Example an editorial, then, for the Weekly Affiliated: a highbrow, low page-count rag light on advertisers of late and becoming increasingly desperate, only recently having been labeled by its myriad competitors and even those in the suffering if soon illegalized secular media as the quote Weakly Affiliated, unquote, a nickname that like all of them becomes less funny the more it’s invoked — an extraordinarily maligned and litigated writeup, an edit of which despite everything goes on to make syndicate (causing an entire chain to be silenced for a week, then shut down, its editors imprisoned, its morning edition torched with its stands), opening with a memorable phrase characterizing the tragedy as “Tongue-N-Cheeks,” then going on to note that “though He’s eaten of the forbidden fruit […] it’s not like He’s still enjoying its taste.” countered only a day later with an oped claiming, “If we have no pity, then we have converted all for nothing. Just as it takes more than a God to make a religion, it takes more than a religion to make a mensch.” Unofficial reports wander freely, and leaky…a drippy, slippery out of bounds: the chains and gags of wire, of summary frontpage, hovering above the fold, bolded and columnarly exalted…it’s impossible not to miss the management, to reconcile it with rumor: murder slash suicide pact gone wrong, shots fired, Metropolitan Gestapo headed up by the newly installed Des Moinesher Rebbe wading into the reportedly frayed hallway from out of nowhere (though he’s the son-inlaw of the Light of Kansas — traditions already generating, ambitions becoming dynasties becoming power) — arriving to find the assembled dead from gas, from smoke inhalation, a fire…Mormon kindernapping, ransom paid, hostage never returned, ransom never refunded, hostage involved in a tragic quote accident unquote, a quote unquote unfortunate incident, substances abused, and women, too, white slavery or Resistance supremacy was it, involved medical experimentation, on newborns, the unborn, Animalia, with regard to equine ejaculatory response, decapitation, castration, tongue severance, hotel falling in on itself, swallowed whole by the earth, flying ambulances of fire whisking away the Marys who immediately after in quotes themselves, “decide” to leave the employ of Garden, Inc. without settlement or severance further, granting no interviews save what’s reported in a statement so official as to be regarded as prophecy, as if dictated — but not read — moons before Av ever began…His mind is His slavery, His life, who He is, a slave, that’s who He was born to be. He needs a woman? Forget it. He needs a life! or so a woman who wasn’t there or even named Delilah recounts in rehearsal for The 18th Hour, we’re at 1492 on your AM dial, the host with the most with the radio face, a former plumber with the best, cleanest pipes in Passaic appearing in person like a down on his luck ventriloquist or his dummy and despite the suit (which just has to be worth hundreds), he holds her while she weeps away the show, then the theme music fades up, the On Air lights off themselves and the static comes in like the clouds, weathering patience…
Mary which one who knows as who has the time she thinks to save, plucks up the fallen, fusiform tongue and wraps its impressive length in the Business, others hold skimped Sports or Book Review, section of a newspaper dated a Shabbos previous, in one account, bylined by the owner of that very paper…though others hold rolled in a hospital’s fundraising newsletter left lying around by the last shoesalesmensch to slink this way (used to wipe the filth from his soles) — in pages palmed, ripped right from the book of Psalms: if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my righthand forget its cunting, let my tongue cleave to the Ruth of my mouth, it goes…saves it though, “apparently,” no reattachment surgery’s possible (even if the price’ll be lately right by the Doctors Tweiss): risk such a procedure He’s thinking and He’ll risk His freedom, to think if not His life, Him stumbling deranged mouth glop maniacal spew from out of the motel’s rear service entrance and onto the highway, miraculous you have to admit as do latter commentators that He doesn’t get picked up by Anyone, hauled in for a session, a little of the old Q. & A. even for just appearing in public like this, a dressing down for dressing up as His mother, actually in disguise as a Mary disguised as His mother, if you’re with Him: that old desertruined robe exchanged for a pink slip of housecoat clasped too huggingly tight with plastic flower buttons, forgetmenots but who remembers, dumpster’s sneakers over slippered raiment retained He’s traded in for heels, pumps one for each stumble of foot He’s tripping, falling, huddling past the assembled Law, the Media, who are the Law’s later interpreters, its reporters and photographers (many latearriving Affiliated journalists actually forbidding themselves from pen and camera due to the holiness of the Ninth, the wasteful nature of such observance distressing in this ridiculous ritual of these lensmenschs and shutterschmucks: how making cameras of their own filmless hands, they squint one eye then click with the finger) — they let Him pass as her, without inspection, whether to them a motel maid, a whore just off for the night or her grandmother’s sister, a voyeur onlooking, rubbernecking what with her head kercheifed, too, become babushkad, old and avoided as destitute and sick. He trannies away from the river in heels, the skirt of His coat shrived high by the wind. His mouth’s open in an attempt to air pain, and so exposed to the weather falling, the spitting drift, but no yelling’s to be heard, only the untastedness of the street wind and the avenue wind and then at their intersection, the resoundingly ringing silence of that angry greedy pud. What it resembles is a growth of goldbrick, a bellish bud or coin sored upon the middle of the mouth, deep inside it and secret, the ornament of His standing aleph, an uppermost putz only smaller and softer than most. What He wants to say with it, though, He doesn’t know, as He isn’t saying it, as nothing’s being said through Him — only this letter, the round of its soundlessness in search of a vowel, the translation of this search for bearings east, a new beginning voiced only in blood…B’s arms flailing, as if communicant and with His legs, too, His head, as if limbed directly to His mouth’s fingery stud, made veined to what remains: the stirrings of a torturous howl through the slip of parkinggarage, then down its slipping grade, the turns, the ramps on and off, waiting at the crosswalk for any light to change, Him an aleph splayed, waving finally with sound, Aaaaaa…all He manages, to echo across the darkened and utterly vacant 10th sad & 40th He doesn’t know which, He wouldn’t, dispersing, disappearing into a traffic of whirling ice, obscuring the noise of even the sirens.