To report, what now…a disaster in progress, natural or not, a flood fatidic, another postdiluvial deluge: not the tenth plague, but the first before the first, Ur unnumbered because unknown as plague to now — ten generations after the Adam before His Adam, with the world begun already destroyed; no rainbow shall assuage. Then, days and nights to soften…the furniture soggy, sagging, broken: credenza floating tchotchkes, snoglobes and mugs, glasses and lamps of glass, coffeetable buoy sloshing with milk and sugar and coffee, books of photographs, albums, and books; oceanically unpaid bills, appliance warranties and instruction sheets, catalogs and magalogs; an operator’s His mother onduty, holds the unit from her ear, to save herself from the whispered fearsome kvetch — pitching into a scold’s geshray; then, informing Him with excessive patience, forced maternal reassurance, that assistance should be arriving momentarily, that grownups are on their way she means and, maybe, He should attempt to find a mop. Like it would be helpful. That, or perhaps you could bail yourself out with your mouth. But where would a mop be. If I were a mop. Ben flails across the room in thought. A broomcloset, or laundryroom, apparently. Who would’ve thought, which hall. Though such situation requires plumbing not a polish. His sisters arrive shortly thereafter — just here to cleanup, don’t mind us — which is discombobulatingly risky because all this’d been Wanda’s job. Her responsibility, this swabbing, and would’ve been this bailing with buckets out windows. Angels arrive a wing’s breath later, to remove the body; floating the corpse, in a wet procession, each to a steering limb and then, his head, guiding Feigenbaum out the opened door, and with them every sip of filth remaining, stopped, to tide: their fall down the stoop, to drain the house to dry.
And so it might be appropriate, with everything relative and all Einsteins now dead, to engage in what’s been called the pilpulistic: to pull on our beards, to tug at our locks, to split hairs as befitting us lesser creations, sundering God Himself, Who parted the Sea of Reeds only for us to cross over into the wilderness, still barren of our freedom. They’ve begun their dying, their relentless death, of all days on the Sabbath, the first day of this the first moon, which is known to us as Nisan, the moon of the night of the death of Abel Steinstein: a night different from all other nights, as it’s said, and yet, at least according to official Garden recommendations, to be kept distinct from Night, too, which is the capitalized end of Creation, dawning upon the destruction of the entire darkened world. Over the mornings ensuing, the issue of days as generations stillborn from the womb that is Shabbos, the toll rises to the rarified pitch of the sky, a hollow bell
A final flush, then, and the bathroom’s left empty…its door shut, locked forever forgotten, struck from the blueprints, forbidden from memory: offlimits, closed for the cleaning, slippery when even thought of, if — Feigenbaum among the one’s too many lost upon the altared third of the month, those thousands of them, these tens, the hundreds losing their daily shadows and with them, their nightly lives, to the lighting then darkening of this moon passing through, this moon passing over, waxwaning its judgment, as if a selfeclipse; the remnant crescent of his body remanded first to the (easterly) Morgue, for processing: the cataloging of his personals, not much, blood drained and body cleaned to corpse, his photograph’s taken, his prints inked, and name entered into a ledger; only then, he’s hauled over the ice for commendation to the waters below.
