To wander the river’s edge, icebound, and bound, too, to a calling: the Mississippi, it is, under the sinlessly white rime of which there’s only a trickling sheen, slitherine…Ben’s roaming the bordering bank north to south, toward a loose assemblage of insipid figures draped fittingly formless in a pale that no one should have to behold in the light of the sun this early in the winter of morning; it’s blinding, a blur. Too bright, and the bright it’s too clean. Heavy, though, even their smiles are heavy, lumberously overweight. He’s interrupted some ritual or other ongoing, walked into a ceremony in which He doesn’t belong, whether as honored, honoring, or hardware. Call it a mass debaptism. A disconfirmation, an unconsecration — it’s a Kashering, a making holy, made whole. Holes’ve been smashed into the ice, to the water frothing below, cleanly bleached from frost by the sun above the sunken silt, the muddy crust at bottom — and around clear to the other bank, are tiny tchotchkes getting dunked. People in yarmulkes, in their too short, too tight white kittels where do they get them (their bedclothes repurposed, sheets and slips), are sinking their plates and pans and pots and utensils down into the water freed to soak, led by a mensch, longhaired, neatgoateed, quiverlipped and tall, standing far out on the water itself, it seems, miraculously, not quite, mundanely descending a shiver into a hole he’s destroyed for himself at a shallow; submerged now to the knees, with a sharp rim of ice at his waist he’s mispronouncing vaguely Affiliated words from the sides of his mouth, givingout snippets of prayer, liturgical snatch delivered in a terrible voice mired in schlocky melisma. And not just household goods, provisions of the sleepy domestic — everything’s getting anointed today, must go damped down to holy: pets herded toward the lap of the frozen, womenfolk tugging roped their families’ goats to slip hooves out over the icing, old television sets and stereos and refrigerators, obsolesced computers and calculators and radios and telephone units, impractical electrical appliances still plugged by extension cord into sockets hosted on the only interior walls of neighboring mobilehome units, elders’ doublewides, parking the riverbank (an electrocutionary risk illadvised, but God will save us, always does), newspapers runny, clothes and socks and shoes, officesupplies, paperclips and rubberbands, pottedferns and filingcabinets removed from the offices and backrooms of storefront and stripmall churches defunct, their Sunday School desks, tables, chairs, and pews, sand, shore, and the river itself, getting wet, rendered allowable for household use if not that of the sacred; cars, vans, and trucks fishtailing out onto the scaling, towed by horses and mules and then their own owners, them, harnessed with ropes tied to chassis and bumper, vehicles hauledout to fall into their own weight, to jut up their rearwheels as if icicles expurgated from other holes stomped into the river’s midst, spouting stilled, jagged metal springs: a technological potlatch, a mass giving up, such divestment of the profane.
Ben shoves the survived of His mother’s robe down into pajamapants, which are suborned with stripes, inherited from a recent enslaver, rolls bunches of fabric into fisted cuffs, then holding them high wades out and over. Assembled, they stand and stare, their mouths hang mailbox open, flags up the flabbered nose; but while some chance to pick at or cover their gapes, others hold tighter still in fellowship and psalm: it’s Him…the gospel’s that He’s recognized, silence; not a chirrup or a shatter of ice, not a plash nor a bird’s flying song And then, without signal, as if tranced, made vehicle themselves, takenover as prophet, what do they do — they congree and give Him the bumrush, they grab Him, lay hands upon hands…the adolescent mensch in the markered goatee, it is, holding Him by both arms crossed as if a sarcophagied Pharaoh: to sink Him down with them together, some seated on His chest buoyed with breath, others up and stomping on His shoulders, neck, and head dunked through the give of the frozen, violently deep into the slow, ropy water below…the water displaced, now rising up, now gurgling over, through His hole then the other unfished holes, too, as if they were throats flopping over the rims of their mouths this freezing vomit — the flooding of every hold that might hide His heart icebunched, bonehardened…
Kinder assembled on the bank they’re snapping photos of the dunk, staging the scene for posterity’s too obvious — within the frame of their ready youth, their rummaged souls, there’s a memory in the making and a history, also, they’ll admit: the fleeting innocence of such revelation…a sign gets tacked onto a tree at the back, lightninged to fall to the Miss, a bridge to tomorrow and its hopeful conviction; the poster there indicating in attractive lettering, Wanted Dead, Westernly sherrifed with serif…that here’s an Officially Recommended opportunity for a photograph, what’re you waiting for? and soon, flashes pop off everywhere, lenses loom, apertures widen to the horizon, the glaregolden set of the sun; despite the darkening, the f. stops keep going, keep flowing, the gaping mouth of the delta all down to the Gulf ’s flooding with collodion, gun cotton dissolved in ether, that is…the exposure’s nearly half a minute, a minute, more, longer, always longer: one meaningless motionless moment frozen as solid and as flat as the river just a lame handful of strokes north upstream; and in that time, not even an eye may twitch nor a lid shy shut (a traveling photographer, who maintains offices on the leftbank of last century, hustles into his darktent, to unpack his grip and arrange the trays of his developing outfit, his bellows, cranks, and reels): the plates have to be developed immediately, there’s no time to lose, never is, must be kept wet under syrups, thickened tears, honey dissolved in water, must be sensitized in a bath of silver nitrate spread on a plate of glass, or in cellulose nitrate, this substance more flammable than the paper it’s to be smeared on, the product printed, the image forbidden to even itself — and that’s why it can be developed, its reversal, that’s why it’s facing out…this is all process, understand, with the assembled — us — invited to select their medium, ours; how any souvenir can be developed any way you like, in almost too many ways: in an emulsion of gelatin silver, or with the technique it replaced, albumen, which is eggishly eyewhite, given generational hatch — whatever their nostalgia requires, we’re here to serve, whatever you want or your memory needs, we provide. A life macerated in magnesium, or developed in a dish of heated mercury, amid the vaporous essence of iodine, the balm of bromide from stenchy, unquenchable bromine, sodium thiosulfate, a host of other names none can ever know to pronounce, to concoct chemically in the lab of the mouth…this and more’s explained to these lost revivalist, whiteshrouded kinder lining as if in timeline the banks of the river — the pose, the technological prosaics of wonder; the photomechanical processes that make the widespread dissemination of images possible’s what: Do You Know This Mensch? all over the Sabbath pre-prints, in bulletins and circulars, at the postoffice, and waiting on line; an image strained through a fine screen, dispersed into dots, newspaper raster, each schmeck of Him every dark and darkening pore holding the secret entire, exploded hugely across the fold, a spread, a schmear campaigned to claim uneasy truce with flaw; etched then inked to the page, gravured…intagliod in halftone, in duotone: yes or no, it asks, the binary cleave, life or death, who wants to know; or maybe you’d prefer to know Him in solarization, that inversion of tones resulting from an image being exposed again, reexposed, to light during development — whichever, your wish is ours and, anyway, I’ll shoot straight with you, it doesn’t matter: as whatever the presentation, production, or reproduction by which we destroy, there’s always wear, inevitably tear, everything in the end goes to molder in sepia, or gray, which is the murder of black by white — memory’s tone, the past fading In.