These faithful surviving, they’re the staff butchers, the Garden’s onsite ritual slaughterers, their profession in their olden lives as well as that in these their new, not for long — though Shochets is the term they prefer, just as their fathers had preferred it and their fathers before them, on forever. Strictly glatt, lately they’ve been slaughtering as never before, in a blind and crazy, heedless, needless rage, as if their work, which is never finished — there will always be carcasses to carve — would serve, but how, to postpone the imminence of their own death; as if by providing sustenance to their kind, they themselves would be sustained, would outlive those they’ve lived to feed. As if by exacting the punishment that is the animal, they would be spared its fate. As if by killing, they would not be killed. Here in their matching aprons, retrieved on arrival from an unlaundered drape on hanger steaks, their paunches swaddled underneath them, hanging from the ribs like swollen tears, they work in a frenzied lust. Despite the fast — meat their life, the making of meat from death their only purpose: trimming fat stored upon the soul for lean years until last Xmas, its ingathering to the Island and this, their privileged employment, their slitting of throats to painless end. Butchers as their fathers before them were butchers, they might be brothers, too — fraternal in their flaw, which is only the quorum of their flaws, a bloody congregation. And though it’s impossible to ascertain just how many of them there are: they’re always coming and going, schlepping and slicing and slitting and bestially blooding — our sages hold that it takes all of them, however many of them there are, or were, to constitute what we would regard as one whole, intact person: as each is deformed, if grossly, lamentably, is mutilated, if only slightly, in his or its own way, uniquely and that, it’s interpreted, it might be this very mutilation that makes them family, that renders relationship to loss, conferring kinship upon such senseless blemish. Unsightly, but they can’t hear you. One’s missing a thumb, another a forefinger, another a middle, another a ring, yet another a pinkie; a knife dropped from up on high severs a thumb toe, a cleaver fallen middle toes, a band or circular saw deprives the foot of pinkies; one’s missing a right hand entire, another still a left, both hackedoff at the wrists, scarred purple and without hair. Occupational hazards. Condolence them not, though, they’re suitably insured. One’s missing an arm to the elbow, the stump of a stub, another to the nubby shoulder, a missing arm entire; one’s without a nose, in the way of risen sever, another lacks an upper lip to lick in concentration on the following blow, his other then, poorer a lower; two have eyes poked out in the disposition of one and one, workplace sacrifices, spurts over the low counters and cases hewn from ice. Know, also, our scholars say, that they cooperate, make do. That the one who’s missing his righthand works alongside the other that’s missing his left; that that other without an ear works alongside another lacking the ear opposite — more than each compensating for the other, for yet another, collaborative in their sin. It’s that they work, ultimately, as one organ, as a unified entity, a mass of single mind and purpose: a huge monstrous slaughterer, murdering away for the sake of the multitude; working despite the horror and hurt as routinely, as placidly, as the carcasses hang from their pitiless hooks, as if pendulums to clocks, swinging their bloods out of the bursting walkthrough — outside: an overflow freezer laid to leak its hold onto the Hudson’s ice, red currents flowing out to slake the bay.
And then, to the west, which is the secular directional, the way of the fallen, out at the furthest edge of the Island, marking the nearest, anchoring preserve of our float from the vale of Joysey and its rim of oncegreenery — the State Park blanketed by ash, hacked picnictables scavenged by locals for their wood: the fuel of Hoboken the fences of Weehawken…portapotties toppled, swingsets mournfully rusted, the playgrounds’ hanging ropes noosed, twisted into hideous knots, their worn tires the nests of malevolent storks — the view from Ben’s house, His parent’s, His bedroom above.
On the third of the newest month, Feigenbaum sits, downstairs still, has survived.
