Ben walks unburdened blocks familiar, block after blocks. Up from under the freeze the sidewalk comes to kiss at His feet, to smack His soles with lips that are cracks. Brokenbacks. Obeisance, the denial of one self in the service of another. How habit, and this despite its particularity — even if grand and luxury and maximally moneyed — always seems humble, modest, and small as too known. This is because we can adapt, we must, get used to anything, get used. But still, we’re aware of this capacity, always, of our ability to change — and so the lure of origins, the tempt of what we have been. How being here, and especially alone, it’s like living again, for the first. Though it’s not so much that He’d loved it here (how could He have, how long had He been here), or that He’d lived for so long, not long enough, in its displaced dwelling, under its exiled roof; it’s not that He was born here either that makes this all, wasted, destroyed, so true, and so intimate, and this despite the lack of stroller or sisters’ share: what makes this Siburbia so comforting, so comfortable, isn’t the lapse of time, no, neither is it the impression of time lost upon the impressionable, the able and willing, the wistful or sentimental nostalgic, think again — it’s that Siburbia itself had been built familiar, that One Thousand Cedars was built to be familiar from the very beginning, welcoming, Shalom and stay a while, take off your shoes, take a seat then holy us with conversation over coffee or tea; how it’d been intended to be indistinguishable, immediately, from any other annex, extension, or subdivision of this Development we know of as earth, as America — the freest if most dangerous and perhaps damning of possible worlds: only the fundamentally uninteresting, the absolutely anti interesting, could be so familiar as to transcend its particular existence, its particular name, its geography, and specific time. In essence, without essence, nonexistent, no life: and how it’s this very nonexistence that allows us to encounter it as we want to encounter it, however — to make its meaning whatever we want, tophet or home, whether nowhere or the only.
Though who could tell from the ground, One Thousand Cedars had been laidout as a circle, as a concentric Abandon all hope centered around what had been the plot of the roomiest, the most spacious, house, the Israelien’s. From the eyes of birds, nested as if a target — the eye of a urus, an auroch, a sacrificial bull. Directly past the Gatekeeper’s, inside its perimeter fence, there are the poorest houses, or were: stubby ranchers set way the far back on these small stubbly lots, vinylsiding wrecks their roofs wanting for shingles, held up by the very fences they’re backed onto, wire strangling wood to splinter. And then a circular road, which separates one ring from its inset better: in this next, there’s a round of larger houses, twostories, the bedrooms up top, waking life down below, lawns respectable if still mowed by their owners. Development Maintenance had always been reserved for the homes of the three inner rings, that’s what help the prices here bought you: another road, then the rich threestory houses, colonials of ruddy brick and sparkling fieldstone; another road then the fourstory houses of better brick, never to spall, hand-made in shades mottled and faded, duskily suggestive of the old, of the made old and by hand, the venerable and the lasting; such houses a defiance of impermanence, an entitled dare to fire, privileged in their security when all’s wellinsured. And then, the largest and widest swath of fivestory houses: an inner, defensive wall of them almost, overprotective as they’re set on immense lawns lined with shrubbery of an immaculate levelheadedness, trim and fit and ready: houses with multiple drives, endless entrance porticos decked with flags in recent favor (change the regime, they’ll change the decoration), imperial façades clean and neatly marbled, their white the purest blank. Inground pools emptied or frozen, cement graves marked by the tombs of cabañas, a tiki memorial to gardenpartied wakes. And then another road, a curb, a sidewalk, an even, domepitched circular lawn — and here, set atop it, the Development’s jewel, purported to be its grandest, and most luxurious, the Israelien home. Or where it once had been, where it would have been still, if not for the Garden — where it’s since been converted into an imposing museum of Him, the Metropolitan Israelien, of late less and less visited, it’s unfortunate. Initially, it’s open only one day a week, for an hour…
He takes the arcing turn from sidewalk to sidewalk — how tiny it is, how have I grown, a miniature life…existence matured within the shadow of the demeaning, the diminutive, Benya, my little boychick, meine Zaimele, be careful, keep safe: despite no traffic He’s still pausing at each intersection to look both ways left, right, then left again. Ima would be proud, Aba, too, would’ve been. A hexagonal sign says to Him, Stop…hazardously topped with the putrefying nest of an absent stork. To keep feet within the bars of the crosswalk, imprisoned — Wanda would approve, would have, or just wouldn’t have cared, offered a cookie nonetheless, a finger of her milk. A left, a right, the knowledge in His feet, though His head’s free to look not only both ways, but further — He recognizes no one, they all look the same. Neighboring strangers, sojourners. Nextdoor in hiding. Not emptied of people, no, only emptied of life: people occupied, finally, with something other than themselves, with something maybe, shockingly, disappointingly, less. And then these new grates for the sewer, too, now stamped U.S. of Affiliated. An Underground sunken, the descent of dissent, an emptiness deeper, the septic tanks of the soul and those rank pulsing pipes…and then — Apple, the sign still says Apple, His old street…it’s His, the cornerless circle of Apple an immense looparound, islanding traffic toward the drive of the Koenigsburg’s, in whose windows the curtains are drawn; candles in the others windows, though, in all the windows of all the neighboring houses, He notices, homes, burning behind the shades. Except His.
What once was the immaculate, gently even, geodesic rise of the lawn’s been let wild, overgrown, once suffused with that shade kept only by the richest of lawns and the newest of money now an impoverishedly sad landscape of grass grown out in every grayed shade of the spectrum not green: faded yellows and brown and black and ashdead, whitefrozen. Iciclespikes from the snirt. Mushrooms, umbrella mounds of sandbox sand overturned from holes made by hail. A swingset strangulated. The graves of sisters’ goldfish that hadn’t gone down the toilet so swimmingly. Livestock graze amid the patio. Uprooted foundations, cinderblock scatter, leaning beams, the dull crash of wet wood on wood. Gone to ruin, is going — this rise adorned, too, with the turds of goats on the loose, mating amid stalks of antediluvian weed; chickens peck among the remains of the flowerbeds, the skeleton of the herbgarden; roosters crow noon from the satellitedish, more and more storks nest atop the lightless lamps, the leaning poles…
At His feet is a hole that had held His house. And at its bottom, a glimmer. The Garden’s goys have only disappointed any subsequent looters (the curious, the bargainhunters, and a profusion of new neighbors, their quote unquote relatives moved in from out of nowhere with the approval of no board or committee, even without that of the Keeper himself, also a raider though only of bribes being offered, a hoarder of any finds that find him), having proven themselves thorough, professionally so, greedy and handrubbing, grubbingly giddy: they’d taken everything…or so they’d thought, or so they’d reported so as not to be officially remiss; everything, that is, except this — such glint missed, forgotten, overlooked, don’t look down, who knew, who would still. Maybe they’d respected it, rated it touchingly, it whatsoever it be (Ben leaning over the mouth of the pit as if a word spoken into its echo, the incomprehensible shriek of Israel’s least favorite son, an unmentioned, unmentionable, lastbanished brother of Joseph — on His knees digging, and flinging then falling and hitting the rock of the bottom, the hole’s pithiest black), maybe they’d wanted to leave behind at least one relic wherever it lied, and there unexplained, for posterity inexplicable, the edification of any future paternally stable, maternally exacting, precise: one thing, one object, one item not in their inventory (in the house remade on the Island, and there displayed ever since their return from the traveling tour: the family’s bible, Hanna’s addressbook, her diary, and loose refrigerator lists, a legal index of Israel’s, a tome of building codes, a volume revealing of the intricate mysterium of corporate finance, it’s said — on show in these cases lining the hallways, their glass regrettably fogged, of late seldom cleaned), page 1: one find lost from their catalog cum reliquary…panel 2: missing from their immaculately kept litany of incanbula…plate 3: unaccounted for amid the bulletpoints and crossoffs of their ledger illuminated by nightlight…the glowering glowworm of the hallway upstairs-upstairs — that is, if they have a record, if records anyone keeps anymore. If a miracle, then one He has to work for, uncovering with hands dirtied to warm. It’s a piece of silverware last seen missing from an heirloom set, a spoon for Him to suck on, reduced, immaturely as not table but tea, to rattle at His teeth in defiance; still, its handle the long and strong arm of any parent, its bowl largely wide enough to hold the burn of every sun: twisted to tarnish, anno don’t ask, it’s an antique, smuggled over from God knows where when any oppression would’ve threatened to melt it down to a bullet, which would be used to murder those who once used to spoon with it supper, with a shot in the mouth from a gun of an allied metal — their bodies to tumble down into a pit such as this, where Ben’s found.