Midnight, the house’s second floor. Upstairs-upstairs, Ben’s standing on the deck. In a robe, with nothing underneath, and slippers, His mother’s. He’s facing the ice, toward the flame, a fiery pillar, a piling pyre. He feels at the rickety railing: a suicide, He’s thinking, up and over the edge, why not…dayeinu, which means Enough, His father would say, I’ve had enough, throwing up his hands, I’ve had it up to here, His mother would have said, then she’d raise a palm to her neck as if to slit herself to peace, a knife she’d been halving recipes with, a stirring spoon with which to scoop out the pregnancy of her stomach: suicide…an idea, He’s thinking nights now the only idea, like Masada, that windowless mountain out across the ocean, a last stand against the unsighted; the Island pushed up by tectonic pressure, tidal force, risen to a rock towering above the barren city; Ben atop, the FBs, too, waiting out their day a breath below the sun, a last gasp below the blade of the moon…days casting the lots of an earlier season, sharpening their own daggers on the summit, fasting themselves into heart, and sleepless, they’re starving, thirsty, lonelier than dead; the stars toll, the PA sounds from behind the clouds, the house’s intercom quakes the foundations of the sky: Curfew…them to plummet down the slope, to break the fast of their bones. Atop the deck opposite Liberty, one of two givingout from the room of His parents high above the house and the Island, He’s fixated on the flaming horizon, and there on an assembly of forms in every color never His: black, brown, beige, yellow a migrant red, the Kush just following their orders, as always, but now issuing them, as well, as if a Law given over to themselves in a million languages echoing equally to Him as they all mean the same, which is nothing — work; they’re rolling the dead out over the freeze, gathering them into shrouds of massive white, snowballing corpses turned over and around again in a wheelingly reeling processional over the ice thin and thinning thanks to their fire out to melt the furthest shore, a flame of bodies cracking the freeze under its heat, the funereal weight, crushed under the gigantically cyclical, cycling roll of disposal, to fall them hard into sharding spring, dispersing, down into the depths.
A slight splash — call it a clock, a serving plate once kindergarten art & crafted by Judith with hands and with twelve numerals, then hung upon the wall of the one and only kitchen; a clepsydra, the hollow drip of His parent’s whirpool Israel said as Hanna’d said jacuzzi: each hour, every minute, twice a second a burned body’s dropped through the ice as ash, its noiseless plash marking a slight on time…call it a calendar: the bodies daily stacked in a bonfire like the blackened boxes on the page of the month hung on the kitchen’s wall below that white plate’s shadow, which is round and without end. As has become tradition, an official count will be given come morning: a mechanically whistling voice, distorted, distorting; what souls remain stumble to inspection, of themselves, by themselves, from awake nights worrisome to fumbling to feet, with a pretense to having slept an optimistic dream — for appearances, their own sanities, calm, what sake not or better; they try to wake their neighbors, their bunkmates, the stricken barracks. Sons and stepsons and grandsons, SonSons, halfbrothers and nephewcousins. Attention, good morning, there are now X of you left. Why. Zzz. Have a nice day, you thousands, you hundreds, you holy tens. Pleasanries, don’t mention. Attention, there are now only a handful of your kind left alive. A thumb that makes a mensch. A prophesizing finger pointing fault down the throat, to belch up a burning answer: who didn’t know me, who wouldn’t. Have a great weekend. Shabbat Shalom.
