An eternal, eternalizing idea, it’s said, Shade’s that of their Iscariot: we become humbled to prevail, we sin only to merit. Along with the envoys of Abulafia & Sons, Inc., their heads bent low, he’s in discussion, not prayer. Their muscle, enforcers interested both official and private, sit one room over atop the tomb of David itself, idly oiling their pistols, and smoking cigars as big as whole pickles, making their toilets and moves: ogling these newly Affiliated exnuns, here of the former Carmelite Order, old habits exchanged for new, bustling in and out of the meeting with ample vorspeizen, appetizing trays heaped with savory outlay: toothpicked olives dark and light and pitted and with pits, too, alongside platters of pickled everything else you’d imagine; plates sweetened & soured in every verity known, with many of them only dreamed up by catering last moon — though all of them new and old tending toward salt, their sweet more like halfsour, cheekhollowing, budtart, new green and dill, yes, though not only those pickled pickles, no, there’s pickled babycorn, also, and beetroot, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, mushrooms, peas, peppers, pomegranates, radishes, tomatoes, turnips, and watermelon still in its rind, the delicacy that is the aubergine pickle, as well, that’s eggplant, if you weren’t sure; the reformed nuns stooping to enter the room, still sexless and humbled, musty and modest and decalced if only from personal preference, each time coming and going back and forth and back again in barefeet they’re tripping over the threshold and scattering alclass="underline" the room, the rooms, pooling in brine, both vinegary plain and whitewine, and so out then in again with them, and then again with another tray, yet another of them to drop, to scatter their heap; they’re wading through the thick wakefoamy juice waved by their long logged murky skirts patched out of wimples, trying to serve their refreshment amid the spicing flotsam of bayleaves, peppercorns bobbing, dried red chilies, celeryleaves, cinnamonbark, vivisected cloves of garlic, coarse salt, coriander, dill, fennel, ginger, and horseradish, onion, parsley, and thyme floating atop the floor’s pool. At one end of the marble table’s a projector, this paleotechnic failing machine whipping its exhausted fan intermittently on electricity wired from the bulbless socket above: it’s projecting transparencies onto the opposite wall, miscellaneous surveillance images of Him, and of His former owners, Master or Hosts if you want, the official terminology’s TBD, interpreted — those of Laser Wolf (LAW), or he might prefer Glazer, those of the proctological family, too, them and their lawyers examining, then vague resource maps (oil and water) extending outward east the furthest known to what’d been Asia, an assortment of topographies and graphs, a Babel’s baffled charts; the bulletpointed, sevenday itinerary of an upcoming goodwill tour of Polandland entire, to be undertaken by Shade, and to be replete, they’re talking, with performances by yeshivish brass-bands and miscellaneous orphanages’ gleeclubs and choirs, summits with emissaries from seminaries, and meetings met with imported intelligentsia, promoting what they’re officially calling dialogue, cultural exchange, I don’t know…Shade, senior member of this assemblage as head of the Sanhedrin soon supranational, he keeps ducking down toward the table then almost under it as if he’s in the way of the image projected, fingering spiced at his nose, the shvitzy pimpling of forearm to forehead, tugs at the pants of his suit wetted through to the knees. Thinking why’d he go and agree to this meeting, this location, and with its timing so off: a tick too late of shade, this career’s blot, a soured stain; how he mustn’t lose the sun…it’s that he’s trying to follow its beam, windowed, slit, this ducking, dodging, feigning and feint, to stay within its lighted coddle. To keep low, if still wary of warming: the US of Affiliation shouldn’t know he’s here, or, if that’s impossible, then especially they shouldn’t know why, his purpose — his sitting down to break bread as much as covenant with these heathens, Philistines, meaning goyim he’ll Judas anyway. Silverpieces, futz them: the taste of coin in the mouth, a metallic bitter, too tart to talk anew. Fling a purse, and wing, he’s thinking that’s the schedule. Maybe it’s the symbolism, though, what stills. Its salty reek, the sulfurous retch: a time itself pickled, preserved, stuck fast in webs of herb, parsley/dill nets, onionskins…O to savor it upon the tongue, as the tongue, before the swallow and all’s forgotten, belched. He’s uncomfortable, feverish, tired from the flight. Hell should be this hot. And hell, he’s reminded, is only a valley away: just past the glassily shimmering walls, the arch widemouthed, the open lid of the nearest gate — giving way to the briny, brackish pit…
The purpose of this gathering’s hushed like a baby born into sin then flushed down the Nile, is to lay to suckling sleep the groundwork, in Jerusalem, for a lasting peace — and so nothing’s new under Ecclesiastes’ sun, Kohelet’s, which is as oppressive as it ever was, if only here, the shadow of its former dominion. Idea is to fix a ration of reparations to the remaining few Unaffiliated; who first need to be counted, who, Shade thinks, to receive such reparation would just love to be counted, and then and only then — it’s proposed — to get them their own nation, some small wound of bloody dreck somewhere, anywhere, to become infected, infecting…proposing to appease them, to shtum them up — to let the world get on with what it has to get on with, the Law. On the wall opposite the projection, there’s hung an extensively taut skinlike tatter, a parchment spliced then nailed as if to dry itself of slaughter in that light in from the one thin teardrop window still arcing, not yet walled: it’s a map, of the nation in question, that questionable nation, what to name it, why — partitioned wherever as an exclave, an excrescence, balmed in roughly the shape of B’s body, it’s said; that is, if you examine it squinting then sort of to the left, looking upsidedown, too, and through an obstruction, a column…Shade’s head in his hands, staring down, heedless, unhearing. What would’ve been B’s bodyparts: organs, glands, and yadda in that vein, leeching fourcolored inside these black borders some thick with others dotted as if for future severance, all sectioned then labeled with the names of the assembled, and to him the President what’re inexplicable numbers, indicating spheres of influence, responsibilities, domains of empire imminent only in their destiny, never to manifest…His forbiddenaround, tabooedabout hindquarters, there at the sinew of the thigh marked thickly in red with the term Undecided as if expecting, or provoking, a fight with any angel that would deign to sponsor; His heart’s hachures bearing the name Shade in black, His heart that is itself a Shade, which name is shadowed, too, under the tongue and then upon the forehead, marking due north toward a border that’s going to prove a problem, a pain in the international tush that’s labeled across the entirety’s lakelike middle Abulafia (its southern extremity, though, also marking the ocean, and so they’d be controlling what would be this country’s major port and largest city), a solution to which’ll probably eventuate even more death and, what’s worse for Shade, another invitation to a meeting amid the rooms of this scorched soaking Jerusalem tomb, yet another convocation of this body, and their seconded, protracted session of parceling His — this legislating of it parsed, skinned and grown then shed — this body that’s to be His not much longer, which will become as foreign to Him and to us as will be that makeshift nation to any, to be grafted onto the spine of whichever continent so deserves it, would deserve if only. And if, ultimately, amid all these arguments, these questions unanswered because still and forever unasked, unproposed, a solution can’t be found, and soon, by eventuality’s timetable, which is wellappointed, placecarded, and centerpieced, too, with Sinai’s two tablets, with the settings around them in place for first seating and already amply spread with the dew — listen, there’s always Shade’s solution, which is final, enough. Intifada. Plan B. It remains a Shem unnaming, however, this thirdtablet silence — for now not a label, placard, or scrap, but a gag. Hands are shook. If only in hope. All arches, their gates and their avenues, remain open.