On the toilet, in its spare bathroom down the hall to the door to the garage and subsisting this entire time on breath. Only groans. Noises that hallway to Ben on the wind…these singly plyed moans being questions, how to answer: Dad, where are you, how are you, Israel, Yisroel, Aba Aleichem. He resists, and is silent, makes instead to follow the origin of the echo, its whispering that ends in the blackened brick of the fake fireplace with shuttered flue, in the familyroom, unknobbed from the speakers of the screen; a voice in the livingroom, from the den, as if the words spoken — words that sound to Him like names, His Aba’s, Ima, sisters, PopPop, DadDad, Zeyde, Saba — are only the manifestation of prophetic delusion; as if they’re the words and names and memories only these links in weedy, rusted chains, sent out to bind, tongued to noose around His neck and legs and arms to drag Him down, submission — don’t look for me, an origin, a source…the chain says hissing its way around His waist and around again to knot at navel, as navel, you’d better not if you know what’s good.
Are you God? He asks.
Are you?
To be drug by the voice out of the kitchen then to the stairs, hesitation whether up to the bedrooms, or down to the basement: how Ben fears being taken down there, despite the assurance of any bind, curiosity’s hogtie — down there who wants to know. It’s always beyond, though, this mourning, as if otherly dimensional, a hidden call coming from the stairs and further left past the porch with its brittle wicker, two rockingchairs without cushion out of season, a low table topped with shells Liv’d found at the beach that summer once, and a sofa, which now all seem made of braided strands of flowingly immobile ice, screens for the windows to be put up to give air to spring still propped against the furniture as if windows in the negative, unyielding nothingnesses, hard voids as black as holes; then, at the end of the hallway the door stripped of stain, the welcome mat, Shalom, the entrance to the triplewide garage. Three doors along the hallway to the right. To open one a linen closet, the folded cloths, the deaths of moth, clean and bright and fresh. Another, further along the hall the closet of dirty linens, balled placemats and coverings, heaps of messy drools. And then, to try the door to the last right against the wall and the end of the hall with its descent three steps down to parking. A static shock, it’s locked. Jigglejiggle, knockknockknock.
It’s not my fault, the voice says as if softer and further away than ever…I’m sorry.
I asked to stay here…I told them, it’s better for my condition.
First floor last bathroom, his accidental discovery that Sabbath, that Shabbos, the last and just in time, tenks Gott…an emergency, and to think of what could have been: a trickly blush upon his crotch, Felice his wife Israel’d always forget her name would have said a shame, he’d have said a Shanda; an embarrassment: to have spilled his filial fill to further arabesque a plush rug of the Orient warming the tiles of the hall. Here, Feigenbaum lives as if he’d asked for it. Too late for remorse, turned to rage in the full flush of his senility: possibly depressed, though lacking clinical confirmation, he squats. Woodpaneled, lilymirrored, hung with a kitschily antiquarian map of Jerusalem framed in metal, purchased by Hanna at an auction to benefit charity, the synagogue: kinder without stomachs, cancer of the conscience, the birth defect that is guilt, converted to regret. Feigenbaum, he hadn’t even wanted to accept the invitation, standing, the welcome openarmed, but didn’t know how to say No, which naming word was first spoken on the eighth day of Creation — Eve to Adam, God to…
