B .
Forgive Him His
C .
Forgive Him His
D .
Forgive Him for His
E .
Forgive Him His
F .
Forgive Him for His
G .
Forgive Him for His
H .
Forgive Him His
I .
Forgive Him His
J .
His Jealousies, say…as petty as they are—as he had excellent shower-slippers, which won’t fit, and then neither will his hat: Steinstein’s personals stacked to the side, under the desk made a tiny pile, cinched with a snippet of his belt…
And TEN (10) is the number of the toes on His feet. And NINE is the number of the pimples on His knees. And EIGHT is the number of the wens on His thighs.
Forgive Him His
Ken, kenosis, keptstatus…
Forgive Him for His
Laxity, laziness…lists.
Forgive Him for His
Machinations…
And SEVEN is the number of the foreskins He’s shed today alone. And SIX is the number of the hairs encircling His navel. And FIVE is the number of the hairs encircling each one of His nipples.
Forgive him O Lord of Hosts,
Thou Horde of Losts our forgiver forever…
Forgive Him for His Necrophilia, though latent — practiced exclusively with incarnations of His sisters, and His mother, which only occasionally, when and if He asks them to, fool Him.
Forgive Him His
Onanism.
Forgive Him His
Persnicketyness…as to which
pleasure’s which.
And FOUR is the number of the whiteheads on His neck. And THREE is the number of the blackheads on His nose. And TWO is the number of the ulcers in His eyes.
Forgive Him His
Q.
Forgive Him His
R.
Forgive Him for His
S.
silence…
Forgive Him for His
T.
Forgive Him His
U.
Forgive Him for His
V.
Forgive Him His
W.
Forgive Him His
X.
xenophobia,
what else in the X’s?
Forgive Him for His
Y.
Forgive Him for the sake of His
Zion.
And ONE…
O forgive Him our Horde of Hosts,
Thou Lord of Losts,
Who art in Leaven—
O let us be risen, too!
And let us say,
AMEN!
~ ~ ~
2
IV
A miasma of gray puff and cloud congestion, an exhaustion overhanging the water, which is ice…everything that’s not burning has already burnt. Ash has fled the air under the headcovering of night.
It’s earliest morning, and through its darkness waning an apparition comes forward, anomalous because it’s dark itself amid dawn; it comes starkly, with unrelenting drive, with pitiless force, as if the blackest god in the sky; it pierces the cloudbank, a ray of negative light, then screeches sideways, hisses, honks, comes to rest at Ben’s feet. It’s a limousine, a new one or the Joysey old repaired. Frank Gelt emerges from the gloom, holding open its door. Hamm lumbers from behind, bows for Ben His head and stumbles Him inside, choking, barely breathing from the fume. He’s veiled, still; He can’t use His eyes, His lids give only black. Again with the veil, it’s precautionary, not that it doesn’t also make for laudable mystery, suspenseful. A thing. Doors shut, lock. And then the limo, a refitted chariot charred with sunrise’s flame gone out, wheels around, heads to return in the direction of its arrivaclass="underline" straight ahead, star-bound, fading at a falling skid out over the ice without yield, hurtling offIsland, unstoppably fast, deathbringing, leadenfooted out over the sand over the ice then over the slick skin of tar.
Ben presses His veil up against the window tinted with weather, which passes for air thickly viscid, the limo passing through clouds, muscled intestines giving way to the cranial gray, bloodied iron, lifecold steel, metal limbs this rusted meat…the city once dead just now being reborn, hulking in the effort of its breaths ever higher above the grossest of streets: glaring heights of lipidic marrow, vertical artery, glassy and gelatinous organs peeking through insatiable tumult; fogflecked the digestive din, pulsing penetralia oozing light…the neon clot of billboard and sign; the mucilaginous asphalt, the strut, truss, and trestle; millions of links to the chain around Manhattan, binding this island of the Island in coils of burbling, gurgling cloud the limo bursts into air, as mere puffery, nothing.
Welcome, Ben. New York, it’s about time. This is what you’ve been missing, what you’re missing still, blind to all this, witless. The city of the windows of the house, the city of dreams and day, the world He’s been waiting for through glass and air for days and nights, and still denied Him, the city incarnated previously only through glimpsed Garden views and bunkbedded gossip, the memories of surviving FBs then dying, now dead; this city the repository of all dreams, and of dream itself, a holy of holies, a blessed covenantal ark of two of every kind and more, too many — each, though, an unknowable island unto itself, floating purl in the air on the sea on the earth itself floating within an emptiness, an Island alone in the universe as cause of its own belief, belied, its wisdom shrouded in distance, remove, exile, cloudbank, smoke and ice: each one of us is an Island, nothing too original about that, but each of one us is an Island with a city atop, building a city atop; a mensch building his city ever higher and forever, a huge high world of a city in the head of every one of us, shored in with skin and wharved with bone. All the lanes and towers and scrapers and panes, their scale’s been known, has been registered, at least suspected, of nights and days immemorial and insomniac through the windows of the bedroom of His parents — O but the people, Other people, their lives, that doing going life, that’s what’s worth it, that’s what would’ve riveted: people wanting and needing and loving and losing; it’s noble, this wanton heedless loss; it’s incredible, this loveless need. Though they seem not people but animals, hopeful beasts, hoofing and snouting out their crude existences, stuck in the mud of their own minds, their mindlessness, seeking only to satisfy the barest, the basest — survivaclass="underline" the awareness that they are, they recognize that, and that they must be — that, too; and then, that their purpose is that they must keep on being until, and in the face of it All, which is a thousandeyed, a millionmouthed, with too many ears to pierce into servitude, and too many feet to knowingly toe. It’s amazing to some, how humbling, debasing, destructive if one isn’t strong; others think it grand, life in this bestial city, that it’s exciting, ennobling, inspirational even. God bless them, God save them and keep them — they know not what they do; they know not who they are, only if. For them, for now, that’s enough.
Animals, mewling punching kicking beasts and curs. Animals, but animals with beards, suddenly with sidelocks, animals adorned in fringes, clothed in black, in new boots and hats and wigs, which are black, too, and even laundered; their hides the purest snow. Without, everything’s slushy, sullied, trashed. Horse dropping desecration. Old oil on the quivering gelled surface of the eye. Lenses smudged in ember, whorled fingerprints of ash. Gray burrows into drifts of boot and cart. Filling letter slots, mailboxes, even mouths to stut and spit, silence, then, as if in a renewed language, an attempt to expound again. Arguments batter every corner. These animals never relent. As the limousine takes turns, rights lefts, makes drastic swerves, turnarounds, Us and loopdloops, it passes packs of seething envy, parts resentful mobs to leave them in its wake exhaust to breathe on — the window cracks, a stone’s been thrown, or has fallen as hail, be charitable. The city has chosen, it’s changing: bodies dumped to bump drifts of fall long cleared; apartments have been repainted, appliances replaced on warranty usurped. Restoration’s in the air, He’s sensing even without a face…Ben’s limousine swerving as if driven by the quick pitiful flicks of His searching head, His form, Him an entrapped wounded mammal attempting only to window a view through the veil. They hurl into embankments, stagger around in skid to seek a throughstreet, a shoveled path, a route alternate if wild: maps are useless, fit for kindling, to stuff into shoes for warmth. Understand, there have been casualties, with service down if not delayed: the numbers have been unordered, readdressed, the grid has come undone. Junk juts up from pilings midstreet, mounds of sooty clump, dark humps of tar macled with ice in glittery brilliance. The limo takes a wide turn, cuts across meaningless lanes to curve into a straightaway, pacing itself against the Parkside sprawl, lined with streetlamps that’ve wilted from the crooks of bishops into logs obstructing, laid frozen across Fifth Avenue from sidewalk to the sewer. The Park’s overgrown in icicle fang, a flank of clods and butts bearded in white, rising to overflow the walls that stand to stop the spill from threatening the lane: walls of fieldstone, filthed, themselves walled with heaps of trash. Ben hauls over to the window facing, collapses against its blind: Uptown, the arching arctic crests and crowns, the dusted trails with the Reservoir rinked; low gusts winding frost along the floor of the Park, through tunnels, over bridges, then across its lawns, their bushes and shrubs snowed as if to cool and blameless monuments, freshly flush with light. Untrafficked, it’s this pure polarity by day, a golden pale suffused by latter dusk — with a strange and utterly clear crystal coddled deep and cold within.