Don’t give me that stuff everyone’s a winner — that you can save for your fans: it’s crazy, you’re smarter than that, even you…without guards, without guns, no rental medical, no beeping blinking disturbance.
God, he says, the deals, the fame and the Name, anything for the asking, it’s yours,
They rock, until Ben to tell the truth wants to stop, wants to give up on this shuckling but He keeps on despite, goes on in spite, and so they sway together even faster, as if davening in unison, as One — as if in an attempt to merge, through singularity to save themselves from fire, the fiery ice, the Angel of Death…then, tiring and slowing, making lips, lying to eventually sleep, neck lain over neck and wounding with a kiss — to be sundered apart just past midnight. Paschal silence, lightning from the furthest white of the eye. Outside there are stormings of glass. As has become the practice of every eve plagued with their survival, the blood of imported lambs has been daubed upon the doorjambs, dripping a redemptive red from the mezuzahs why not, who’s it hurting. The welcomemat a puddle.
Ben’s borne through the fence’s gate, up the winding slates to His house, on an Infirmary stretcher turned litter, sagging overhead; carried away by the Kush in a leaving difficult for all involved save the left for dead. Steinstein’s Angeled away to Tweiss autopsy then storage, iced in the overflow easterly Morgue, the afterlived warehouse of his Father as its only son. Fullup of recent stock, the bodies of the last week or so, inventoried, ritually prepared, have been cleaned out toward a clearing adjacent to the further dock, twelve bodies frozen southward to the tottering shed of the drivingrange, northward to the ravaged putting green, flagged offlimits, limitlessly: body after body atop body, glommed along the fence of His property at Island’s western edge, just inland from the ice’s slip to the shattered hole, its water and the oceanfloor, the fundament of shadows — the descent of the last before the last, the first before the last, the birthing of an end: spring’s, winter’s, winter’s winter, theirs and as theirs, ours; even panic having been displaced, with Ben left alone in, of all rooms and voiding spaces, the basement no longer to be feared.
To need a rooting now, this firmness, to know His place at the footing of things, with nothing left to dread. Quickpoured black concrete. And so His mooning around these left boxes and trunks, these tapes and unscissored twines: Hanna’s forks shedding tines, knives dulling mirrors, spoons bearing bowls flattened to tables, handles rooting out so far as to become unknowable in whatever their useful, drawerward ends; heirloom sederplate emptied of egg and shank, of green and salt dipped twice, an order confused in this exodus, this exile to the Pharaohnic storehouse, Ramses’ granary holding as its only ware the sand of our Joseph’s dream; the World to Come up from the basement to save us from famine, from desert’s thirst, the privations of this, our latest diaspora, failed in that it was only temporary, seasonal though skimped on light and heat — the sun’s illumination coming in through the windows set at the rise of the earth’s backyard lighting the beneath from its always dark into a dim known that can only disappoint, a worrying mundane…this Passover also bringing the last guests of the Island’s guests to crowd the sky: their cold smoke from daytime’s cremains, from the snuffing of an ever stranger night.
