But it’s the wall above that interests, that holds. Webstuck to it under kinks of spiderwork, nailed, screwed, needled and pinned, there’s everything you ever need to know (but, yes, were afraid to ask), the casebook displayed, the fact file. Benjamin approaches it again in His wend, slowly around and circumambulating around its corrupting presence amazed, what not to be by these skins, these hides, maniacal pagings parchmented by weather, burdening the faces of slagblackened, goldenbrown brick: windrustled tattery newsprinted images of white middleaged Midwestern balding and cleanshaven and glassesed politicians posed in meticulously managed stages of photogenicy and colors of tie blue and red, faced amid a clutter of magazine clippings, tearsheets of fawning, gawking celebrity profile: who adopted whom, who’s dating, who’s married, who’s all broken up; faded mugshots of movie and television actors and actresses and those ostensibly famous for doing nothing, for being nobody — an act, their eyes and mouths circled or xd out in black; above and below obsessive reams of mullet length statistics subtracted from the ERAs of assorted Yankels or were they Metz pitchers since traded in an unspecified though rare losing season, multiplied by a multitude of precipitate statistics for greater Berlin circa every year of the last war; a ream of passenger manifests, apparently, recovered from the wrecks of defunct, Russianbased aerolines who could read that language, that unalphabetical foreignspeak; timetables of garbage pickups for Harlem, New York, New York; a flapping, dogeared map of Mormondom, Utah, strung across to nails with human hair meshing together every known abortuary ever to offer that procedure of damning sin for under a grand out-patient; Leeds’ hands splayed open it seems what with the dirt prints that remain used as stencils traced in pen on a map of Joysey, superimposed atop National Parks Service and U.S. geological survey maps of the Kieferöde with areas of probable dog saturation labeled and keyed according to the phases of moon; pornographic stills of male and female minors, hairless and pigtailed both demandingly angled, cut up and remade halfsexed, quarterlimbed, their resultant anatomies sectioned, and labeled: hearts, livers, kidneys, and spleens, where they would be embellished, in chalk and charcoal, with various gematric inversions and retrogrades attempted with the mailing addresses and telephone and facsimile numbers of a host of Texas holding companies with interests in both oil and war; the ages, too, heights and weights of their CEOs along with the dates of their mistress’ birthdays, then stapled and clipped to an alphabetical list of and scripts for the medications they take for any sexually transmitted viruses they’ve been given by them; Leeds says, finally noticing Benjamin’s curious browse, did you know that when the Freemasons dedicated the Washington Monument, that it stood, what’s it now, 555 feet and 5 inches tall, all those fives, and that its base, you should be aware, is 55 square feet and then that the windows they’re set 500 feet above that base, too, isn’t that crazy, I’ll be damned — now, didn’t know if you knew this one, either: that if you take the base and you multiplied it by sixty, or in other words by five times the number of the year’s months, which are twelve, and you get what, 3,300, that that’s the exact weight in pounds of the capstone of the thing, like the pyramidschemes the aliens made, the allseeing eye up there, Ra the Sun God, the Cyclops on the paper money bill, you with me, if I’d had one I’d show you with all the poisonous spiders and Latin; follow me here, as the name Washington as you know has ten letters, of course, five times two, and that if you then take that capstone’s weight multiplied by the base yet again you get, just give me a second here, 181,500, that’s it, which is as we all know roundabout the speed of light in miles per second, the whole atomic project, this is nuclear now, you get it, no one survives; and then, that if you take Washington, the name, I mean, which has a numerical worth of 122, with W equaling 25, A, 1, S, 19, H, 8, you get me, alright, and then let’s say you go and take that 122 and subtract another seven first for the G in George Washington, and then again five, which is the governing number of the Monument, as we’ve found out, and also of the Pentagon’s pentagram, if I haven’t yet mentioned, which is the symbol of the devil, Satan 666 (and how many letters does George have? now you’re getting my drift) the dragon serpent and the fallen prince of this world taken times two for the division between the base and the obelisk’s top, between George you with me and Washington and what do you get, you get ten, also the number of the Israelien tribes and so of the sons of Jacob, too, of Israel the goddamned IRS ATF kikes and then let’s say you go ahead and map that onto the calendar, say, the 365 days of the year and what do you get again, you get 105, if it’s not a leapyear, that is, which is the day that taxes are due, you get how it’s all connected with the Vatican Mafia and, if you weren’t aware, the day Lincoln died the same day after having been shot the night before, which…not only nailed and screwed and stuck with web and spit to the wall but also stuffed, stuck deeply into its cracks, between the burnt, ferruginous bricks, as messaging mortar, as all that holds the whole repose upright, keeps it from falling from its own grace: as a safe and secure depository for this madness, preventing it from becoming actioned into violence or humiliation upon the surrounding beach communities, exits north and south on the Parkway, just upstream, then down to the Delaware Bay. Far to the edge, a strip in white spraypaint, a thin listing stretch swathed entirely with naming displacements, interpolations of vowels:
