And though He’s been hamming it up as kosher as possible, everything’s just east of being on tonight, say Utah latterly known as Mormondom that’s how far off, make you happy…as if the audience will notice — and how are our notices? Has the backlash backlashed into slavishness, yet? What’s wrong with me, what’s my problem: matrimonial jitters…having these eighteenth thoughts, that prenup this Goldenberg had Him sign this morning too early, how maybe it favored her too much, though she has her own money; after all, she’s the President’s kid, The First Daughter, foisted da Foist, they said da Pope sent a gift, Pius Zeppelini…how to get a disengagement, what are the divorce laws in the state of Kinfusion, how to go about getting a Get, or else — how to avoid such thoughts, and the aufruf; how to put an end to any Genesis before it can gestate into what?
Questions: do you Ben Israelien take you this stranger whomoever to be your fill in the blank, to have, hold, better and worsen, for richer, poorer, in sickness and health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward until death do you — who even knows how His own tradition does this, or did…they’re perusing the video arcana, the archival photographic, the imaging and audio lore; albums are pillaged, the reels are raided as tombs. And soon, begging off the bachelor afterparty, which the stagehands had been planning to host in the Forum, a vomitoriumlike via of Rome annexed incongruously to this unit of Egypt, Ben’s returned to His suite, penthoused atop the pyramid of the Hotel & Q’asino. No apologies to their disappointment. Frozen vodka and warm mashke just sit. The strippers had anyway canceled due to conversion. Hiding high above this iniquitous Whoredom, He’s beyond the reach of radiance, the sizzling of light a dull throb. Registered under any odd surname malaproposed then appended Pharaohnic with number — Jacobson I — Ben’s the lone guest of the alight capstone of this monument memorializing only its own wasted expense, roomed in the glowing glassed pyramid set atop the larger stucco pyramid sloping below. He sits exhausted on a luggagerack under a sconce, an oillamp illuminating the suite, then the desert, the sprawl hazily endless, as if emanating from the very rubble landscaped at the feet of the faces of this gently widening gold, at the very least gilded, edifice, which is set here as it is there or was, Egypt, b’shana haba, alongside the lie of a great riddling Sphinx, in this lockdowned keeping appearing almost domesticated, with its nose again attached in a laudable feat of archaeological rhinoplasty, its paws splayed out in front astride a stretch of statuary, enthroned Ramseses arrayed in factory ruin, wired for light and sound. Ben’s left the bow untied around His neck as if His head’s an opened gift, snifter in hand and a smoke, slippers and a robe — miracle of miracles, He’s left all alone.
Let my person go…Him of shvitz and of sadness, walled inside this tomb, however tastelessly appointed, not that He’ll notice, being nervous, anxious, humiliated by His image, His presentation, how He’s been packaged — O to be bound within the circumference of a ring…God, everything and the show, too, tonight’s disaster He’d rather not go into — the closet’s mirror, or that above the bed, in which to relive the worst in the face of relief — not with what He has to do to evade tomorrow, its tight new tux hanging plasticshrouded behind that closetglass (to be laidout on the bed in morning’s reflection), for the ceremony’s seven circles and…Ben almost thinks to stand in line for a refund at the boxoffice Himself, but no, think again — to do the drastic, that’s what’s called for, the coming voice, not as much gesture as deed, less prayer-whine, more more. Let my people, get up already and go! Gegangen! Napkins have been fitted into their holders. As for the rings, those two golden globes hollowed for vow, as if emptiness is its symbol (one of which’s been named the most capacious yet made, possibly ever, in the whole upper 40s, Mitteltown’s reformed Diamond District; who keeps records of such things, you might ask, but how they whisper!), they lie surgically stitched to a pillow on a bed in a room, which is Gelt’s, three quadrelating floors below, between two macaroons compliments of turndown. Ben takes steps to the window opposite the deck, dashes His eyes down upon the slope ensuing, its desert landscaped: a combedover tangle of briar, withered scrub and shrub giving way to flats; the far terrain littered not with treasures of papyrus, scarab, or hieroglyph shard, but with paper, plastic, the metal promise of lottery scratchoffs, the greasy shrouds that mummify burgers…Hathor the cow goddess slaughtered out in the wilderness and then carved for buffet, the four sons of Horus gone bust as the birds then flown home with the Sun God finally set, Amen-Ra; Osiris’ Isis secured for the night in her maximum security vault. Transportation to any netherworld’s just a short ride away, though, a straight shot from a lot of parked golfcarts that opposites the horizon.
From the glass atop the sharp rise of His accommodation, Ben’s stepping past the kingsized serviced with two macaroons of His own, served up each to a pillow, how thoughtful; their grease as if leeching His shadow across the eggshell carpet, deckward: the open and wide desert just a fall past volition, a gust flings open the door to screen midnight’s sky. The stars have been annulled in favor of the lights burning below, downed to the lampposts in deference, due respect dimmed to the blinking cold and the signs. Enumerate that lower stellular, then its sands gardened, too, and may that number be the wondrous sum of thy kinder — no way, you got the wrong me. Why should He marry her, how could He, why would He, know what a decent reception for onethousand maybe friends and no family costs you these days — it’s His money, not that it’s His to spend, but…emotionally, He means; know what kind of expectations are involved, what failures might lie in wait under every placarded table, what curses can be writ in the cards? Ben steps over the threshold, through the air, into sky. And there, at the greediest, pyramidal pitch of His occupancy: His head itself a greenish eye appraising, allseeing, seeking value unlidded, unlashed atop worth…Exile — the desert endless and endlessly unforgiving; utterly foreign, yet if only in its ideal, an inheritance, too: this desert the wilder younger brother of an easterly nowhere, the desert that formed Affiliation, years before civilization, ages before culture — an unpromised land; and, at its furthest western edge, another ocean, which promises to be purer than that that lapped us over here those generations dead long ago. Arise, then go down. Don’t let the wind hit you on the way out. Deserts have this way of turning people to prophets, sheep into shepherds, making rules into exceptions that then grow bushes of fiery beard and strike miracles from the faces of rocks.
Here and now, though, there’s no indication. And so what is it, exactly, precisely, stonily spring forth with what because we all have that thirst: what force, that tactless trust to what or in Whom that has Ben out on that deck, atop the pyramid atop the pyramid from which He rules every and none, then has Him ledge out a leg over the rail…the hair of His head, tangling with breezes and cirrus — to knock unscrewed the burnt bulb of the moon…on the rail, His crotch becomes stuck, what a drop — don’t look down? don’t look up! and then the other leg overs, as well, and Ben’s holding onto life with only the cruciate nails of His fingers, trembling, numbed. A handful of our scholars once schmucked low enough to suggest this as an attempt at suicide and for this they’ve been thrown from the topmost window of the House of Study, which if not merely metaphor is risen higher than any pyramid and with windows that don’t open ever whether in or out — then to become scholars of only their own demise, of their own failure, its interpreting loss; and yet neither is this a martyrdom, not even a selfmartyrdom, as other of our sages once heretically proposed — what mamzers semantic, forget them: may they be excommunicated by their own consciences, exiled out to the margins, the verso darkened by recto of the page being turned. No, it’s at its most secular an escape, as some of our more moderates have allowed, an exodus if you want, but, as they insist, an exodus redivivus reversed — an exile accomplished in rewind, a history never accomplished in doublearrowing rewind: into the desert, the Law, and only then may we wander it was, but now it’s just wandering from the very 1:1 first verse, perpetually — an eternal lightingout for a territory that can only be civilized in its Promise, it’s said. To think that who or what promised the Promised and why’s not to be known, and how that promise doesn’t indicate intention either, whether it be good or evil or neither and mystically both, only fulfillment, as faithed…hymn hymn hymn, is this the particular kind of promise best left unfulfilled, like the one of the One Messiah — who knows if not Him; better to think less, fail better, fall more. Unminded, mindless, to step along the outermost lip of the deck and then, lean. Ben’s foreskin freshly shed before the show thanks to His own ministrations, it’s calming; His Batya, the Marys, are off — and so He has nothing to slow Him, to float Him on down on the wind of its flap. He lowers His tush, holding the railing to air His weight as long as He can and the deck can support. And then breathe, Ben — He just lets Himself go, with a great loosening of everything inside Him gives way, and He slides…down the western face of the pyramid, Him slipping hundreds of widening stories down the slope widening fast and faster forever, what with His weight and its force, the extensive weather that is gravity behind Him, slingshotting this now yellowy butterballed, dirtysnowballing Ben down the incline headfirst, feetfirst, everythingfirst and tumbly nothing, His tush on His roundness that’s all tush getting hot, rubbing hotter and burning, bumping Him up in small moguls on ducts, chaffing until — just as Ben’s sure His robe will spark His roll into flame, a rearside, frontside, inferno, He hits, solidly, and splays open wide, landed in the sand, not quite that of the desert proper though made in its image: an unsparing, unstintingly dusky perimeter perhaps once marked for plantings, but presently barren because frozen, fringing toward the edge of the sidewalk then around at a squared turn to the face of the pyramidal Main Entrance.