heathens, Philistines, meaning goyim he’ll Judas anyway. Silverpieces, futz them: the taste of coin in the mouth, a metallic bitter, too tart to talk anew. Fling a purse, and wing, he’s thinking that’s the schedule. Maybe it’s the symbolism, though, what stills. Its salty reek, the sulfurous retch: a time itself pickled, preserved, stuck fast in webs of herb, parsley/dill nets, onionskins…O to savor it upon the tongue, as the tongue, before the swallow and all’s forgotten, belched. He’s uncomfortable, feverish, tired from the flight. Hell should be this hot. And hell, he’s reminded, is only a valley away: just past the glassily shimmering walls, the arch widemouthed, the open lid of the nearest gate — giving way to the briny, brackish pit…

The purpose of this gathering’s hushed like a baby born into sin then flushed down the Nile, is to lay to suckling sleep the groundwork, in Jerusalem, for a lasting peace — and so nothing’s new under Ecclesiastes’ sun, Kohelet’s, which is as oppressive as it ever was, if only here, the shadow of its former dominion. Idea is to fix a ration of reparations to the remaining few Unaffiliated; who first need to be counted, who, Shade thinks, to receive such reparation would just love to be counted, and then and only then — it’s proposed — to get them their own nation, some small wound of bloody dreck somewhere, anywhere, to become infected, infecting…proposing to appease them, to shtum them up — to let the world get on with what it has to get on with, the Law. On the wall opposite the projection, there’s hung an extensively taut skinlike tatter, a parchment spliced then nailed as if to dry itself of slaughter in that light in from the one thin teardrop window still arcing, not yet walled: it’s a map, of the nation in question, that questionable nation, what to name it, why — partitioned wherever as an exclave, an excrescence, balmed in roughly the shape of B’s body, it’s said; that is, if you examine it squinting then sort of to the left, looking upsidedown, too, and through an obstruction, a column…Shade’s head in his hands, staring down, heedless, unhearing. What would’ve been B’s bodyparts: organs, glands, and yadda in that vein, leeching fourcolored inside these black borders some thick with others dotted as if for future severance, all sectioned then labeled with the names of the assembled, and to him the President what’re inexplicable numbers, indicating spheres of influence, responsibilities, domains of empire imminent only in their destiny, never to manifest…His forbiddenaround, tabooedabout hindquarters, there at the sinew of the thigh marked thickly in red with the term Undecided as if expecting, or provoking, a fight with any angel that would deign to sponsor; His heart’s hachures bearing the name Shade in black, His heart that is itself a Shade, which name is shadowed, too, under the tongue and then upon the forehead, marking due north toward a border that’s going to prove a problem, a pain in the international tush that’s labeled across the entirety’s lakelike middle Abulafia (its southern extremity, though, also marking the ocean, and so they’d be controlling what would be this country’s major port and largest city), a solution to which’ll probably eventuate even more death and, what’s worse for Shade, another invitation to a meeting amid the rooms of this scorched soaking Jerusalem tomb, yet another convocation of this body, and their seconded, protracted session of parceling His — this legislating of it parsed, skinned and grown then shed — this body that’s to be His not much longer, which will become as foreign to Him and to us as will be that makeshift nation to any, to be grafted onto the spine of whichever continent so deserves it, would deserve if only. And if, ultimately, amid all these arguments, these questions unanswered because still and forever unasked, unproposed, a solution can’t be found, and soon, by eventuality’s timetable, which is wellappointed, placecarded, and centerpieced, too, with Sinai’s two tablets, with the settings around them in place for first seating and already amply spread with the dew — listen, there’s always Shade’s solution, which is final, enough. Intifada. Plan B. It remains a Shem unnaming, however, this thirdtablet silence — for now not a label, placard, or scrap, but a gag. Hands are shook. If only in hope. All arches, their gates and their avenues, remain open.

The Arch

In the beginning as in its end — though Maimonides the Rambam might deny one — we are told Without form and void, and we listen, we respond, we repeat, Without form and void, generation after generation, Without form and void, generation Without form, generation And void…though we might add, if only now, forever late in a latening time, that it’d been soft, too, and as warm and as wet as a womb. Then the pressure from within, and then that from without, as substance separated and those separations separated; all was already old, existenced deeply. A mouth was forming, a mouth in the making — an arch. Then, the waters were divided into waters down here, waters up there, the waters were rent, the wet ripped, and hardness ensued, hardnesses, and we say — Darkness was upon the face of the deep…

An eruption down the dirtied throat, an irruption, others hold, dirtying, the blown breath of God, taking with its flow all the detritus that webbed the esophageal walls, venously scummy — ejectamenta, those spoiled little gel-fishes, and that vegetative stink, to fall laval down to the depth of the stomach’s valley. The stones, though, they went up the other way, were vomited up from where they lay like macle: there they sat as rock inside stones yea when they remembered…had been quarried up from deep in the gut, having laid there lo under layers and layers of layers maternal of rocks and the stony paternal for ages that weren’t yet ages but Then — finally to be formed, as found, unfinal, never. Verily, the finding gave them form, And it was good, then the form gave them function, and it was open, opening: these stones destined for heaps, which were found in other heaps, founded in heaps predating heaps, preterite piles, they were arranged, they’d be arranged — in an arch…into two arches facing each other, these arches of soaked stones rocking in vomit up from the gut, whites surfaced from the gutted river of tongue, not yet forked between the good, the bad, and the unsayable flow of the middle, which itself is never to fork. Rocks, punishments exacted to yellow. Gravestones. Teeth to lose.

B stands in front of an arched gateway once passingly ornate whose doming gold can now be found within the mouths of those around Him, those asking of Him, questioning with smiles that can’t comfort but glow, the untrustworthy wrinkles of the pious. It’s the opening here to a town with no name and, too, with every name they’re speaking in glinty hints, who knows the nyms, the polyonymous endos and exos, I don’t, onomastics masticating on and how, either, it doesn’t matter to nostalgia, never does…east from whence the world came from the belly of the bestial valley, vulvar and dark with a breath of its own that blows cold. He speaks none of the languages, I speak nothing. B yawns stumped, standing at its guardhouse, its gatehouse, passage’s home without guard, at least none that I’ve noticed, noticing me…His legs arched open to walk through the arch, to walk through this gate’s village, which town, then out its arch opposite, to flee toward the horizon then into the rise of the sun, from its set — all the while casting His own arch, against the day’s brightness, its shadow arcing His shade, behind Him then ahead its towns and its villages, toward the horizon that’s the rise of all arching and His, which wanders on with Him even while He’s fleeing it, too, and so arriving and departing forever, and never.

Hold on a moment, though, langsam, slow down, says the Guide — it’s that there’s this interesting thing about arches.

The Group quiets.

It’s that they’re built with crosses, just follow me here, the Crucifix…there’s mumbling, a snarky grumble — the cross being the frame, he says by way of quick explanation, hurried, hurrying FYI; they’re the gallows for the gallows, if you will, the construction of an arch involving the use of a scaffold, have patience, usually of wood, until the placement of the central voussior, the quoin as it’s often called, the keystone, or crown: a cantilever, that’s the stone that’s in the middle, to be placed at the highest peak of the arch, the stone that negotiates, that mediates, that bears every burden…the pressure, you with me — without it, all would fall.

A cross, the Guide says, it’s the form of the body — and the floorplan, too, of every ruined church that doesn’t awe, just disgusts…

A Crucifix, their Guide guiding on, but without any symbolism: only think of it now as two lengths of wood, how it’s urged…one just longer than the other, laid across it then nailed.

A cross, the Guide says again, call the crossbeam the lintel, then mirror that by nailing another board, as long as the lintel, across the bottom, down by the knees.

A hammer and nails.

Good, says the Guide, everyone with me?

Or should I wait?

Almost too easy to get a laugh out of them (it’s the nerves).

Now, he says, the workers here — gesturing to a group of overweight, overalled types who they grunt in response to their introduction, then make a show to roll up their sleeves…they’ll place two posts there, to form a V between the lintels, the upper and lower; then, they’ll nail two more between the upper and the very top of the arch, which is the keystone, remember — the crown.

Now we have two Vs, openfacing…imagine a diamond.

Can-ti-le-ver. Can’t you leave it? Here?

We’re touring an arch today, is what the next Group’s Guide explains.

Why? To support? to strengthen? what else?

To open, his opening goes.

As the Group nods.

The cross, the Guide explains now and again, it’s the wooden frame for the arch, erected to support the structure before the last stone’s placed at its peak.

These stones (Jerusalem stone was used here — a goodwill gift from friends former, they’re doublefistsized, about the hurt of a head if they’d tumble atop), they exert pressure, they push and they pull up against each other from both sides, from every; they ache, one against another, along their ways to the top.

They’re irregularly shaped, rough’s the word and unmortared.

Ages of pressure, of all this madinsane I’m talking tectoniclike pushpull — like, too, the process by which coal becomes diamond, it’s offered by way of example — will eventually annul the arch, destroy it, lay it to waste…will finally let’s say excommunicate the stone of the crown, casting it forward to B’s feet, without sin; and then with it, the other stones they’ll fall, too, with nothing to hold them up anymore, how they’ll fall to lie in two piles loose at the feet, as He turns to wander His on…

On the Island, amid the ruins of the Garden, which have been at pains staked preserved, made rubblesafe, they tour the subterranean tunnels, take in the vaults: arches barreling high, the groined crosses, lancet and ogee, passing through passages of all possible lean, of every potentiality for their own destruction; they walk in the dark, feeling their way toward a voice, following its light, that of their Guide what with the microphone and the miniature speaker clasped to his belt and the flash, the sentinel of his hardhat. As they’d descended from the floor of the Great Hall, there’s a sign: Mind Your Step, and God how they’re minding…you’d be proud; this way, please.

This began with the cross, there before the crown’s what we’re looking for here, the keystone, the foundation stone, the rock of all ages…then, Let there be the crucifix, and there was, heretically or not, here it crosses; the whole Group nods and they grumble, once an hour, on the hour, they nod and they grumble, like this, shuffly grumble, just so, six days a week nod again. And it was good, the Guide says, was good only because it lacked meaning, was not yet a symbol, not yet this curse, not so blasphemed underground: how they’re encouraged to think of the form as just two pieces of wood, really, merely material, nature’s own exuviæ, one actually a length longer than the other, these branches if you want them to be, sticks even, twigs; kinder poke each other, their mothers shoot them this look.

You must be this tall to…in the dark.

This tour, it’s a survey of the Garden’s fall, openaired: the State owns all of this now, owns this as they own almost everything, the public absorbed, assimilated finally to its power, a People. Their sleighs leave the city every halfhour, and on the halfhour nine to sunset, accommodating those who’ve purchased their tickets at least a Shabbos in advance, or, if sameday, maybe they know someone important, someone high up in the business of memory…I don’t, I forget, what’s his name. These workers, former Garden employees lately re-hired to work unrecompensed penance at the site of their sin: they have nails in their mouths, dulled, piggish teeth, they wave hands at the Groups with their hammers, then set to work, sparking the dim with their din. They’re re-raising the fallen, resurrecting what’s better left buried, graved underground. A Group makes its way to the furthest project, their present worksite, situated just past a score of glassed enclosures, up against a wall hewn from rock, the objects encased there (photographs, souvenir Garden products, personal effects of Garden employees) labeled with tiny tacked placards: naming names, materials, date, place. A lintel is mirrored, the workers hammer fiercely, another plank’s nailed below, there at bottom…a plank as long as the other above, both shorter than the central length, which is longer and goldengray. Another sign, this hung in the corner and rather beaten and crumpled, its letters handblocked, or in this pitch poorly stenciled, says—Please Excuse Our Appearance During Renovations. We’re reasonably sorry. And so they excuse, grumble and nod. A worker falls from a ladder, his nails scatter, and in the frozen darkness and noise the Group hews unto stone. Be right with you. Cleavage it’s called, giving a laugh. Then receiving, confirmed. Other workers don’t give any notice, though: they work on…now nailing two short vertical boards to the lintel lower, place two posts in a V between the lintels lower and upper, then place two more between the upper and the placement of the keystone atop, the crown of the construct: you’ll notice how they now have two Vs, openfacing, in the shape of a valley, think of a diamond, iyiyi, if you must — not to support, their Guide affirms, not to strengthen, and the Group nods its neck sore, approval. To open. Understand, more. This begins with a cross. All begins with a Crucifix. These wooden posts make the frame for the arch, are the frame for the arch, the structural support, he says, its strengthened foundation — to hold all up, he says, to keep it from falling down before the crown’s placed, he says, before the arch becomes crowned, they say now and so everything’s explained all over again how he says it. The keystone, the key to the stones as much as their lock. And then, a lick of a laugh. Every hour, this is. And again. On. The hour. Outside, even the sky’s stone, it’s goldening late, the sun the sky’s keystone falling the day into night, the night into dark and its scatter of stars. Ice holds firm under the freshgreased runners of sleighs. But it’s a walkingtour, and so might we suggest you wear comfortable shoes. People become Groups just beyond the entrance to the Great Hall, its steps, the Registry a floor aboveground, are then herded into Groups by age and by sex, hauled around by their time of arrival here, and there of departure, let’s go. There’s a mysticism to the making of a Group, it’s been said. In any Group, in every, there must be weakness and there must be strength, curiosity and complacency in equal measure, they’re told — the askers and the answerers, the talky then the mass, shushing silent. An arch — the height of a question, its mark. Photograph the video for posterity’s sake, then meet me in the giftshop for food, drink, and toilets. All groups are equal in function if not in form, in pressures, their pushes and pulls. What I’m saying is this — a person alone’s unsupportable. Be aware. Be burdened aware. Don’t forget to crown your Guide. A tip, always appreciated.

Inside, darker down these stairs spiraling into the vertiginous, spiderspinning of passages, webbed steps steeped to the pitch of night’s fall, precipitous, scary, and not recommended for those with the conditions of having a heart or a brain — the hammering’s loud, reverberant with the stone, and so he shouts over it, while apologizing all the while as he’s screaming, too, that he has to, their Guide he’s restless…now waving the Group toward him with a hand, then away with an umbrella, as if a warning of sorts, despite underground; they follow behind him, close and yet far enough away to estrange, always toward and then into what seems like a small, dankmoldy antechamber at the furthest eastern edge of the Island: an Introitus of sorts, a space just beyond dark, walled against light, keeping it from them, behind which heavy uniform slab this tunneling once went on, once led — as it’s said, as it’s guided over and over — into Manhattan: a passage proximately ruined into this wall, a progress thwarted, an answer, there’s your answer right there. Less than a mile off, what they’re sold. It’s told to have given out onto the bathrooms of City Hall, which stall…we’re not sure, that surety not included. I’ll take your questions only at the end of the tour. Inaccessible, too. Please, save them for the end, and yourselves. They feel at the walls on their ways so as not to be lost, though the tunnel tunnels on only straight, keeping their eye fixed on the halo of their Guide, which is the glint of voice from his person and that that’s flashed from the hat — not the voice of his person, but that of his function, his task, the glow of the plasticized crown…and so feeling their way, they go gripping a grope at walls knocked through with others, with these walls, and halfwalls, with quarters, ruin fortified, then reconstructed again to appear just rubbled enough to be safe, ostensibly, it’s passed around, ideally these fallen rocks falling as stones, some of them glassy, others dropped dull, this haphazard deconstruction of destruction even more haphazardly rehabilitated to now. And then — wall. Masonry. Ashlar. And now again, stop. This wall’s been arched, their Guide says, this arch’s walled in. Here, with newer stones. There, and with rocks found variously around the Island, its shores. In the style, though. Of the period. From the tympanum (which is the space between the top of an entry, or exit, then the arch arching above it, he explains while realizing, too, he’s forgotten to previously — wisdom lost on those arrived early) on down, all the way, it’s filled in now, full up. Me-zu-zah — there’s that, too. A crowning chink, beyond which it’s impassable, inaccessible, not today, try tomorrow. Kiss it, no matter — respect. The stragglers, those behind the curious, their spouses and kinder, their compensating others, have come to a stop, to a stand. Finally. They come and they come, they come then keep coming. Forever, six days a week nine to Shabbos. And then — they’re here, and then there’s no more, no further to go, turn around. About face. Stragglers first, with the Guide to guide now from the rear.

Take the keystone out, the Guide says, and this wall’ll fall.

And how the Island might, too.

Stick together, stay near.

Workers break for their brunch, which is tough rolls, gristly salami no harder than vodka…they’re silent behind the velveteen ropes hung from scaffoldings’ stanchions, makeshift brasspoles — how they’re almost exhibits themselves…

Please, no video, or flash photography. Tarnished, tarnisht.

This way, just this way — after you.

After the Group’s done with all of the Great Hall above, then the tunnelings of the Great Hall below, they’re led out to the rim of the Island, the Groups, toward the fall of the ice, daily marked at its thinning: there to pay their respects, it’s suggested, to the dead sunk beneath, to their dead beyond death, beyond theirs; which respects, however, and their prayercards and candles, aren’t included in the price of admission: according to their Guides, it’s another ten shekels to visit the Island’s wonderfully dilapidated synagogue, shul (which had never been a synagogue: there’d never been a shul on the Island, or one that ever was used — how they’d davened wherever they stood: in bunks, in clods of snow, amidst whirlwinds); which structure had been merely a trash facility recently redone to meet expectations, anticipatory of its legitimizing appeal…to there mourn reflection, it’s offered, upon the death of their — Ancestors, I’m sorry, slicha: many of them saying a Kaddish they’ve recently memorized, or tried to, whether in the original or translated, whether in transliteration Yisgadal or Yitkadash no matter, as many won’t register the difference, in meaning, in tonguing — to pronounce His Name Magnified and Sanctified, to magnify then sanctify high the Name of He Who Makes Peace a rote Shalom’s Amen. And let us say, you’ve been a wonderful Group. Applause. The best Group I’ve had. Thanks. Yet today, ever. Give yourself a hand. Clap fists all around. Across the Island, a tourist from the next Group — there’s always a next Group or else, there’s always another group of the Group — whichever neophyte ben Avraham with small needly eyes, colder lips marred with eschars, and beginning a beard, he not seeking the merit of any mitzvah, not even thinking that old do unto others: just do — he kicks out a shoe, nudges a pebble from the path up ahead, which is ice…the slate submerged, leading up toward the foundations of B’s house, exposed; so that the kinder coming up from behind won’t trip on their ways to the basement’s exhibit, then fall.