And then, to the west, which is the secular directional, the way of the fallen, out at the furthest edge of the Island, marking the nearest, anchoring preserve of our float from the vale of Joysey and its rim of oncegreenery — the State Park blanketed by ash, hacked picnictables scavenged by locals for their wood: the fuel of Hoboken the fences of Weehawken…portapotties toppled, swingsets mournfully rusted, the playgrounds’ hanging ropes noosed, twisted into hideous knots, their worn tires the nests of malevolent storks — the view from Ben’s house, His parent’s, His bedroom above.
On the third of the newest month, Feigenbaum sits, downstairs still, has survived.
On the toilet, in its spare bathroom down the hall to the door to the garage and subsisting this entire time on breath. Only groans. Noises that hallway to Ben on the wind…these singly plyed moans being questions, how to answer: Dad, where are you, how are you, Israel, Yisroel, Aba Aleichem. He resists, and is silent, makes instead to follow the origin of the echo, its whispering that ends in the blackened brick of the fake fireplace with shuttered flue, in the familyroom, unknobbed from the speakers of the screen; a voice in the livingroom, from the den, as if the words spoken — words that sound to Him like names, His Aba’s, Ima, sisters, PopPop, DadDad, Zeyde, Saba — are only the manifestation of prophetic delusion; as if they’re the words and names and memories only these links in weedy, rusted chains, sent out to bind, tongued to noose around His neck and legs and arms to drag Him down, submission — don’t look for me, an origin, a source…the chain says hissing its way around His waist and around again to knot at navel, as navel, you’d better not if you know what’s good.
Are you God? He asks.
Are you?
To be drug by the voice out of the kitchen then to the stairs, hesitation whether up to the bedrooms, or down to the basement: how Ben fears being taken down there, despite the assurance of any bind, curiosity’s hogtie — down there who wants to know. It’s always beyond, though, this mourning, as if otherly dimensional, a hidden call coming from the stairs and further left past the porch with its brittle wicker, two rockingchairs without cushion out of season, a low table topped with shells Liv’d found at the beach that summer once, and a sofa, which now all seem made of braided strands of flowingly immobile ice, screens for the windows to be put up to give air to spring still propped against the furniture as if windows in the negative, unyielding nothingnesses, hard voids as black as holes; then, at the end of the hallway the door stripped of stain, the welcome mat, Shalom, the entrance to the triplewide garage. Three doors along the hallway to the right. To open one a linen closet, the folded cloths, the deaths of moth, clean and bright and fresh. Another, further along the hall the closet of dirty linens, balled placemats and coverings, heaps of messy drools. And then, to try the door to the last right against the wall and the end of the hall with its descent three steps down to parking. A static shock, it’s locked. Jigglejiggle, knockknockknock.
It’s not my fault, the voice says as if softer and further away than ever…I’m sorry.
I asked to stay here…I told them, it’s better for my condition.
First floor last bathroom, his accidental discovery that Sabbath, that Shabbos, the last and just in time, tenks Gott…an emergency, and to think of what could have been: a trickly blush upon his crotch, Felice his wife Israel’d always forget her name would have said a shame, he’d have said a Shanda; an embarrassment: to have spilled his filial fill to further arabesque a plush rug of the Orient warming the tiles of the hall. Here, Feigenbaum lives as if he’d asked for it. Too late for remorse, turned to rage in the full flush of his senility: possibly depressed, though lacking clinical confirmation, he squats. Woodpaneled, lilymirrored, hung with a kitschily antiquarian map of Jerusalem framed in metal, purchased by Hanna at an auction to benefit charity, the synagogue: kinder without stomachs, cancer of the conscience, the birth defect that is guilt, converted to regret. Feigenbaum, he hadn’t even wanted to accept the invitation, standing, the welcome openarmed, but didn’t know how to say No, which naming word was first spoken on the eighth day of Creation — Eve to Adam, God to…
I was born, came over here, you wouldn’t understand, no one ever does…worked selling luggage, suitcases, trunks out on Orchard Street, I made what I made then married and got old. After I smashed my hips, my wife moved us down here to a facility, relocated was what she’d say. I went to a shul, I went there to daven, you say synagogue and pray; Shalom’s its name I forget, Anshei Bergen County, my wife liked to sit up front where she could see the rabbi, hear the cantor, the chazzan I’d’ve said if he hadn’t been so terrible, but me I stood in back. One night, this stranger comes over to me and asks if I have a meal, I say no but he insists. I come, I sit, I go to the toilet, the bathroom, here…an intention just to visit, to stop in, say Shabbat Shalom then quiet, let his wife do all the talking. His wife, if he couldn’t please her better to become a chair and die of splinter. From her, how he became habituated to keeping not only the seat down but the lid as well, his head. Felice, she’s the one they came to like — the Israeliens inviting her back week in week out with him lugged along as baggage, furniture delivery. Felice, the one they liked to ess a fress with, to talk hands with and to; the one they always asked to stay later whenever he would ask to leave. And how every day here since has felt like Shabbos, this bathroom more and more like home. His last how he knows it, feels it deep among his issues both various and vascular. A sit eternal, with the feet already dead: ten corpses cold in ragged socks heavied with his shvitz. A rack of tortured washcloths, a counter with a sink, brightened with flowers, who knows what brand they’re called; a mirror draped in towels. To find nothing new under the overhead light: floors are white, shoescuffled. In appearance, he thinks, this bathroom the same as it’d been previous to its recreation, its resurrection, always, though how different in its feeclass="underline" othered, unsettling. It’s not the fanned air, the pressure required to relieve; neither the worry for an emergency of tissue — amply stocked under the sink, twoply as if earth and sky, like waters; anyway, there’s nothing yet to clean, no need for Ben to haul down to the basement for any rolls of more, chaperoned only by His fear — the hum of the ventilation as sudbued as ever, pitched as dulcetly as its previous whirr; the same gurgle of the tank; the light, unobtrusive. It’s that he’s been revealed, or so it appears, a voice, a visitation — whoever that is with the footsteps flatly thudding. Feigenbaum sits with his elbows on his knees. Mortification, a birthright — and such a pain in his bowels, his head lapped in his hands.