But you can’t think why anyone would want to hurt him, can you? Did Abel have any enemies, anyone with a pretext, even the merest inkless inkle of a text — did he leave you a note, I’m saying, or a letter with Adam? Anyone with a bitter chip, a grudge. Held against. A hatred, seething. You hear anything, you see anything? unstoppable Der’s shrieking. As if to say, it’s fine by us to fink, to inform, to rat and rodent around — after all, we’re all old friends here, aren’t we? Chaverim, habibi. Ben springs from His chair. Metal clatters to the floor, uneven concrete, negligently poured.
I don’t know anything! He’s yelling, nothing. What are you talking about? I wasn’t there, Adam was, and he’s my friend, mine and not yours, you wanted him to be, for us, I mean…mumbling, bends over His gut to retrieve the chair, unfolds the rust to sit down again, tilting the metal against the rocky wall — and as long as we’re here, I should ask you about my mother’s cooking; it’s gone downhill, and fast. If it’s not being poisoned, it’s either horrible or humbling.
Don’t avoid! and Der paces, strokes at his lip with a gunkgorged nail. What have we told you, Ben, haven’t we warned you? They haven’t. And anyway, who’s we is what He wants to say. Friends, Der says, they’re probably not the best idea. Especially now, what with the…he hesitates, this incident.
He adjusts an epaulet hanging askew; his medals clink like chains, binding him to his tone, his speech, this public life; he squints, always squinting, as if this incomprehension’s the fault of the without, not the failure of his within, anyone but him; then, making sure his chin’s still around to think with, to think from the mouth above, he exhaustedly sighs, begins in on Ben again.
Contradiction, babble, tripletalk.
Keep your distance, hold your tongue. Rub your stomach then pat your head.
It’ll make it easier for everyone, dismissed.
A referendum has been held, the table has been readied. Places have been laid. The guests have yet to be chosen. Our diningroom, the room with the longest and widest table, is still. Our island sinks deeper into borrowed creation, other time. As the fixed becomes unfixed, is given over to the fixed again, as one life in death is usurped by another, its mourning, the comfort found in concentration recedes — what once was community now is cramped, brotherhood gives way to resentment. Mistrust. Furtive eyes, with hands in pockets often not their own they stand apart. Picking them and noses. Against this insanity of existence, the exigencies of a situation out of all pockets and out of all hands, the clock still ticks — the sun’s face, blank and cold, setting behind the Great Hall, between immovable porticoes. Against the mystic absolute, the mundane must be strengthened. Despite death, it’s life we’re after. Its necessities. Becoming amenities. The schedule reigns. There’s work to be done. There is no chair at the head of the table, and so there is no head. To be left alone, one must first become oriented.
To the north, dim puffy women, former prostitutes and the metropolitan destitute dressed in tarnished overalls of pigskin emerge slowly from their lowslung, falling down cabins of corrugated tin, heaps, impediments to wind held up by the luck of a miracle; with hands gloved they wield their axes handled in bone, their blades sharpened on the sky. They’ve fallen the last trees of Staten Island, its Greenbelt, Moses Mountain high above the dump, having already deforested much of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan’s Park in advance of the Temple, for its timber hard and dead, too frozen to degrade. Then, with measuringsticks held between their teeth, one holds the nails the other hammers, banging slabs into coffins, sixpointed, sixsided, skidding them out onto the ice offIsland, where they’re stacked for future use: stored empty, topless; filling up with the burial of snow.
