O Felice! how fare the toilets of thy heaven; enlighten me as to the quality of the thrones of my Father — are they not warmed by the breath of stillborn babes? is the paper not pressed of the wings of angels? is their flush not the flow of the rivers of Eden — the Pishon and Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Hudson and the East? Why not accustomed to such by now, this life lived in hide, a locking squat, this hurt on pain of passing, the unsettled intestinal of his punished gut, the lower glower the inheritance of generations of persecutory kashrut since wiped from the tush of the earth. That and he’s hemorrhoidal, too, yet another intolerance (impotence), incontinence once even, never again, you name it, ever since he’d been weaned from his mother — out of the womb and into the toilet, a stallguest, to become an intimate of a leftover world. But it’s more than that or revelation by unnamed others, the rebuke of footsteps, and their thumping voice — it’s what they have to say: hot air up from under the draft of door, word whispered around of a plague returned, more virulent than ever, and adapted to resistance, and so resistant to resistance, strained into power, mutated beyond all conscience, made only to destroy; the gossip of a Steinstein dead, corroborated by the loud cries and whimperings of a lately disconsolate host — enough worry to rip a hole in the silvery lining of even the ironmost stomach, tract life through then grunt. Heavy figs of hairy branch and bough dangle over the edge of the seat. Feigenbaum scratches at what itches. He shifts, restless, unease, a tense, and almost…there are limits, breathe there must be. To think — a thing this large through a thing this small, this you didn’t have to tell Ben’s mother, you don’t have to tell his wife, they know from passing, dead down below: forget heaven and follow the pipes. Almost…but why still this pishy push and pull, what could be left inside: empty, he feels, he’s nothing, the ash of ash and tired, sustained only upon the shoedust and that overhead light. Partibirth. Stale air. Stillshat. He’s passing his innards, must be — his drecky, wasteworn soul.
Promise me…it’s the mumbling fan, you’ll never seek me out.
Promise, humbling, and I’ll remember to you whatever you want.
Ben sits on a sofa in a room His mother called one room and His father another, couched alongside the telephone set atop its table of wood legged fickly ever since He’d stood on it to rip the intercom’s unit from the face of the wall. At the sound now — she knew how to cook, how to compliment, she loved you very much, Feigenbaum says, I want you to know we all did — He knows not to answer, to provoke; give the voice its privacy, a room of its own, the gut of the house and the hallway, it’s a throat. Where’s the head, it knows what a week it’s been…Feigenbaum unsteady, lubricated from the shvitz of his sit, cracks toes, uncomfortable upon this dumb tooth of bowl, chomping him, consuming. A stack of magazines to his left on the ledge, having been blown under the door by way of looser lips, and so a sister to thank, a drafty girl who might’ve called him uncle, alongside yellowing, wetmoldy newspapers, expanded editions for Shabbos, featuring the Arts and Stocks, now with full death statistics, please turn to page D1: a record skimmed for the past, scanned for the present, headlines at his feet he hasn’t yet lived down but through; pages upon pages wetted to harden thick into tablets kicked to the corner to crumble into kibble. Fluffy seatcover itches, a poor pillow. To scratch, to sleep deep in the wounds he itches out, there to never wake, to live within your hurt is to never be hurt again…it’s that as much as frightened. Old enough to know better, old enough not to care he does, or that he should, it’s this insanity, also, this mania recurring when it’s not a fixation, perpetual, digestively always; having been trained to the toilet late, in that flat waterheated, a tenement smokewindowed, shared with a hundred others, a hundred hundred, an entire family encamped in a crack of the bowl, urging him to pish, to get done soon, get it over; the night of his tush, eclipsing the day of his flush — all the days and nights of his sit, unrisen. It wasn’t a family down there, it’d been the apples his mother had sold, or his father, the apples his mother would sell to his father who’d then sell them out on the streets for rent and heat and light and water; bobbing, kept cold in the tank, corefresh. And then the snake, it would slither up the pipes, the pipe, winding up and through the crumbling bowels, three, four, five walkupflights stooped up the plumbing up past the rust and rot; shedding skin as it surfaces, half submerged, to coil in the bowl, which is so white and gleamingly pure that it feels, now, to be made of bone, jointed to his squat; this serpent swallowing itself, tightly, coldblooded and yet warmly, a scaly quivering turd, just waiting, to bite him in the tush as he sits himself to lighten, two marks, one for each cheek turned, poisons, or even worse: to crawl up into him, corkscrewy the hisser to wriggle up Feigenbaum’s puckered hole, to eat his fever from the inside out; intestines as a newest, shedless skin, to poison his vitals then out again, trailing from its tail his bile through any convenient membrane, maybe its head forking a tongue out one nostril, its tail flailing out the other; with his failing breath Feigenbaum to grasp at the never spooled, never started, and yet almost finished roll, to poorly wipe away the venous venom: his two hands wrapped in tissue as if they’re bandaged, absorbent wounds incurred in the intensity of his grip; an iron vise holding fast the ring of the seat, steadying the spin of the planet diseased within, his own stormy dungheaped heart.
To die, then, atop this modest throne, the toilet of the bathroom he’d chanced upon that mortal night, firstfloor. Return to seat, to bony sit, with even his discomposed decomposing now, the only thing left such cobble from his cheeks. He faces the mirror sprayed with errant soap and mold, green oxidate, takes in the hurt flushed deep amid the black basement septic of his eyes: bowlfleck, basinfilth; the wrinkles of his age twisted into horrible bolts: a burn of lightning, though the thunder comes up from the gut, a great whirring racket, his innards wheezingly wracked as if an obsolete technology. His hunch, too, and that he’s still in his hat. Even his nipples have fallen asleep. In the mirror he mouths to his mouth — a hallway desecrated, intestines rawthroated, hoarse. To go beyond the cry, nothing else to say. Borborygmus, borborygmi. Feigenbaum leans to open the cabinet under the sink: emergency rolls stored damply, ten of them he counts, once replenished by Wanda by the week, contingency for the pants caught down. Each square, a shroud for a soul. As if the page of the prayer required, he unfurls a quiet ply.