I was born, came over here, you wouldn’t understand, no one ever does…worked selling luggage, suitcases, trunks out on Orchard Street, I made what I made then married and got old. After I smashed my hips, my wife moved us down here to a facility, relocated was what she’d say. I went to a shul, I went there to daven, you say synagogue and pray; Shalom’s its name I forget, Anshei Bergen County, my wife liked to sit up front where she could see the rabbi, hear the cantor, the chazzan I’d’ve said if he hadn’t been so terrible, but me I stood in back. One night, this stranger comes over to me and asks if I have a meal, I say no but he insists. I come, I sit, I go to the toilet, the bathroom, here…an intention just to visit, to stop in, say Shabbat Shalom then quiet, let his wife do all the talking. His wife, if he couldn’t please her better to become a chair and die of splinter. From her, how he became habituated to keeping not only the seat down but the lid as well, his head. Felice, she’s the one they came to like — the Israeliens inviting her back week in week out with him lugged along as baggage, furniture delivery. Felice, the one they liked to ess a fress with, to talk hands with and to; the one they always asked to stay later whenever he would ask to leave. And how every day here since has felt like Shabbos, this bathroom more and more like home. His last how he knows it, feels it deep among his issues both various and vascular. A sit eternal, with the feet already dead: ten corpses cold in ragged socks heavied with his shvitz. A rack of tortured washcloths, a counter with a sink, brightened with flowers, who knows what brand they’re called; a mirror draped in towels. To find nothing new under the overhead light: floors are white, shoescuffled. In appearance, he thinks, this bathroom the same as it’d been previous to its recreation, its resurrection, always, though how different in its feel: othered, unsettling. It’s not the fanned air, the pressure required to relieve; neither the worry for an emergency of tissue — amply stocked under the sink, twoply as if earth and sky, like waters; anyway, there’s nothing yet to clean, no need for Ben to haul down to the basement for any rolls of more, chaperoned only by His fear — the hum of the ventilation as sudbued as ever, pitched as dulcetly as its previous whirr; the same gurgle of the tank; the light, unobtrusive. It’s that he’s been revealed, or so it appears, a voice, a visitation — whoever that is with the footsteps flatly thudding. Feigenbaum sits with his elbows on his knees. Mortification, a birthright — and such a pain in his bowels, his head lapped in his hands.
O Felice! how fare the toilets of thy heaven; enlighten me as to the quality of the thrones of my Father — are they not warmed by the breath of stillborn babes? is the paper not pressed of the wings of angels? is their flush not the flow of the rivers of Eden — the Pishon and Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Hudson and the East? Why not accustomed to such by now, this life lived in hide, a locking squat, this hurt on pain of passing, the unsettled intestinal of his punished gut, the lower glower the inheritance of generations of persecutory kashrut since wiped from the tush of the earth. That and he’s hemorrhoidal, too, yet another intolerance (impotence), incontinence once even, never again, you name it, ever since he’d been weaned from his mother — out of the womb and into the toilet, a stallguest, to become an intimate of a leftover world. But it’s more than that or revelation by unnamed others, the rebuke of footsteps, and their thumping voice — it’s what they have to say: hot air up from under the draft of door, word whispered around of a plague returned, more virulent than ever, and adapted to resistance, and so resistant to resistance, strained into power, mutated beyond all conscience, made only to destroy; the gossip of a Steinstein dead, corroborated by the loud cries and whimperings of a lately disconsolate host — enough worry to rip a hole in the silvery lining of even the ironmost stomach, tract life through then grunt. Heavy figs of hairy branch and bough dangle over the edge of the seat. Feigenbaum scratches at what itches. He shifts, restless, unease, a tense, and almost…there are limits, breathe there must be. To think — a thing this large through a thing this small, this you didn’t have to tell Ben’s mother, you don’t have to tell his wife, they know from passing, dead down below: forget heaven and follow the pipes. Almost…but why still this pishy push and pull, what could be left inside: empty, he feels, he’s nothing, the ash of ash and tired, sustained only upon the shoedust and that overhead light. Partibirth. Stale air. Stillshat. He’s passing his innards, must be — his drecky, wasteworn soul.
Promise me…it’s the mumbling fan, you’ll never seek me out.
Promise, humbling, and I’ll remember to you whatever you want.
