let my right hand forget her cunning if I do not remember thee let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth…superfluminating pages turning pages of pages into His room’s very walls — wallpaper peeling all its words ever echoed, shrieked in pain and pleasures; shedding scribble, graffitiskin wrinkled with inscrutable signs, phonenumbers, profanity: for a good time call home, can you remember the last time you talked to your mother…the paper a shade of parchment, smokeyellowed, drinkpickled, an animal slit, split, then bared to the wall facing out, opposite the cindering brick: this room, B thinks, had once been but when possibly seven, eight, nine, ten times its present size singleoccupancy, and then the walls, their paperings, slowly glopped with spit, gooped one upon the other, atop, forming ever thicker and so the room reduced, raggedly smaller — with more neglect, with more paper upon paper upon paper upon paper, loose mouths gnashing gummily, the bed would be consumed and Him, too. B lies on the bed just a mattress bare on the floor. Overhead fan swings slow, rickety. A nightstand too high for the mattress, its lone drawer hosting amid mousemade minims a tattered, dogeared copy of what was once called the Bible. Testamentary, old, new, borrowed, blue. As far as books go, pretty good. What else, what more do you want: the only other presence in the room an understuffed recliner, infested with rinds, shells, and peels loosed from a decade or so of anonymous pockets, under its baldingly tonsured cushion a vault of oxidized pennies, as if skullcaps for the loose and lost. Stale air. And no toilets here either, or ice, or laundry, or — those are either down the hall, or down a flight of stairs, He forgets, keys to them kept by the mensch in the office, each worth a tithe. And the telephone, too, either/or. Everything stained.
Here’s His holiday to repent of — this room the cheap reification of B’s atonement: for not mourning the day, for not observing, for not being able to observe without window, the ninth of Av’s moon; for always being out of time, always timeless, whether too early or late, born already delayed, arrived unprepared, checked in offhours and without the inheritance by which to identify, without tradition’s baggaged burden and so, with nothing to prove — ignorant as He is, unsure as to what they held by, as to what He still should be holding, clutching, what’s clung to, the Israelien family’s rites. He doesn’t know from their breaking the fast (as it’s been said: she who passes, is herself passed; she who serves first, is served last), Hanna’s loaves raisinrisen, she baked, in death she might finally bake, the glaze of honey, the shards of apple soon to dip, shechyanu — gesundheit the minhag, and then when her eyes are on her husband your father, how you go to wipe your nose with the linen…doesn’t know from the set table, the cloth Hanna’d save from the spills of the mundane, would launder in moon — sisters, His, as if stars to lineup syzygy against the white wall of the hall, their faces washed to beam in pure light, setting the candles to shine, Israel standing proud, seated justified, Hanna honored in their midst…O His family lost — and so, to seek a reunion tonight. Upon the New Year, may He be forgiven — though if He can’t be by Himself, who really can?
B lifts the telephone from its hook in the hallway used to hold the drip of transient coats, cords it out from under its muting slickers and muffling jackets down the hall to the shelter of His doorway where at least the ceiling’s not snowing, not yet, dials His homenumber, Israel’s worknumbers, Wanda’s extension, PopPop’s, anything scrawled on habit by memory’s hand. No answer. For a worse time call disconnected, He thinks, disdisdisconnected. Ring ring hiccough ring. It’s a holiday, what’s He thinking, whether busy or changed — then, dialing the Koenigsburg’s ten tries later after its tenth ring, gets a goy on the line with every line in the world, who he knows from favor and favors, backscratching with the palms greased in balm, spikenard, and cooling coinage, the purifications required for a leap of faith such as this; from the heights of depression, how far the fall underground, the Resistance, it’s been called, the Unterwelt; he’s promised his fee, the goy tells Him to hang up and wait. The phone spurts a ring in a moment, and it’s one Laser Wolf, or that’s how he’s been characterized (maybe he’s real, maybe he’s ten of them, a whole minyan of real), Shalom how’s been by you and where, he asks, then agrees to handle particulars: it’ll take an hour or so, no problem, how are your fixed, or broken, take care of yourself, if you need anything else, don’t hesitate, click.
Prayer later and lamentation, with the frontdesk mensch hosting a shiur of migrant kitchen workers and idle maids in the motel’s laundry downstairs, there’s a knock at His door and it’s them — His sisters, the Marys…mishpocha, what a mechaye! B holds the door wide for them dripping with the weather’s melt and that of their thick, hasty makeup, adjusting their skirts and swishy wigs, then slams the door on their noses and breasts, which have been bound if not padded, and their knees and their hands held out to embrace, only to throw it open again to ingather them all, one by one over the threshold: He drops each hard to raise dust from the floor. Marysomeones, anyones, Marywhomevers in relation to the illegitimate why, as long as it’s now and quick, over and done with like soon — a giggly gaggle of them, a nosegay in a handful of familiar scents, colors, blooms; Rubina and Simone and Liv and Hanna, too, He’d forgotten: she’s none of them, and is all, was who or what that mensch his name spit poo was Jesus meant whenever he spoke of his mother Mary as the Woman, as everything, total, as all — in that goy’s life too many Marys around, abounding, Mary his mother, also Mary his elder sister, then the whore who’d mothered him to the end…the Mary who’d laundered His diapers with a pinch of His mother’s perfume, the one who indulged the suckling fetish, and that of the wetting; the one who always had to be threatened to set the table, to quit wasting time — have you finished your homework? — then eat up but slowly, chew your fill, wash your hair, scrub your teeth; Judith, Isabella, Zeba, the same now, all one, entirely Hanna — call her a balabusta, a berrieh ballbuster, just call her this once in a while: one mother, twentyeight-limbed touchy and feely and wiping this Hanna visiting the sick, doing charity work, benevolent business, cooking, cleaning, volunteering her time; how she’d sacrificed so much she’d remind you, how she gives still of her self what she thinks it so selflessly, kind. The Marys, they’d stolen the van they’d followed Him in coast to coast (since the aborted Tour, it’d remained garaged, kept on ice offIsland), a mudspattered heap spewing rust they’d christened with a bottle of Manischewitz the Mizvah Mobile, then drunk themselves full as if to fuel their revenge. A midnight’s raid of the Garden, how they’d managed to slip into costume before slipping out. Wardrobe, they’d gotten dressed, skirted, madeup mascarad and rouged, but in their hushed rush have become mixedup, half workedover: one wears Rubina’s skirt tableclothwide, down below and pleated to match with Dina’s blouse too tight up top, shriveled as if a balloon; Natalia’s skirt blue or maybe it’s black in this light, too short with Asa’s flounced white blouse way too tight, too, Gillian’s skirt hemmed short in purple beyond any modesty, barely showing below Josephine’s blouse crying buttons in its snug to pop eyes; as for Rubina, she’s blossoming to be generous: feeling a little bloated, damply fat, in Batya’s tiny floral panties; that, with their earrings mismatched (the older ones pierced, the youngest pinched by their clipons), with one lip sticked pink, the other stuck with the red. They pick themselves up from the floor, wander throughout the room to an alluring array: on the nightstand, openlegged atop the luggagerack, retracting their foreskinlike stockings to rub at and warm their legs it’s so freezing in here, held substantial and wide atop the radiator that doesn’t work and then opposite, on the filth of the flabby recliner; one digs candles from her pockets by their wicks, she’s on her knees in grotesque attempts with matches wet to light the room dimly — flames guttering, then licking high, the wax melting to the floor in a ring around the mattress as if to holy what’s about to transpire.