To sleep here always, forever in your own bed — your childbed, your deathbed; to rise up and lie down day after night in His own room as if in the very house He’d been born in, on its table a floor below. And that it is. Joysey or near enough, still within its jurisdiction, the judging throw of a stone from a strong hand, of an arm outstretched to Manhattan and its water iced. To wake always and run to Ima, which is what He would’ve called Hanna, to hug at her breasts and kiss upon them nipples, never again. Forget any finding His father already left for the office, Israel in depositions early, high in Midtown, trying every courthouse from Centre Street down to Camden, a dreaded arbitration in Secaucus; out to try a client in Coney Island seeking to sue Berlin for nightmares at midcentury…then, His sisters — never again to tug their hair in a row down the hall: I’ve got your nose, a quarter from His ear. Home is where the heart is, it’s said, and there imprisoned, criminal, beaten. The doors to the outside have been locked. Ben lies in His bedroom, and even sleeping aches. In what seems His house to the final detail, the most thoughtful ornament, the voweled adornment last. Down to the lost sock strewn His room, His nursery’s what they’d called it, His parents, it should be, should’ve been, way back Turnpike to the Parkway south and exits further — a bedroom that’s His and isn’t, relocated a mile or so north of the Great Hall at the edge of the Garden, an Island ringed in ice, with a sheet of freeze paving from here to shore in reflection of the appled lights.
Ben’s slept naked, His Klansmensch uniform’s been washed, bleached of vomit, dreck accumulated, has been dried, pressed, is hung in one of Israel’s garmentbags, draped over the hutch of the desk too crowded with clutter to work: birthcertificate, photos for a miscarried passport — this uniform the only estranging item, the only touch not to be found in the original remade.
All of a sudden, hazily, halfway between eyes shut and up, there’s a hold of alarmclocks, thirteen of them ringing halls at once — and so, finally, to rise Himself to silence. His sisters’ schoolday warning, to begin their waiting for the coldest shower. Ben’s shvitzy, feels like oy. He rolls around, grinds the sheet of a foreskin into the bedsheet, fumbles for the glasses He’d been born with. He finds them, stumbles out the door toward the sirens, hanging a right and into the bathroom first, His and His alone intended, even if His sisters would still be alive and requiring an emergency toilet, in which He proceeds to wipe eighteen minutes from the earth — life’s ritual already, routine. He pisses salutiferously, to greet the day with health, this steaming stream, to foam wild drops on seat and floor the purest white. To shower in an excess of scald, hot water over then lukewarm, to towel Himself; hot water the one true luxury in the Israelien house: how they’d bought a dysfunctional heater from a relation, Hanna’s, an uncle; with fourteen then fifteen before one in the house, pleasurable showers had been miracles, like sunrises — you had to get up early, or else outgrow them. To the mirror, now, to shave the face of its growth. He slices Himself, wads, washes. Adolescence is to remain with Him, a shadow’s shade. Pimples congregate, constellate as acne. He airs His pores to puss then sucks His fingers. No shame in that, no loss — all will have stubbled back by nighttime. He doesn’t yet scrub His teeth, abstains from flossing — that’s left for after brunch. What’s cooking, what’s not: there’s another noise from downstairs, between the smashing rings, the ding ding bells, an oven’s timer’s rattle…
And that burning smelly taste, a crash of tongue in mouth.
