A ray of light or shaft, with Him beneath, the disposition terrible. One leg of a ladder missing another leg and then, too, their rungs altogether, with Him beneath and passedout. A pole, and not that of the moustachioed, sausage-tongued nationality, those who once had been known as Poles, and so to be fatter and even taller and immensely hairier and more violent than that of the present species — but a pole like a totem, as in a lamppost, a telephonepole, above Ben, passedout about to cometo.
The mood, horrendous, don’t ask.
A pole just poling out there alone in the middle of the desert — O the West Pole, standing blown to bow in the cold wind of dawn, its shadow so long it reaches all the way to the easterly pole and right back around again, equatorial and such, gone global. As for the loose rag atop, that flappity schmatte: it’s flying the standard of a nation Ben’s never heard of before, a flag for a land He’s never even seen on the maps, a country maybe unconscious.
18, it says, where’s that?
Ask Aba — golf was his thing.
It’s freezing, and His robe’s no help, it’s wet, not fabricate but filth. It’d snowed, then icedover, and all the while the grounds’ sprinklers have been on, shooting their water to harden, to still, their sprays frozen insectlike, or into seacreature tentacles — coldhanging cages of flow, as if capturing air, imprisoning cold.
Ben on a golfcourse, His form a divot of earth.
The shadow is the pole and its shading flutter the poletop flag for the eighteenth hole He’s sprawledout atop, or below: comingto, goingout, Him coming and going again to where He doesn’t know which, nauseous, perplexed — an incalculable time dialed, teed upon the posts of His lie. On the head and the arms, there are wounds, there are scars, and then the shadow’s in a different lie from where He’d last left it, dimming across a hazard with the westerly swing of the sun. The light, His eyes…the kopf of His head. Ben’d been knocked-out: a prick of blood encircled by the red of unconscious scratch on an arm up near the hock of the shoulder…a doctor, it said it was, then there’d been a needle unnursed, its sharp tipped widely and as dark as the night. He’s hit that head, too — on a rung fallen from, knocked a dream. He tosses, numbed, though His numb also aching, and His putz slipping from its shorts, then pajamapants and mothering robe to writhe within the hole lubricious with ice melting from the friction: Ben rubbing up and down against the astroturf, and upon spurting He goes out again and when He comes to He’s shed a skin and soft again and there’s greengrass that’s strangely not God’s Third Day of the beginning creationary grass and the green, it’s a strange bitterherb in His mouth, between His teeth a tongue that’s jealous of wet. He spits to the wind, turf and leaves fallen, flails under the eyes of vultures perched on powerlines neighboring the fairway, aged and blistered buzzards out for fleisch, His or any. It seems, with the long, sharply tipped tufts His hands weed from the course, that the astroturf, regularly watered by weather, has begun growing on it own; it hasn’t been manicured for moons.
To His left, a golfbag lies empty at the verge of what had been a sandtrap. To His right, an iron numbered nine as if in designation of the shadow of its future hour — and then a driver, which is crossed over the iron to form an X, marking what geary spot, amid the dot dot dotting of balls. Ben rubs Himself, rubbing to itching, He has to, to scratching again, to raw. He sits up, stares. The links’ve gone to dreck, which is pretty much par for the course: wind’s up coarsened from the hoard of the traps, whiting out the arroyos, bunkers, and cañons menschmade and those that are merely the obstructions of nature; easterly as far as the wedge of horizon, these pyres of clubs and bags, leisure dolmens, puttered obelisks, jutting up from the snow littered as if in offering with gloves quickly stripped, shed headcovers, upended stands; golfcarts overturned as if abandoned at the score settled on total disaster, imminent threat disrupting all shadows, their teetime; and then, furthest to the west, a forever spanse of evergreen snows, moneyshaded from astroturf leak — the leachate tainting of the real by the fake.
Oy, the back of my knees. Ben rises to survey the lay: as if a landfill in its wastefulness, almost otherworldly as uninhabitable, too cold to breathe…this terra terribilis gone incognito without the usual atmosphere of polyester admixed with plaid. As He rises, He’s scratching still. What is it, it’s horrible. A mold forming around Him, a bushy cloud or monstrous fur, the seeped whitening green of His sleep, staining the robe, sucked onto the skin. He itches, it feels, even unconsciously, in His unconscious, its recognizance in the waters hazarded over with ice: to let fly with nails at your reflection, the burn in your brain — it’s leprosy, Ben, this land lepromatous; you’re going to have to trust us on this, we’re all doctors here, at least we’ve all been to doctors; take off your robe, put on this gown, you’re on holied ground: sit down, let’s answer our questions.
What’s given Him this leprosy, assuming that’s what it is? Los Siegeles, babele, Los Siegeles, the last He remembers. What’s the line, what’re the real odds — on survival; how He’d wandered feverish, dazedly delirious, to here, this golf links, to the south, the west, between them and both, dreamlessly scratching itching and raw, unkempt to His fingernails gnawed, tearing a drip precious of vein? Had He been walking, what, two, three, four days due southwest, half through the iced desert, over freeways newly tolled but who has the nerve to pay, in doing so just denying an inheritance lately received: withhold your right over every head, not chutzpah and yet neither is it cheating per se, only it’s a sin not to bargain, to handle as well as the truck, abandoned and lost — over ticketed ways high and low, banditbound interstates, routes fined, polared to pot…was it a drink and its poison He’d been slipped, comped to conk out, the seizing of shikker — a bartender He’d paid to be serviced by, only to be taken for all and for nothing? Whatever image He might try to mock of Himself gets subsumed in the fame, sublimated, otherwise Affiliated, never at fault. What Ben last remembers: betting the bank on red 18, or, then nothingness: dropping some dry drink, something too ginned, or overly vermouthed, a drink altogether too expensive and refined to ever be indulged upon His own free will and separate check, there’s no way He’d ordered it for Himself, no way He even knew of its existence (Israel drank wine, Hanna had sipped Israel’s), attempting a splurge only to spill the dribble over His robe, soaking His socks, puddling slippers. Bookies to creditors. Dealers untipped. Bellboychicks and cocktailmaydels. Foxtailed waitresses. BunnyBens, and then what. Then abducted, but how, only to wake up here rawly rufescent, with this futzed fuzz on His skin. He holds at the pole for support, then with a sigh lets it go and stands upright alone and unsteady, wavers like the flag veiling His eyes, nearly falls a foot into the hole below, staggers then rights Himself again, tries to breathe deeply.