If you have a house, you are safe. If you have a house with a lawn, you are safer; though a house with a lawn with a fence is still safest, with neighbors all around to tell you what is yours and what is theirs and to affirm that nothing will ever be both of yours, or no one’s. But if you erect a fenced and lawned house on an Island, you have only created another Garden — and so there can only be another Fall. The familytree will be uprooted. Apples will turn to waxen wood, becoming mere ornament atop the table. A chart of the ABCs will burn. Plush dolls will lose their stuff to rage. Limbs torn from toys. And even the toys shall be allotted toys of their own to neglect. The hobbyhorse, thou wilt be lamed. LMNOPee. The crib has been moved against the window to make room for the bed, whose bedding matches the carpet, which is pink, brightened by the sun coming in past the gauzy tongue of curtain. A cedar chair cushioned in a fluff of white by the door, which even if closed is always open. A son who trusts in locks is no son of mine. A woman sits atop the chair, knitting a bootie big enough for the thumb of God; she whispers to her boy, a lullaby for the waking. Benny Cenny Denny Schlaf. If a baby lives in a room, that room is called a nursery, the knob to its door a willing nipple. Suck it in, suck it up, He’s our kaddish. Talcum breath, with hands of cream, clasped in benediction. Keep quiet. Tiptoe an inside voice, He’s sleeping.
Without bells, or their jingling toll — the sleigh that’d brought Ben back from night and forest, its horrid, haunted, enchanted, and terrible wood, it’s a flatbed knockaround workhorse that’d been too rundown to haul a century ago; its wood unvarnished and splintering, it’s parked now in the garage below; its horselike dogs impounded from the pines romping puppy in the backyard, amid the snow of the sandbox overlooking the ice and the fieldstone, the gley and the marsh, the warehouses, the fallen stockyards and trafficlights wavering slow yellow in the wind. Across the ice, dawn rises to a vantage upon Bergen and Communipaw Cove, silence rents to own; a railway terminal with its switches abandoned, the grids of the parkinglot like empty graves stood sentry over by leaning watertowers, the lowing overpass of the holy drainage ditch, baptism by the irradiating verd of sludge — the skyways arching over the fallen industrial gardens of Joysey as if they’re the rainbows of a million different covenants, each fulfilled only at the deadend of the asphalt and its prismatic stains of oil in the miracle that is the city, founded to last any Apocalypse, as secular as steel.
What a view, what a nightmare, Joysey and west, the Palisades; a mountain risen from the receding of the waters below, only to be frozen by those above, that crystalline breathless sustenance of window — glassing the gaping mouth of house and, too, the unspoken dreams of those who live within. Who lived. Understand, this is how we once spoke of dream, both as a visitation of the night and as the mark we hoped to make upon the forehead of the day. Of what did I dream now not a concern of the prophets but of the failures among us, those who would never own to a home. Above the window there’s a banner, cardboard, one end of which hangs low to the sill from a tack that’d lost its dig into wall. Mind it. In retrospect, this banner reads like crank prophecy, as if the first words mumbled after a darkened sleep.
As the sun makes her face, the woman rises slowly, failing to countenance a litany of joint ailments from the weakly kneed chair — don’t get up for her sake; no, really — she’ll be fine. His mother, with her dress taken in too tight under the breasts, the wig askew and all too black, makeup smeared as if yet another face fallen from the face she leans to light His own, to kiss Him awake upon the lips.
Come downstairs, the hallway calls in a voice, if not hers then whose — it’s brunch.
