Midnight, the house’s second floor. Upstairs-upstairs, Ben’s standing on the deck. In a robe, with nothing underneath, and slippers, His mother’s. He’s facing the ice, toward the flame, a fiery pillar, a piling pyre. He feels at the rickety railing: a suicide, He’s thinking, up and over the edge, why not…dayeinu, which means Enough, His father would say, I’ve had enough, throwing up his hands, I’ve had it up to here, His mother would have said, then she’d raise a palm to her neck as if to slit herself to peace, a knife she’d been halving recipes with, a stirring spoon with which to scoop out the pregnancy of her stomach: suicide…an idea, He’s thinking nights now the only idea, like Masada, that windowless mountain out across the ocean, a last stand against the unsighted; the Island pushed up by tectonic pressure, tidal force, risen to a rock towering above the barren city; Ben atop, the FBs, too, waiting out their day a breath below the sun, a last gasp below the blade of the moon…days casting the lots of an earlier season, sharpening their own daggers on the summit, fasting themselves into heart, and sleepless, they’re starving, thirsty, lonelier than dead; the stars toll, the PA sounds from behind the clouds, the house’s intercom quakes the foundations of the sky: Curfew…them to plummet down the slope, to break the fast of their bones. Atop the deck opposite Liberty, one of two givingout from the room of His parents high above the house and the Island, He’s fixated on the flaming horizon, and there on an assembly of forms in every color never His: black, brown, beige, yellow a migrant red, the Kush just following their orders, as always, but now issuing them, as well, as if a Law given over to themselves in a million languages echoing equally to Him as they all mean the same, which is nothing — work; they’re rolling the dead out over the freeze, gathering them into shrouds of massive white, snowballing corpses turned over and around again in a wheelingly reeling processional over the ice thin and thinning thanks to their fire out to melt the furthest shore, a flame of bodies cracking the freeze under its heat, the funereal weight, crushed under the gigantically cyclical, cycling roll of disposal, to fall them hard into sharding spring, dispersing, down into the depths.
A slight splash — call it a clock, a serving plate once kindergarten art & crafted by Judith with hands and with twelve numerals, then hung upon the wall of the one and only kitchen; a clepsydra, the hollow drip of His parent’s whirpool Israel said as Hanna’d said jacuzzi: each hour, every minute, twice a second a burned body’s dropped through the ice as ash, its noiseless plash marking a slight on time…call it a calendar: the bodies daily stacked in a bonfire like the blackened boxes on the page of the month hung on the kitchen’s wall below that white plate’s shadow, which is round and without end. As has become tradition, an official count will be given come morning: a mechanically whistling voice, distorted, distorting; what souls remain stumble to inspection, of themselves, by themselves, from awake nights worrisome to fumbling to feet, with a pretense to having slept an optimistic dream — for appearances, their own sanities, calm, what sake not or better; they try to wake their neighbors, their bunkmates, the stricken barracks. Sons and stepsons and grandsons, SonSons, halfbrothers and nephewcousins. Attention, good morning, there are now X of you left. Why. Zzz. Have a nice day, you thousands, you hundreds, you holy tens. Pleasanries, don’t mention. Attention, there are now only a handful of your kind left alive. A thumb that makes a mensch. A prophesizing finger pointing fault down the throat, to belch up a burning answer: who didn’t know me, who wouldn’t. Have a great weekend. Shabbat Shalom.
With death returned and all the preparations that accompany it like a mother that follows guardingly, witnessing, a step behind her son only to outlive him (to wash his body, to keep watch over the corpse, the smashing of a wombgrave, into the warmly unfathomed ice), Garden employees and Island staff, many of them insourced into this insanity—Mishegas, again, being the term currently preferred, though the Nachmachen might hold by Narrischkeit—from municipal jobs sectored private and exclusive in the wake of the disaster, they’re spending so much time burning and burying that things begin falling apart, melting, giving way, incredulously’s the joke, even more than they already are; the Schedule erodes, though in implementation only, as nothing can banish the record, the rule: security becomes lax; journalists infiltrate the perimeter under the passage of night, toss the gloss of their magazines and the folds and Shabbos inserts of their newspapers up and over the fences, the wires, and climb on over, crawl through tunnels dug through the frozen dirt with their pens, muddydulled nibs, flashbulb smoke the gathering clouds, the zooming lens of the moon; what they report back to the mainland makes no matter, it’s all entertainment: death as distraction, diversion, from more lasting change, meaningful purpose, the future’s promise of evermore destructive upheaval; sentries have abandoned their posts, guardtowers forsaken, circumcised without barb; the patrols late on their sweeps if they make them at all; nightly meals are even served irregularly, often pass skipped by the staff, never by the survivors, who wait whole hours for their feed, only to go hungry again at the appropriate time; unofficially forgotten about, their beds lie unmade, without maid, their linen dirty, shvitzed to filth; their laundry’s never taken out, if taken out then never returned; the FBs are eventually allowed to sleep in; soon, lights are never turned off, if turned off then never turned on; the Schedule still exists if only as idea, idealized but not implemented, extant but only as concept, countenanced only, recognized, to be sure, but within that recognizance lying only the negation of any power it’d had: this Law imposed now just a way to live, another imposition, one of many, merely a way to die, something we once knew, and occasionally remember, another world, that, theirs, another desert and its generation dead, deserted. Those who aren’t burying are already buried, or are burned and burying themselves, weather permitting: everyone from the longtoothed, shortorder cooks to the shippingclerks, the nurses and pursers to the valets of the latter, those who’d once been conscripted to care for the living, to indulge them — repurposed, made complicit with the cause’s discard, occupied with hiding not the evidence (as there is none: only healthy, successful people, provided for and pleasured, happified and fat), which as it doesn’t exist cannot be kept secret even from their God, but with hiding the evidence of the evidence inextant, the fallen, droppeddead rational, the then alive, now burnt, unexplained — all of them, that is, save the high staff, led by Doctor Abuya and the Nachmachen, who’ve been charged with taking care of PR: sounding out what this means, why it’s not bad because divine. Understand, there will always be those serious people — goys placid, imperturbable, without pleasures, kept around to take care of business, to make arrangements, organize futures; the lots cast delayed from last season to covert the plans, preparations, massing, assemblage, underground, in the tunnels, amid the earth revulsed and gray…President Shade and partners striking ironclad deals, hot and molten, plotting spin for when the globe holds its own.