As it’s soon understood, these scholars have been assembled to settle a dispute quote of global importance, of, quote, international scope: theirs a question that seeks not one answer but millions — eighteen million to be precise, the famed Octadecamega as the pollsters would pundit at the very margin of error; it’s to answer with facts, identities, with names, and current mailing addresses and telephone numbers, who to scape now, now that rapture and our redemption and yadda’s out of the question, which question is ours and not theirs, it’s explained; it’s that the people, in conversion and not in their death (though death is perhaps a species of conversion, not one would later suggest), had been essential to redemption, endtimes salvation, and now that that seemed gone all to hell or to heaven and which, what’s next, any ideas — when do we break, where’s the toilet?
This revivified Sanhedrin has been convened to choose a new chosen, to conduct a new selection — to identify a People, according to their missionstatement: to be selected through the will of God, or through those whom that Deity selects…a directive already drafted and ratified by the usual Washington interlopers and upstartists, as if anything they legislated would be signedover in fire by God, the nibbed forefinger of, that willed and willing Deity party and without the hindrance of dissenting votes, as President Shade — assisted by the Mayor of New York, newly named Meir Meyer, here little more than a functionary — takes the lectern to announce, and with no mean modicum of humility, God’s selection of himself and his subsequently deific selection of this Das (apparently, a former advisor, chief of staff to a predecessor better forgotten, a cabinet member, past secretary of the Treasury a few have to remember, a shadow owed much and by many), invested with autonomy as full as it gets, promised no interference, no accountability expected and, anyway, who has the time; this deicidical Das who in turn has ostensibly selected those assembled below, foremost intellectuals, policy wonks, thinktank wizards, and the odd factotums of fictional government to infiltrate, make report, ensure what we once knew as due process — this in an operation financed by the holding escrow of the assets of the dead: to peruse assorted arcana, pursue genealogies, wills and testaments of every ilk and ink in the hopes of ascertaining the representatives of our impending redemption. Or else distraction, popular ruse. And as an assemblage without a mission is as a mensch without a head, the body of choice is already accounted: there’s policy, protocol, they might even have an insignia, a motto (though none knows what those are; each is urged to bring not only pencil or pen, but their own stationary, too), everything except an idea of what anything means. Still, in the following season the scholars are ordered to apply themselves as diligently as desecration can be, and sooner than they’d ever imagine they’re firing off memoranda and missives discreet, regarding the suitability of proposed scapes to colleagues sitting, sleeping, slumped just to their left, to their right, across tables, down halls; a deluge of notes, reports, inscrutable forests of papered waste: hemicovers of books slam closed, cause enormous clouds, dust to eclipse the above, to obscure the silent morning visits of, among others, the dubiously redubbed Mayor, accompanying the President, Das in his General uniform twostarred one day, threestarred plus purplehearted the next, flanked by his innumerable minyans of minions, plainclothed as decalogues, in suits pieced together of drab tablets.
Assistants interrupt the reverie, defile the idyll, at every hour hauling in more hulking tomes more and more esoteric, forever falling apart, to be perused with fingers laden with shvitz, with their toes and their eyes even through the glasses of the nose and the hands that mate and serve together to magnify, pages smudged with excited froth, with nicotinal saliva, with languages like the irretrievable People, dead and gone: some scholars sleeping already, others holding their tomes upsidedown, unsure how to right an alphabet, turn the page, turn the page, turn the, answer’s to be found on the page after the last; more and more books by the crateful daily delivered, old things mostly, out of prints, limited runs regressed from private libraries and archives, flownover from attics, excavated from basements and the least accessible stacks of permanent collections; they’re turning pages pulverulent, impairing visibility, aggravating with malicious intent the nose and throat; sifting through leaves, unslit of the unreadable unread for some idea, any, of how to begin — only to end, it’s been said, with the identification of those popularly referred to as the Nus, or Neues, depending on who you talked to and on what day. They the assembled would select a people, and only those people, whose souls would redeem the world — with no messy conversion, no choice on the part of the chosen allowed; this to be a wholesale redacting, remaking, revision, preferable, it’s been suggested, to any proposed wandering around the world, a process expensive, forever long, in search of someone to blame, anyone futzed enough in the head, willing to be scaped and so, martyred — a hook for their wilting felt hats, their slickers drenched through; though the sun’s out, winter wounds the glass in raging lashes.
For a moon, all that can be seen in the Library — since shut to the edification of the general public, who anyway might’ve long forgotten where it is and when it once had been opened — are these improbably tiny noses peeking out over extensive volumes bound in leather as the scholars are bound to their chairs: becoming merged to their chairs, fixedly fused, gaseously suctioned to seats, forcing them to a restriction of motion, their movement accomplished only by the manipulation of the hands placed under the seat of the seat; wanting to leave for a moment of air or peace, for light when the sun darkened down they’d thrust themselves forward at the ache of their wrists, heave from the hurl of their spindly arms soon distended, and so the scholars they’d eventually push paper and themselves from their palms upon the floor’s splintered tiles, letting loose the occasional screeched, creakcracking fall, sneeze, cough cough cough as if only to assure themselves and their others that they’re, sad to say, still alive.
Sequestered in this Library, remanded to what’s become by January’s close an impossible task, having been less asked than ordered to find the solution most final to a question that can’t even be asked: not to confab, or to approach the presence of truth by consensus, but to vote, or to find, to determine, to order — to vet all potentials, nominees for salvation, then to ensure a future by publicly naming such resurrected embodiments of the cold, the dead, and their past, to identify inheritors, immediate kin. How to do this is work, is research, is falsity, lies — a salvation itself, if lesser, more personal, adrift amid earthly time: spending days as vast as the sky poring over pages and charts, diagrams, lineages and the annals of annals, parchments and hides, every species of document that had ever occurred to the most human fear of being forgotten, the ambition that is immortality to be discerned amid memorized numbers and memorious dates that live lives independent of us, to be retrieved from between our flesh and bone covers that are, themselves, oblivious. In the end, though, it’s perfect, a total success — in that it’s worthless; as every hint leads to a prophecy that foretells a clue, yet another falsity to be followed through to its conclusion, which is only real insomuch as it’s nothing and nowhere.
East of our maps, Hic sunt serpentes…Here There Be Serpents coiled into currents, baring fangs of wake, venomous rips whirling around the throat of our Island, to skirring, to choke. Here’s a small island just off the coast of another small island that itself is just off the coast of an enormous country known as America — situated in space as in time just opposite the enormous green goddess with that torch of hers and that book, too, from whose pages our maps have been ripped. Manhattan’s a mammoth compared with this neighboring clod, this island we call it though it’s barely an isle, more like a breathless speck split nearly in two by a sip of water, into tablets, with a sullied tongue pronouncing profaned names, forked baybrackish, sundered churning, churlish. A slip, it once had accommodated the docking of vessels, ships like the Vaterland, the mighty Leviathan, the stalwart Amsterdam, and the Westerland, the Gellert, the Thingvalla, the Mohawk, the entire Moravia fleet out of Hamburg, the Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Kronzprinz Friedrich Wilhelm, the SS Whatever on down the wavylined, watermarked Manifest of Manifests, all of them descendants of the colonizing Saint Catherine (patroness saint of libraries), which steamed in the very first stock: immigrants who’d intended only to arrive, up top; down below, emigrants who’d intended only to leave; up top, immigrants who’d thought only of the future; down below, emigrants who’d thought only of the past…immigrants who’d honored opportunity, emigrants who’d prayed their lives away to the historical failure of gods ever older and dumber — arriving all day and through the night, too, in these ships and impromptu brigs and barques, their steerage made democratic meat, shipments if only for the slaughter that is the new, always, the lavish luxurious quarantine that is this particular exile. An enfranchised garage, a Cadillac parked deep in the crotch. Judge not lest, though — after all, they knew their mythologies, their archetypes, the windy symbols and the manifold, though onesunned, doldrums of fate: having crossed the river that is the ocean to die here, they’d lacked only the coins to blind their eyes, which would undoubtedly be earned in due time — found on a sidewalk, in a sewer, under the tongue of a wifemouth, in the pocket of her professional “father.”