You want we should tie the tubes? the psychoanalyst Tweiss is dying to know.
Knot Him up before He knocks her up? adds Tweiss the mad plastician.
Wouldn’t want any mongrels or mutts running around, stray halfholies, those partichosen bastards…the Nachmachen removing the High Priest’s shading miknefet to bare his bald, gauntgraved face — the line would be muddled along with the Image, he says, the blood and the buck stop here, are we understood? Or, if not, like will you go ahead and blur the balking points, dust away the processes particular, the impetus impotent, and just do your job, what you’re paid and more than you’re worth to get us done: anesthetize, sanitize, sharpen what needs sharpening then slice right in. Make us the Messiah we so terribly deserve: a machermensch, an exilarch — a king who can issue no prince, a God That can manifest no son.
It takes a full lunation to recover from the procedure, from the subsequent infection, then from the infection of the infection, unto health again — which is, at heart diseased and failing, only the ideal of health, its hope and so consoling until the advent of what calamity dawns next — the wound yawning the distance between Ben and His body, its perfection, its willingness to go on; His mind or a mere tremulous semblance of recouped from the croup of medications, side effectual shvitzes and aches and languorous lolls, the lifting of the masked and measured fog, the recuperation of regret after this period of an occupation less fruitful, a surgical measure of selfpity recurring more virulently than ever through a moon of stay, inhome. For recovery, He’s housed in a northeasterly turret of the Great Hall, a towering growth from which you’d rescue a princess, clambering up the cascade of her hair, the platinum ash hung down as a shade from the sills of the windows of the height’s lone room, set with four small Oriental slits allowing incomparable views when the shutters aren’t on; a stay fully insured, it’s assured, Garden’s coverage complete to put His mind at what’ll have to pass with doping drug for ease, and then — once returned to the flush of youth, and it won’t be soon enough, once the ramifications of this operation have been explained, contextualized, psychologically massaged away as vital component of His therapy, then apologized for with sympathy and toys — license is His to shtup with impunity, they’ve promised, without much reservation: something to look forward to, they’ll tell Him something like that, another mutilation, sell Him a new life, just wait, sold, you’ll love what we’ve gone and done — the slice, the peel, the cut and its cauterization, the sutures, then the swelling, the numb dissipating from His waist on down, the extremity’s tingle, His feet, His toes, needling life in resistance to such ascetic anesthetic.
Though as for that heedlessly promissory promiscuity, that happiness is still weeks off, a moon away. An entire lunation spent in rolling moaning wake and dream and sleep, selenitically wasteful in flattened fit atop this luxurious bed commandeered from Long Island’s Hospital Under the Sign of Everything, last belief ’s Health Care Facility of the Year, lyingin state of the art this unit wired for comfort, programmed for calm, a multiadjustable slab, a posteurpedic grave. Demonically idle with the hands not allowed to stray below the navel’s hairy scar…Ben thinking just thinking like, what’s it all worth: with the branch bowed, its line ending with Him, familytree hacked to trunk; when He’ll rise weak in the knees and needs His testes hanging between His stumps like seedless fruit — He opens the shutters west and gazes out the window at the appletrees barren, chopped and stacked, the hollow knot, the cicatrix, barkveined cores, their wither a wrinkle past a sill…Stammbaum reduced to Stammsprout, hacked, hatcheted, axed, downsized to kneehigh and nothing after, uprooted, never to grow again; no, despite the dreaming, despite the time to dream, the opportunity to forget the day as night sleeps through the day only to reveal, if inspired by luck, an inner light, an intuit, a glimmer — He isn’t able to work up any image of a kid; any apparition of any offspring’s of Him, as His own immutable self, pure ego, an infantility incarnated as walking and talking already, fully formed as He was, is Him this taking after Him, showing Him the sand ropes, demonsrative, immersive; initiating Him the Other Him in the most deeply shushed rituals of Sloth, the most lazily hermetic initiatives of Waste, imparting the secret formulæ, the incantations and hidden practice: that Schlemielundshlimazelkeit (Ben’s Ben as an updated Faust, younger, impressionable, irreparably Semitic, handling poorly, making a fool’s trade: Himself for another, an even schlumpier heir of Schelumiel son of Simeon, Numbers II, loser of wars, mensch of schlimm Mazel), that whole brand of pathos, that copywrit inheritance of guilt — managerial, patriarchal, Godlike; after all, what else’s a father for…how would I know?
O Israel, where art thou, hast thou forsaken me and why, what was your price, verily might we splitteth the difference? Was I to become you, if only to becalm you — your soul? Israel, he told me stories at night then sang to me, he would have danced at my wedding, offered a toast, napkined my bride, lipstick from her cheeks, the cake topped with the marzipan coupled, how I loved him, so very much…just answer the question — I loved him. Then why do I still have such guilt? A statement’s given — only to be itself deposed, disposed of; everything we have forsaken has been preliminarily notarized, its memory duly filed. It’s not Israel here, though, not now, not anymore: nu, it’s another lawyer, a mockey just begging to be disbarred for the work he’s doing, about to do and the way he’s billing them for it, a clock’s hand futzed up the tush; it’s a Goldenberg who’s survived, a most senior partner of Israel’s, maybe, who must’ve just been passing for him to still be breathing, walking, talking dictation, briefing and billing, charging to the fullest extent of whichever law might govern both personal comfort and his mortgage. Most of our sages agree…hymn, thanks so much, he’s just thoughtful enough to drop in on Ben, pay a visit paid; I was just in the neigh or no, it’s that there’re still a few matters to deal with, he says with face blurred bright from out of his opened mouth, a goldtoothed aureole, issues outstanding, you understand, little things for Him to sign, a handful…O nothing too important, certainly bubkissoff, nothing much to get worked up about or over, remain calm I’ll collect, it’s just standard stuff, these disclaimers of disclaimer, waiver forms in duplicate, powers of don’t want to hassle you with the details, the small mint unread he’s making uninitialed…Article 136, for example, the riders, the fine party of the first print, the penultimate clause, sanity, with fire and water he sticks it to me, acts of Gee-O-Dee, better not to think, best about it or anything at all, shouldn’t really in your condition, doctors’ orders, no double buts or jeopardize your second chances; like put your faith in ad hock, and just sign here here and here, an X and it’s terminal, the black blip, a flatline dotted: a sheaf of soggy papers rained out of a puffy scuffed pleather valise otherwise empty, save for an apple, halfeaten allrotten. Goldenberg’s borrowed a pen from a guard, he’ll forget to give it back.
Once he’s guided his client’s hand over those lines flatly dotted and straight, crooked and contiguous and both, made limp passes at blanks and bubbles and fields, this Goldenberg takes a seat, makes himself comfortable as if to prove his concern: a heavy groaning settle of unpressed pants and rumpled sportsjacket, in for the long haul on crows’ feet winged with balding elbowpads, his wet fedora hunched down low over his eyes, a black borsalino its brim just a nervous tic too bent, its bow of headband torn to flap in the smudge of gust through the windows; all as if to say however long it takes, I’m here for you, Ben, hineni, chaver, another allnighter, a week, a month; how you’re not just the client, Mister — you’re the boss in charge; he falls asleep, is soon snoring fungus off the walls, the mold and mottled hoar, is woken up only upon termination of visiting hours, never official save that beyond their interruption he begins to make time and a half.