You’re not safe here, the elder says preparing Kiddush that eve over what they’ve scooped of the weathering melt steeped with the peels of grapes saved and stored. I know who you are. I’m not just a native, I follow the news. And it’s not just my family, I fear for you, too. He holds aloft a murky tin cup, and there’s silence because none of them have yet memorized the blessing, the bracha. Over the washing, done from the depths of wheelrut puddles and hoofsinks, but before the breaking of bread, two cold loaves of corn, he takes Ben aside and whispers to Him: after we make Shabbos, it’s best you be gone, then returns to his kinder (his shayna shanya kinder), promising them — when we get to the store, I’ll trade up for more wine.
Ben sets out from the axis, walking two days, wandering three days, four, traversing four lines, arms, roads, and their people, kith and kined worlds…ways that might all be the same way, as the days of repetition lead toward the closing: blockade; with the meal spilled upon the ice then the savory salt, and there’s only one road left open…this the hardestrocked road, winding a way past the touristed ruins, originals destroyed whether by earthquake, fire, raid, or by time itself a God and then like Him or it reborn, again resurrected if only for the fast, distracted worship of weekenders ingathered; then, up to the so described, you sold me majestic vale of Third Mesa — how the pamphlets and brochures and catalogs available for a nominal investment of faith say windswept, say mighty with height, the site of the invisible archway by which the spirits of the dead might enter this world, and then exit, taking leave in a deep fall forever into the grandest of cañons. At least it’s not so small that you’d miss it.
To leave the line then, to forsake His personal migration, His own singular path or forgetting — repenting the axis entire, Ben takes off in any direction opposite, out, only out, into the open to wander again within the world of direction, of progress and forward, onward and upward due west. Yea though He walks through the valley of the shadow of death, how it’s worth it, there’s nothing much else to do. He heads toward the tinsel, Him fearless of evil, with only a rod and a staff, which are one and the same and discomforting, by now without an underwear change — out to Angels and its Holywood, passing over playa to plagued, past saltpillars of snow formed to His form and none other: apparitions, Himlike white specters, frozen in their own autochthonous escapes. Don’t look back. Don’t turn around. Every three or so steps, He shambles into a length of railroad track, 4 x 8½ gauge its iron quaking, hot to melt the fall as if a train’s fast approaching, though none ever does: tracks snaking over and under the dunes as if boundaries to invisible countries, borders writhing like worms strewn across the emptiness of the earth; the track rough, battered, barbed, occasionally surfacing, then submerging again, winding veinlike, mained, through the rises and falls of the sand in its dunes. After four exhaustive five exhausted days, fording washes dry turned tundra, sidestepping sidewinders, tumbling weeds and mossy boulders better hazards on a roll, Ben begins finding these longer lengths of track, then descent, and then nothing; hombre, we mean nil. Then, other even longer lengths of track ahead, these at an impossible angle of turning from any section previously found. These discontinuous stretches lie scattering the pale, small stitches on the flesh of the desert, as if holding together the grains below, binding the sand to the fundament, the grounded, down to earthed, wounded in valley — the lengths that once joined these sections made timeline of the discrete, gone, disappeared, maybe quakeswallowed: a punishment if not undeserved, how incurred. He nothing else to do follows the directions these markers might indicate to any mysticism inept; follows them far until they have Him at a loss, turned around on Himself and Ben has to rest and so sits down finally here — around this dim camp coiled in a valley between two risen dunes, one the sun, the other the sacralized moon. Sitting His legs crossed in the native style at a flame fricked of His own creation, sparked by two scraps of track, ties He lies with then falls asleep with in His hands, slitting both wrists with them and so becoming His own brother — to live for Him this life upon a shade’s awake. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them. Praise be to God.
Upon the morning, a good day to die (Shabbos the holiest of days according to our sages boding well for the disembodied, the living and the thinking and the unknowing, too — all holding expiration within the Sabbath’s bounds to be a wonderful omen, despite the suffer and sorrow of inexistence resultant) — having quit the line, forsaken the truck, his people, the world, and an inheritance of future worlds for himself if not for his own, pelted now in the pocked skin of a buzzard’s coyote tied around his neck, Kokuiena in chalk-bitten whiteface walks feet bared bleeding the day’s way up to the flat of Third Mesa: hours it takes him, moons and their illuminative suns before he ever arrives at this plat above his reserve; he paces himself, he must, it’s required, a mandate to take it slow and go easy, and so making those four stops along tradition’s hard pass, interrupting his ascent each pause to a quadrant, each a gesture to its own direction, its own wind — an acknowledgement or farewell, that’s the ritual; arrives atop the sky only at the time appointed, the hour he’d dreamt had been appointed, after having received visions, overdue bills, and a visit from a collection agency, you don’t want to know them. The higher you get, the greater the heaven, and the more you can find it within you, and within you to believe, too, in even your own shadow — how it gives him this riverrush of power, lording it over his past, as if a lower sky…dreamcatching shades of waving arms and hands, his fingers those dusky dun flocks of them splayed in benediction, a duchen, granting the blessing of death over pueblo and purchase: irrelevance, nothingness, dust to dust, smokestacks of cacti, cinders of scrub, driven snow ashes. Alone, he’s here to receive the arrivaclass="underline" Ben, Bahana…you know Him, me neither — and, too, to welcome the emergence of world the next, at last. Must ready yourself, must make pure, must not must at all. Still, it’s thoughts of her, stealing, his sister: mourn his Kuskuska (parents dead, everything they had, since then his heart as scarce as the earth); he’s lost her to them, his land and his people: she’s far away now in Tucson, newlywed to a notable and working parttime at a mikveh, a kindergarten mornings, at least that’s the word, prophecy without postmark. Blanched by air this cast and rare, shadowed and shadowing he waits, and waits mightily; stands to face down the land: to gaze in all directions, which are none altogether, searching like a bird for its prey, the quarry of redemption, a Savior…a lamed weak Messiah just mincing in from afar, dragging Itself easy diseased, wounded as stationed and bloodily crowned — but for hours, hours then days and then a week of this moon it’s just desert, lack of faith. Must have just missed Him, must. How He’d been in the line, it’s been said, but oriented to the wrong wind, allied with an evil gust, turned around, lived against: they went west He went east, or the other way, too; a revelation denied him. After the death of his people through life they die once again; after faith’s lost, when memory itself goes forgotten, what’s left alone, him. Kokuiena. That and a sharp speck spied in the distance. A mote of the sun, just now rending a rip through a cloud…a push, a peck, then a beak — and suddenly, an eagle tears through the sky, shreds the gray with its wings flapping weather from one’s speed the other’s steer, snow and crests of cloud that swoop to him like snow, too, if not for the sun and its rising glare. Rattily rangy yet grand, despite the distress of its birth, it soars to eclipse even shadow, then hovers those ample and amply ancient wings any angel would kill for a span over and around the jut of the mesa and his standing stone. It holds in its beak a small black nothing, a moon defunct, a lunar rock only the size of an eye — a star lately fallen to dull…to blink, then to calm: it’s a yarmulke, nothing else, that the eagle’s glinting, gutripping talons tear from its beak, a yarmulke the vicious bald bird descends with, in a quickening, meteor’s motion, unforgivingly furious as if the animal’s ultimate plunge: a yarmulke as wide as the sky diving down, and at him, to drop lightly, with a plop, on his head.