A final flush, then, and the bathroom’s left empty…its door shut, locked forever forgotten, struck from the blueprints, forbidden from memory: offlimits, closed for the cleaning, slippery when even thought of, if — Feigenbaum among the one’s too many lost upon the altared third of the month, those thousands of them, these tens, the hundreds losing their daily shadows and with them, their nightly lives, to the lighting then darkening of this moon passing through, this moon passing over, waxwaning its judgment, as if a selfeclipse; the remnant crescent of his body remanded first to the (easterly) Morgue, for processing: the cataloging of his personals, not much, blood drained and body cleaned to corpse, his photograph’s taken, his prints inked, and name entered into a ledger; only then, he’s hauled over the ice for commendation to the waters below. Feigenbaum, Fink, Finkel, Fischel, Fishl, Freud, Freund, and Friedland…
But before our loss can be massed, given one face and voice, any name representation, an inviolate symbol — we’re asking you, wait up, langsam just a moment, will you, shtum: we all must stand ourselves, alive, aware, out on the far ice to reflect above the tide. Namely, that it’s the destiny of every individual, of even the symbol, even the ultimate, to think their time the end, to think their world the last — and this especially today, especially fastdeadly, with everything In the beginning again at the already begun, history eternally returning as always, as eternally as ever but rather quickly, evermore and more quickly now, with a precipitate urgency, an Apocalyptic insistence. Now the time in which you live the time to end all times and Time; now the Never again. In mourning, standing atop the furthest spur of frost above the deep, they mourn themselves, a little soon: their failure, their ill luck, the ruinous stars above with their frustrated mazel. It’s understood, which means it’s itself mourned, our knowing hope, our dreaming: how we can’t all be prophets, we can’t all be priests, we can’t all be kings; that despite what the scholars once believed, there’s only one Moses; that despite what the sages once bowed down to, there’s only our God; thinking, too, if everyone’s their own Messiah, what’s that worth, what’s in it for me. Better to unify, best to hold One indivisible. Nowadays, there’s no why to wonder who, admit it, who’ll make it, whose testimony, whose witness — that’s been long worked out and over, it’s suspected; already taken care of, chosen long before any of us were ever born to live down any death. A statement is forthcoming.
Officially, anything still undecided is beyond any notion of help, of emergency response, beyond even a call to account. Rather, it’s an attempt to define innocence, to safeguard assets from liability, to prevent position, meaning Authority, from assault, that being held responsible narrischkeit, this blood on whose hands mishegas — the Administration to vouch for the water supply, the air quality, middlemanager magi seers at the National Weather Service through an order from President Shade reporting directly to the Garden, which issues its own releases on every bandwith unsunned, givingout the assurance of what lately passes for expected: only the cold and the coldly dark, a steel frost, an iron ice; but there’s a break on the horizon, they’re sure to be assured…there’s bound to be, promised, a covenant fulfilled, just don’t ask us date or time. Nail what down — it’s excruciating, this call for exactitude, not a pleasant cross to bear. Though it’s important to remember, at least the FBs do, are reminding each other on their wandering whispering walks back from ice’s edge to the bunks of their barracks for Curfew, that of all people, organizations, or governments, Der has the most to gain from their loss, from ours of us; Garden, Inc., the very venture that ostensibly protects them, the party that would stand to make the most from their annihilation, as a total loss would make official, perpetually irrevocable, the reversion of assets, the manifold increase of the Island’s holdings in a wax: from obscurity, the mere lighting of a moon; an inheritance disinherited, to inheritance again. Not that any Authority more mortal is pleased, not at all, at least not publicly confirmed. No comment. As gossip becomes rumor becomes rule of Law, then eventually discredited, dismissed, overturned, it’s difficult to know what to do besides stand aside, sleep our dreams, wake, walk, and whisper, monger our gossip into rumors, while letting the course of events inhuman enact whatever punishment it is that might appease the anger of a God; render unto and all that — let the Lord exact the Almighty’s retribution, take enough suffering to satisfy them both, then make wing for day.
A mensch long of age, he seems older than three fathers and their fores. Brownsville, he’d been a Pitkin Avenue boy. He’d sold shoes, first as an assistant, as an employee of his own father, then, after his father’s death from being stepped on then walked all over one too many times by the local women and their creditor sons, as a small business owner — a prominent member of the local community, who’d had his own seat at the shul. A congregation. If you wanted decent shoes, you went to him. And when he said they were good, they were good. He was good to his wife, and he always thought he would live long because he gave to charity. If you gave to charity you would live a long life, because it says so in the books. But he never made the time to read them; his eyes were always tired, now the color of the cold. Seeking only a semblance of routine, the unexceptionally daily, he’s sitting a respite from the death of late, having his last pair of overstock salvaged shined by the new cobbler here who only last wax had been the lowly shiner, an assistant of sorts, an employee, if unsalaried, to the old cobbler recently dead who just a wane ago had reconditioned for this mensch the left heel on his issued pair, a limp. They both enjoyed whitefish sandwiches with coffee. Demoted. Left alone. How the polish is smeared, rubbed, elbowgreased, a shoulder’s put into it; the rag snaps, pops, the mensch slumps, the menschs — what’s reflected in the sheen of tongues are just their empty eyes. One gray the other dead, white and red and glasses. Another sits just as patriarchally, high up in the barbering chair, his cheeks receive a shave, he’s snipped, scissors’ tips to root around in the ears and up the upturned nose; locks are strengths, curls are bonds; a brush bristles his Adam’s apple, the stropped blade’s brought to neck, but even before the flick of wrist the mensch can give no blood — and neither can the barber, who until his promotion yesterday once swept the floors here, occasionally answered the phone, scheduled appointments, was allowed to work the register when slow. And yet another, this mensch nothing but a boy, a boychick he’s called, chubby, fat: wenwambly purses hanging from his limbs, sullenly pale suffused everywhere with a rosy rash, blushy in front of his bunkmates even in the sleeping dark he strips for the night and instead of wadding up his clothes as usual is reminded by the loneliness of his mother, their maid, then goes to fold his shirt and slacks, and before he can place them in his cubby — again and again, and the boy’s father, too, who’d been firstborn and had died before his own firstborn, three nights before, it’d been in the middle of a story for his bedtime. Once upon a, forgotten. Against tradition, against the Law, they’re using pyres once the coffins bottom out. In this weather, a lame and flailing flame. Millions shorn to hundreds of thousands, tens, tons then thousands on their own, fleshing out the world beyond, cremation’s cinder darkening, shadowing clouds to seed new storms. Witness strength given over to numbers, abated to dates, left as scraps of fact and figure for the gleaning of our widows dead, and yet on the wind, inconsolable; life left over to history, the inexorable future of posterity, inherited to memorious record, revelation of a mission they’ll force Him to accept, an identity we’ll force Him to force back on us, Ben, down our throats: talk and popularize, please, yak it up and smile, will you…go all God on them, on us, the whole Job job, prophetmode, jeremiad from the Rocky mountaintop, to the valley of dry bones and silicon clay, promote, protest, debunk, decry, anathematize and, Jeez; may you bless when you intend to curse, and may you curse if you intend to bless; always, though, be in the world, be of the world, be sure of that, be warned; remain in an orbit of sorts, in a perpetual flee, fleeing even from flight, to be a refugee from refugees from self, a survivor, a testimony, a witness to all this made so loud and so fervent, so vehement and righteous that your witness becomes this, that your witness becomes itself the tragedy, which then must be forever itself witnessed by your generations, if any, that ensue.