O, do you feel it — there’ll be bodies on the golfcourse tonight (nine holes)! and heaped upon the diamonds, there to mark the fifty yard line…corpses benched in the piano practicerooms, piled into stacks in the dim of the library’s gym — to be winged away by women in white, first response angels, armandlegging their flock into the backs of covered sleighs, makeshift hearses; blinders on their ferocious horses, icehooved stallions stumbling insatiably across the dark face of the moon. In the Meat Commissary, a few boychicks getting their fill on the eve of the month, piling their plates high in anticipation of a first privation dawn morning, liningup miraculously to their mothers had they been alive for seconds at the saladbar, their imitation bacon bits spilling to the floor in an arrangement that can offer no interpretation…sniveling, pitfisted, prunemouthed and mucosal brats going under and blue then white in the heated pool during Free Swim — at meal, at prayer, at stool, asleep and awake, the Garden’s to be emptied, to be given over to the silent Edenic, a Paradise unpeopled; the Island to be purged of its natives, left for profanation, and that only by memory, a single lit house, the home of His heart. This month, Ben’s not allowed to leave without permission. Housearrest. Domestic murmur. With locks locked from the outside, alarm heavily armed. As of today, no more of His morning wanders, dawn spent rimming the shoreline, His prescribed perimeter exercises to keep down the weight; occasionally testing the ice: two, three tiny tentative steps out to wickworn melt, further, a bow then a crack, a brittle give…arm-in-arm with Steinstein, arm-in-arm their quick retreat. No more afternoon drives, putputt in carts for golf, two friends tempting the dusted roads, skidding into petrified underbrush, lowlying marcescence — ice the skeleton of trees, cage of bush, bone of shrub. No more evening sledding, piggybacked fast into roseate drifts. Smash. Draft. Snow lit from within. Inside seems always so inviting. Though cocoa’s left out hot on the table no longer. Thanks, Ima, same to you. The couches rest on the laps of the sofas. The carpets are the hides of clouds. Homebound, then, and with support staff otherwise occupied, Ben’ll keep the lights blazing past Curfew, candles rendered from the very fat of His boredom…
Illumination the sweep of a lighthouse, the diffuse hoots of tankers…an island of light atop an island of dark. Imposed. Two islands, two dials of a clock, telling the same different times. Trapped within, unable to escape, Ben’s Himself frozen, ossified in youth — as if spring for Him hasn’t yet arrived, and will never, as if He’s been ordered to gestate, remanded to the safety of hibernation, winterized torpor, the otiose sloth. On the radio, they’re airing prayers. And there’s nothing on the screen anymore quite worth it. Electrostatics. Name every flake, from the comfort of the blanket and the sill. Reflect in windowglass. Make to stroke the sky. The fridge, snowwhite, has been emptied, scooped; emergency numbers are still chalked on a blackboard propped against the kitchen wall, leaning away from the phone: sisters exts. 1 through 12, His mother the # key, His father unavailable; when He dials Israel, pressing * for speed, He gets his office message; there’s always a meeting, a mediation, arbitration or deps in the offing — should you have any questions or concerns, please call me, or my paralegal…alongside a calendar, the two ordering nights of the holiday upcoming circled big and dumb in marker, black. Then, a visit to the dentist, a return to the Doctors Tweiss. Occupied. All alone, and still He’s scheduled. Peace now, peace never.
As no God Who would allow a tragedy such as this can exist without a creation to believe in Him, and this despite the ferocity of His wrath; as no mensch can exist and can love without the love of those before him and their women, their salaries and time, they wouldn’t hurt, too; as today is inconceivable without a yesterday whose sins we must suffer the worst for only surviving — for there to be a last, it follows that there must first be a first: those seated in the back, those seated in the front, those standing, those who don’t want to sit, those without any seats left to their urge…the eve of this moon, this the uncovered Rosh Chodesh, which means the Head of the Month in a language no one speaks but everyone’s studying, this year fallen on a Friday night, a Shabbos going unobserved by one Abel Steinstein, cousin to Adam and brother to history, unformed young, smiley and slow — as he’s dead; as persuasive a defense against dereliction as any we’ve known.
