Their nametags, also, say obviously enough Benjamin Israelien, but underneath that writ expected are their real first olden names they’re given over to slowly forgetting, from which they’re changing, converting; what used to be referred to as their appelations Xtian, Unaffiliated, and then the names of their goyish hometowns; example: Harry, Mizpah, Larry, Shiloh, Gary, Lodi, here with his lovely wife, Vicki, doneup in drag.
My name, He says, is Jacobson, hymn, Jacobson, Esq., why not, from where or, more perfectly, from whom He gets it and what else (name, life — nomen est roaming, perhaps), He doesn’t know — and then there’s the touchy issue of quote His accreditation end quote; Jacobson, Esq. just once overheard and now, underspoken — the name, it’s been said, of His father the lawyer’s old lawyer of his own according to the will Israel’d left they’ve since scrapped. Elaine falls for it, asks Him to spell it all out for her: and He tries, capital-J-AC-O-B-S-O-N comma space capital-E-S-Q period.
And where am I from — Wishniak Hill, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s in Joysey, where else should it be? and Explain shrugs, goes and pens it onto His tag.
Hello, My Name Is: and yadda, she pins it to His lapel, its spike sticking through His bathrobe, His breast (later observers would describe Him, Him as Him — as if they’d known, or could’ve told the difference if only to tell it again well after the fact — as the height of inappropriateness, here in a house robe piped in pink, over His mother’s own robe trimmed in purple, both rattytatty, and holed), pricking Him to weep, His sacred heart. To pump Himself, then, from this nick of a question, Ben asking, what’s in a name — whether an inoculation against self, or a sanguinary palm smeared to mark the forehead in confusion, disbelief…blood, Ben thinks: maybe mine aren’t just impersonators; Jesus, do you think so they’re clones? Could be, could be worse. Holding Himself against the pain, the pains of both wound and thought, He tongues lips, sets teeth. Elaine hands Him a program. Explain blows a kiss to His booboo, is what she says from lips swollen with enhancement, botulinum, collagenital. He opens the paper to read right to left. How late tonight there’re still two midnight sessions to choose from: Doctor Tweiss’ scheduled to talk in the Shishak Suite about minimally invasive surgical options to, and He’s quoting: Get The Most Out Of Your Sinuses; competing with his brother Doctor Tweiss who he’s up late doing the Ramses Room in a discussion of the Metametymparapsychologyality of (Im)personational (Im)personation: An Excursus in Pretty Pictures & Lite Muzak; please pick up your vouchers from Registration, it’s urged.
Fat, frizzy almost menschs swarm Him away with them into an elevator then upstairs to either or both sessions included (How To Be Two Places At The Same Time: A Seminar for Expectant Mothers; a prerequisite for How To Do Two Things At Once II: A CrashCourse, kneepads not provided), but the food — it’s back down on the floor below buttoned the lobby’s L. Ben jiggles a flabby wriggle from their frazzled, cuticlebitten grasp, attempts to take the elevators again and this direction down, but the doors’ve already shut, fallen. He rests Himself against the buttons to summon the lights, God forbid walk a floor. Suddenly, the hallway’s hobbled through with Bens halting with walkers and quadcanes, disabled to wheelchairs (electric and wheeled by Himself, by His own best companions both in drag and in friendship, and in the spirit of charitable help), incarnations of any fate that might be His, forever robbed of their futures — with their constant flowmasks or nasal cannulas hooked up as if by strands of saliva to little, wienerlike oxygen tanks tubing attendance, and, too, them lying their spacesaving, moneysaving accommodation in the Q’asino’s sprawled ballrooms and hallways and even in the elevators He’s waiting for still atop a host of rental and stolen stretchers hauled, gurneys rolled on casters that squeak to suspect an infestation of mice from function to food again and again.
A ding, the elevator doors open with Him about to step inside but instead He’s crowded back and out by more Bens piling out, too many, too much even for Him who’s been Himself all His life — what little of life there’s been, both personally with regard to fulfillment and, also, speaking of time. Huffpuff Ben goes to find the door to a stairwell in case of divinely intercessory fire and there in the hall tries at the handles and finds one unlocked and so opens it, He’s sorry: inside the room and sitting on a twinbed’s a mensch, a nearmensch, an almost there, close but not quite, who he looks though — superficially, the suspicion’s only a feeling — just like what His twin would’ve been in reflection, in a mirror hutched on the opposite desk; he’s naked from a hotwaterwasting, fogmirrored shower now drying and draping himself for modesty’s sake with a pair of tzitzit that barely hides the wound of a circumcision that just has to be recent. To this particular Benjaminite’s credit, even his squeal retails real — Him fleeing from the sound of His own voice, through the hall down to its end trying all the doors along the way, locked jimmies locked, then tries the last, the one whose name is Stairs lettered in the holy tongue, too, across its window in red, shoulders into its give to tumble down a flight to a landing whose door opens back into the lobby. But it’s an emergency exit, rigged, wired, and so above there’s an alarm ringing like slots ping in zeros of sound, an openmouthed, untongued everymensch for Himself, no one gets out of the desert alive — people flinging aside even panic, fleeing themselves as one self that is Himself, too, to lobby exits lit and conspicuous, blatant and yet too narrow to accommodate such padded passage as if the very openings, the needle’s eye gateway, to Heaven Itself, which is bright and cold and pavedover with tar…Ben approaches the desk and without really asking Himself what He’s doing asks for a vehicle, demands as if with all the credit in the world behind Him anything with wheels and like now.
And what’s your name, sir? the ancient, fisticfaced hop wants to know.
And the mensch laughs a scar until Ben gives up Jacobson, Esq., with what room I forget…no, #108, the number of the room from which He’d just been evicted by ululant force. The hop sobers professional as the sprinklers rain down on his head and the water gathers in the cistern bowled between his prognathic lower lip and his gums. He nods Him out with a you’ll have to speak with the valet through the revolving doors through which He spins planetarily, revolting around and around, then finally outside and dizzied, lit and alarmed into night, its vastness human and waged: starryvested valets at their stands, amid intricately stranding constellations of velvet, webs suspended fine and strong between tarnished poles. Police arrive as wolves, with the tails of scorpions and the disgruntled foreheads of fathers at the siren of fivetrumpet alarm. He rips His nametag from His robes, throws it to the sidewalk, stands out unacknowledged. Then, bends His knee to pick up that nametag, walks over to the trashcan aside the entrance, throws it properly away — Hanna would be proud, would’ve been.