Witness, too, the perhaps anapocryphal Powers that Are sitting around a table topped in glass, rung with the orbits of sloshing coffee cups, water glasses, and the dew of their pitcher, scattered with stray tobacco, ashtrays overflowing with gray; overtired, occipitally headached and parched, they’re ringing galaxies of smoke around this room underground through the night into morning: Der and the Doctors Tweiss, seated alongside the theological legation of Abuya and the Nachmachen, a rowdy gang of insourced maturation experts, too, adjustment authorities, enablement profs, armchaired academicians roused from their laureate sleep, tenured doze, summoned away from tomes or midnight weaknesses for string quartets, pipe tamps, and whiskey snifts, vaunted pundits syndicated out the mouth, payper politicos, image consultants, brand managers, then an entire jury of Goldenberg Esq.s their dictaphones infundibularized in the flowers of their lapels, a stenographer and a notary public; they’re desperate to be anything but desperate, how now anything goes: gaudily attired gypsies, lisping mediums, psychics, séancers, crystalballers, and tablerappers…Ben’s at home still, sleepless in His bed and alone again after His nightly sister’s left, left Him and herself as His sister — too shockdistracted, onedge at threshold, wasted afraid with the door halfopened, halfshut and with the nightlight glowworm on; nothing to do but keep awake, which means you’re alive, living to grieve again another day. At who knows when too early, redrimmed moon the morning, a hulkingly anachronistic darkness enters the house, a trespass intruder with its own set of starry keys — it has to be a golem, it’s silent. It’s palming a flashlight, he is, its taped shem of a nametag indicating ownership,
Hamm taps the flashlight on His head and says it sounds something like downstairs, softly, get dressed…at least put on some pants.
I won’t beg — you’re coming with me.
A rousing, rustling later with Hamm waiting downstairs out of respect for modesty and even that that’s naked shame, atop a couch with his legs held apart widely and the flashlight between them ranging idly over the brick of the fireplace and the formica of the kitchen’s overhanging counters — a messmassive clattering of feet atop foil, snared on wrappers with a swish and a crunch, Ben hulking down the hall to the stairhead, trippingover the wash folded and stacked into its hamper thanks to He thinks Rubina, wasn’t there this morning…Him tumbling tush over head down the stairs, which are slotted, aired and so He’s rolling almost deliberately down them, His girth sticking Him in the spaces between each step, to bulge out from the slots, bringing Him to landing slowly, as if a gear turned upon the tooth of its paunch — clockwork, any mechanism of the darkened house, or yet another nightly appliance who knows what it does, reset. Landing reached, He raises a hand and gropes at the newel for support, misses and so leans on air to fall the descending remainder. Aright, Ben stands, tucks Himself in under His shirt, cinches His robe, which was His mother’s, over the bump, to face Hamm risen to stand at the foot.
About time, he’s holding out to Him His shoes, then dropping them on the floor and kneeling to His, genug.
I’ll help you with the laces.
