All air’s grounded the days following disaster…not days but an afterlife, which is indivisible, and so even if heaven then truly hell. An avenue, they emptily follow, a street, without escort, the city beckoning: a dark ancestral finger curled to coax, both to bring near and to scold. Laning, leathern strips of tar. A fringe of ice, a knot of tree. Their prayer is only a siren. Two limousines alone together, pass each other, are passed, a gleam of fender, grazing mirrors, bumpthumping and cutting one another off, northeasternward, far up the reach of black, this dim span of everlast cold; the aired flat earth of the seaboard in all its binding chains, a franchise of the known: gas stations lately condemned, treyf eateries just out of business, prospective lots of forested nowhere,
To follow is to lead if in the direction most opposite, an ordinal most opposed — the route of the landrover in reverse, an Exodus rewinding itself through a desert of ice: snowstorm, galling winds. Hail the hardness of stone the size of the sky falls to the windshield, trapping darkness in the web of its shatter. Our driver, a Mormon minor who seems as young as all Mormons most probably are, and every schmeck as innocently perfect, turns into a skid without concern, his face frozen blond and harmless; then, evens out again with a slight sigh to ride the middle of the highway without end, without middle; the fall effacing lines, the lanes useless, with shoulders slushed to watery shrug. Benjamin in the back, there are two others waiting for their introductions; one seated shotgun, next to Heber the Mormon: he’s the shvartze we’d been getting at earlier, name of Sonny Hamm though he’s known also as Testicles, to be pronounced in a manner more philosophical or poetic than most — Greek, though his people long ago came up from the South, the capital of Africa; the other’s seated alongside Benjamin, hidden with Him behind the window that tints to separate front from rear, two zones of temperature and volume of radio static: a foreigner, the name’s Torque Mada. Despite the smile, the lips as tight as scars, he keeps on his head that fedora without apparent humor. Maybe he’d been told to suit up like this, for the sake of impression: doublebreasted, pocketwatch that needs always winding, the sparkling piss of its chain. It pinches. A sensation of slow burning, a headhaze, a rise in His gerd. He’s slumped against the window, His bones feel weather-made. Awake as of just now, the last pothole, tires’ slide — feeling the slow flow of power channeled once again from the beat of His heart, recovering from the injection that’d fallen Him with midnight, the secularized eve of the New Year. Assimiliated to who knows how or when, there hadn’t been a struggle. He’s kneading at an arm, up toward the pudge that falls from shoulder, its bandage unremembered: a sanitary strip profaned in image with a wondrous array of popular animated characters He can’t hope to know, He’s too young — ratty mice, cats and dogs, and piglets.
In one interpretation, you can forget pain, uncomfortable’s the worst.
