Ben turns, staggers palms to foot the ice, falling to His knees, He rights Himself onIsland, to His house and weeping freely. Teary as the way’s uphill: snow drifted to the edges, the fringe toward Joysey a precipitate pack. Not alone, He’s escorted home by His newest lookalikes — flanked by Mada, and a novice whitebread operative known de novo as Frank Gelt — past the lingering smoke, lightning flashes, the bulby horns of moonmade beasts; constellating fame lost in darkness encroaching, just a plague or two too late; the lens of sky shattering at the sight, the spectacle, believe it. To the shore of Joysey and, across the Island, to that of Manhattan and further, the uninviteds, the hangerson, fans, and the citified curious disperse homeward on skis and snowshoes, across ice salted, ice sanded; those who’d hoped for a miracle, say, a resurrection, are frustrated — it would’ve only disappointed, or so they promise themselves, assure, their newest rabbis agree, they always do, we’re sure; them sloughing off slowly, laggardly, diasporating, together, apart, into a diasporation further, unnamed, without number, into futures individual as purposemade, exiles none of them could ever hope to understand.
Which, nu, doesn’t rule out Submission.
Steinstein, says an approved mourner here with the appropriate pass inside the Great Hall, a weeper who’s on every list — now, he was golden. A blank check. This Israelien, He’s difficult, a tough sell. Doesn’t know how to do a soundbyte. Unquotable! Unphotogenic! Or if not Him, His decoys — how much they make an hour? Anyway, there’s not much to like about Him, you know? Hard to relate to. Too strange. Never know what that schmuck is thinking.
Doesn’t matter what He looks like, says his plus one pewmate, what He smells or sounds like, what He feels or even tastes like — I wish the kid had ten hundred, ten thousand fingers to sell off. As relics, you follow? They’re going to make a killing!
Hymn, if nothing kills Him first.
In His house, Ben lies atop the table He was born on, in the diningroom, flopped on a shard of dark tablecloth slipping from its top; then upstairs He’s embedded, upstairs-upstairs, on the decks’ deterioration, a mattress perched aslant a pitch of snowsuccumbing roof — what the media characterizes as “a period of recovery” calming soon, a sobless nap, a little healing schlaf.
For seven nights through Shiva, Ben’s dead to the world. And, too, to dreams, which despite our ignorance of any revelation they might offer to interpretation couldn’t be more terrible than what passes for His life, what’s passedoff to Him as life passedover, the unlivable liveddown, the divine decree of un-lovable fame as proclaimed by prevailing silence. The sun dawns day through the windows, Manhattan nights without phosphor or fuss — everything having been declared dimmed for the mourning, His and theirs. His sisters gather around the table, calling to stall, while unfolding fresh accommodations of cloth and pad, edible inveiglements, sexplay suasions — but no one can reach Him, nothing can talk Him down. The moon remains through the mornings, the evenings find that ancient ancestral plate, cut by its silver, as empty as ever, while the window between it and the polished tabletop on which He rests becomes as a shroud veiled over the most dire vision imaginable — unthinkable, tomorrow; to frustrate even the most adept prophet, whose rest’s given over to the workings of His unimaged God.
