Naming friends and enumerating enemies, for the cautionary benefit of neighbors downstairs floors forever and his unsuspected Arschstrong, too, his lover and would’ve been his and Benjamin’s heir — PopPop doling out wealth he doesn’t have to people he doesn’t really know, never really wanted to anyway; leaving his sun to his SonSon, and may the larks flown south for the winter serve as witness, let their worms live enough to attest. A window, PopPop stands a last, gropes at the sill. Violas swell from a rooftop string-section, behind them winged woodwinds chirp about balconies. From the elevator in the hall, through the door still open, a chorus rises up from the depths, the basement sauna and surrounding pools lap and wading baldly cast with swimmers synchronized, taking a diver they’re swooning pruned the Kaddish, in harmony to the hunk of lifeguard doing a version of faygele in a shrilly brilliant cameo whistle…
He’s dying! my God, he’s dying!
PopPop tearing at what’s left of his hair as if tugging from his head his own response with the dandruff, yelling: I am having a heart attack! I am dying!
As old as death this fall again, back to the kitchen — what a stunt this brunch’s fling, in truth a jump or pounce, prat and rattling glass, rupturing the last act (another halfhour); leaning limply on a doorknob turned with his weight to humble him to knees in the hall, an other hand reaching into the air, still and stale — a wreck, this underventilated apartment with the heating way up and the impotent sun spurting itself through the unwashed, unshaven skylight — his head held snobbish, as if to face away from his wriggling toes, gnarled in yellow nail, he can’t bear them, the weakly veined and restless legs and breathless crotch, in an always last attempt to right himself, to rise. A farewell as extensively meant as Shalom in its every translation, its rewrites, kick-starts, punchups and toneddowns, tightly mouthed: with blessings and curses for all, for relatives, friends, for even just the relatively friendly, the acquaintance and the stranger among them; with obsecrations and wishes, goodbye, the sigh of its syllables again: Sha-lom…his eyes opening after the style of his lips, to the mirror above, around and whirlwinding, to pronounce to himself in reflection an invocation of the worth of his mother, to commend his corpse and soul condemned if soul he has to God. He says his goodbyes now a third time absolute, absolving any prompt: Shalom, Shalom, Shalom…shutting eyes, mouth, face grayed above the flush of heart.
Throughout PopPop’s facility, from towertop to basement bottom, mourning’s been underway for a week already: Unaffiliated though eligible, still attractive and accommodating with money and recipes of their own widows beyond and below, those inveterate cookers and cleaners who’d moved here maybe to land for themselves on Florida’s fishy shore an Affiliated husband, his fortune, their luck, these survivors of intermarriages and failure — they’re out on their own decks below his and rending ritzy their fresh laundry mourning white with spare falseteeth, tearing their sheets and assorted feminine unmentionables to shreds before hanging them out to signal what distress or sentinel under the cool of the coming moon. All day they’re lolling low their sad sag, over their precariously frowning railings like petulant lips, they’re sobbing, weeping the age of water, their flabby hands held to faces shaken out into faucets of flesh, one eye of each the hot water, the other the cold and so, it’s lukewarm tears they’re sprinkling all over Miami, as if to purify or douse. Upon their hair, which is wig, or dyed, ashes heap, luminously scorched particulate blown from the pile of corpses burnt at the furthest edge of parkinglot and, too, atop the roofdeck of the adjacent garage — a great cremate, as who has the time or resources for mass burial. Despite surgery electives and pricey, painful injections their faces, they’re fallen — on the knees of the nose, their cheeks begging for it (compliments) — on the form of a wiry, uniformed official below with the brass, the moustache’s rank, giving orders to the limos parked in the drive. As smoke from the bodies burns off into night, PopPop manages, just manages, to scroll open an eyelid, a brittle curtain or carpet soaked of its red; and with it attempts a wink that’s only to resolve into a roll, dull — which failure damns and so feels itself death; the end of an end come the credits, the stars.
