Name? a voice rasps, its hands or another’s tugging one of His ears wide, and of what are you accused?
And none of that I am that I am shtick, says a voice different but the same, whatever name you want, choose your crime, your victim, flatter yourself — you think we’ll know the difference?
I myself was a saint, name’s Kraus or Krauss now, I forget which, how many esses we’re talking…Ben keeps His silence, too scared to talk, a step upon His tongue; the mensch inquiring drops Him to the enormity’s floor, that darkness stomping still. Another leg up to the surface, a grasping gasp.
Not that it matters, yet another voice says. Silence is an alias as good as any other. An alibi lullaby, you put me to sleep, the z’s.
Hands hold Ben flat, face up to the sky, borne in triage above the muddy throng. His pockets are emptied, of empty, nothing gained, His holes prodded, He thrusts hands to prevent violation. From atop, the valley and hills on both sides, though human, have been reduced to an animal rout.
Don’t think you’re the first person who’s known his rights, is heard. And don’t think living here you’ll live any longer. Hell, don’t think at all…
Registration’s at the western slope, an orientation meeting to follow — hahaha, a general hilarity, which manifests in a gnashing of rank gums.
Stop confusing the boy, an older denizen says.
Refuge, he goes on, asylum, you dig?
Shalom, welcome…groovy, hip, here goes: make love not war but both are money, peace be to you, all that.
These are the rules that aren’t: if you make it here, you deserve to live; if not, not, easy enough — and, another adds, deserving to live doesn’t mean that you will.
But, to begin: no one here’s anyone’s anything…we’re all equal, the same: farout degenerates and dippy dropouts, gratuitous grudgeholders, zonked lowlifes, and petties; the walkingwounded veterans of private, unsanctioned aggressions…
An older refugee it has to be, another atop the swarming, the whirling whorl, how he shrieks out almost unheard to Him, God, I know you, I know you, I do, how he’s insistent this putz, won’t give up: Israelien, remember me? I was there that day in Mudville you wowed them all? Under which rock you been hiding? Not here. Been stoned? I would’ve noticed, even in this.
Yet another and another passes and greets with a twofingered, onefingered, nofingered grope as Ben’s passed around for recognizance — as if one of their own, and despite.
I’m sorry, Ben’s crying, help me, forgive me, forgive (lines from the Show, the Tour’s patter His memory can’t quite shake, or won’t) and a voice says back to Him, wait up, forgiveness? you’ve got Refuge, brother, you sure you’re not aiming for Exile? asks a mensch depluming his chin, feeding hairs to his protector who done chomping gummily asks, where’s that? Answer is, a day’s walk in any direction. Ben’s handed from mamzer to shmuck down to schmegegge to schmendrick, the greasily unwashed and the gracemad, the hippy hippie fallen on hard times, no great shakes, the losing, the lost. A commune bit dust and rusted and aged to entitlement, rage: burntout bug vans and veedoubleu’s, overgrown with tiedye and hemp. An air dayglowed with smoke pungent from where and with failure. An exceptional deformity rides up to Him on a bubble bursting, is passed on from hand to mouth in approach: he’s eyeless and toothless, too, with a nose just nosing on. Psht! he asks in a whisper, pssshht, I’ll trade you an eye for an eye and flashes the ripped fray of his jacket to expose mucosal wares. No? Howabout a tooth for a tooth? I’m talking top quality incisors, none of that denture dreck. Limited time offer, friend. Going fast until you’re robbed broke and blind. You’ll find me if you want to. As he’s hauled away he yells behind him, ask for Mendy, then when they tell you they don’t know from no Mendy you should say, you know, that Mendy…it’s obvious, then, that there are darkening markets of ever darker markets here, unto pitch, and that even their goods and services are tightly rationed by avarice, or secularist greed, the extinction of latest hopes and radical will, the triumph of desert over a dinosaur’s dream; obvious, too, that everyone robs everyone, that robbed stuff is robbed, rerobbed loot robbed then robbed again, as the dead pile up underfoot, counter the culture — there’s no Law, and everyone’s in on it.
Freestanding, eminently wandering, emanatingly wanderable, these refuges providing shelter for the homeless, the broke bust heimatlos, whom society seeks to destroy and now more than ever before, have been set up on no money, only grudging permission, and’ve decayed from the first, becoming less about honoring the provision of the Law than about finding any loophole providing, then — inhabiting it, a temporary noose, looser than most. God Above, how excessively fringed, how faded: intention, respect, a sense of place, standing, a feeling for land. Debauched without habitus, amid the spiraling mud. Though it’s important to make this distinction: this city of refuge is not a city qua city, classically speaking it’s no city at all, only a gathered mass of land, of lands, and their refugees, formed to the give of a valley, the left mess of leftbehind people, outcast undesirables sleeping on each other, waking up on each other, as each other, eating and drinking one another, it’s sick: with no aid from the outside, no intervention, how these people have become their own beds, knives, forks, spoons and cups, transportation, people are shelters from the unaccustomed harshest of elements, people as floors over the earth, people as roofs, sexual implements, sites of excretion, means of execution; the people are the city and the city is the people, and so the decay it’s transmittable, transmutable, how it follows them, waxes and wanes with their migration, their wandering devastation as if they’re a swarm of locusts, not a disorganization of parasite humans — destruction the legacy of this city that’s no city, the sole and so lucrative if ever desired export product of Refuge. And so the exact, on the map location of this city of refuge, of all the cities of refuge, of all the cities that are the one and only city of refuge, up and moves often, is moved, inexacts itself, imports itself then takes leave, wanders and roams widely with its refugees and as them, too, in their tight, evasive spheres, their madmuddied paranoid spins and loops, backtracks and longcuts and yadda and blah — and so the pleasant, peasant mensch with the poor horse stuck whose route of trade takes them past or around and around the Refuge wherever it is often thinks to move the sign, an oaktag placard of his own design if and when his ride obliges; his ride that is his trade, and his only possession: he’s been trying to offload the horse now for moons. Traditionally, though, the refuge roams itself coast-to-coast, accumulating refugees all the slow slogging while: wandering’s forever, as people that tightly knit and wound, grouped for safety, survival, braided and dreaded in curls, they tend to trip each other up, sort of fall for and backward over one another, on top and under, in an intoxicated and intoxicating to participate in or even observe stigmatiferous staggering from platz to plotz, it’s hypnotic.
At Ben’s arrival, they’re heading east again, if roughly, and this valley’ll serve for a pleasant spell, recently popularly voted to be surroundings suitable for a welcome moment of repose, a refuge from Refuge pop. ilimitable, before moving on to ruin the next town, to leave it smoking, wasted; there wherever a mouthful of people to move on out to the edges, daring to, feeling strong enough it’s tempting, to transact business with shops along the way, to purchase sundries and packagegoods at the price of favors, humiliations, disgrace, to say Shalom, send a letter or telegram, make a phonecall, find a new mate or victim beyond the walls of the city unwalled. The people of the wall are regarded by many scholars as those possessing the most guilt, those who’ve decided, freewilled their own standing out there on the outs to functionalize form, structure, stolidity; the most unfortunate of them, edged up against the tumbling hillside, becoming eternally crushed. Otherwise, the wall that is all of people are those who just happen to be, whether through fate, the leaning fall of happenstance, abated natural strength, who happen to have found themselves left to the skirts, banished by the decree of no God they believe in out to the periphery of such a violent, illintentioned throng, the unwilling fighting and gnashing to get in deeper, to the destruction at middle where it’ll still hurt but you’ve got a better shot at dying by the hands of your own brethren companions (if hands they still have, and free), which has to seem, at least in the way of dignity, preferable to most to death from without, to being murdered by those who lie in wait for a refugee remade. In the interior, amid the ruin of tattered tents and leantos and threadbare teepees and hogans and wigwams, among the remains of doomed domed gardens and farms and a dry, witheringly lumbered pen for the raising of livestock gone missing, which animals they’d agreed, or once thought they did, to maintain and care for communally and then to slaughter and divide up equally their flesh fed on dream — everyone’s lost their personalities, also their ages and sexes: female like male, kinder the elderly, kinder who’d done their parents wrong, elderly who’d sinned against their kinder, who’d murdered to enjoy the sorrow of outliving in anything but this peace and quiet however deserved. An encampment of families mixed and broken, converted to lives without name. By dint of sheer width, Ben — after His initial inspection atop the mass, after He’s strangled back down — abides like a lodestone at center, immovable but molten, a star’s burning core; liberally not planetary but sunlike, that around which all must revolve. In this middle, the epicenter of such seismic scorn — with limb shattered to limbs, throats stomped to sucking death — everyone’s trod upon, but Him, He’s the exception, always is: there wombsafe, coddlecradled, a babe.