Ben presses His veil up against the window tinted with weather, which passes for air thickly viscid, the limo passing through clouds, muscled intestines giving way to the cranial gray, bloodied iron, lifecold steel, metal limbs this rusted meat…the city once dead just now being reborn, hulking in the effort of its breaths ever higher above the grossest of streets: glaring heights of lipidic marrow, vertical artery, glassy and gelatinous organs peeking through insatiable tumult; fogflecked the digestive din, pulsing penetralia oozing light…the neon clot of billboard and sign; the mucilaginous asphalt, the strut, truss, and trestle; millions of links to the chain around Manhattan, binding this island of the Island in coils of burbling, gurgling cloud the limo bursts into air, as mere puffery, nothing.
Welcome, Ben. New York, it’s about time. This is what you’ve been missing, what you’re missing still, blind to all this, witless. The city of the windows of the house, the city of dreams and day, the world He’s been waiting for through glass and air for days and nights, and still denied Him, the city incarnated previously only through glimpsed Garden views and bunkbedded gossip, the memories of surviving FBs then dying, now dead; this city the repository of all dreams, and of dream itself, a holy of holies, a blessed covenantal ark of two of every kind and more, too many — each, though, an unknowable island unto itself, floating purl in the air on the sea on the earth itself floating within an emptiness, an Island alone in the universe as cause of its own belief, belied, its wisdom shrouded in distance, remove, exile, cloudbank, smoke and ice: each one of us is an Island, nothing too original about that, but each of one us is an Island with a city atop, building a city atop; a mensch building his city ever higher and forever, a huge high world of a city in the head of every one of us, shored in with skin and wharved with bone. All the lanes and towers and scrapers and panes, their scale’s been known, has been registered, at least suspected, of nights and days immemorial and insomniac through the windows of the bedroom of His parents — O but the people, Other people, their lives, that doing going life, that’s what’s worth it, that’s what would’ve riveted: people wanting and needing and loving and losing; it’s noble, this wanton heedless loss; it’s incredible, this loveless need. Though they seem not people but animals, hopeful beasts, hoofing and snouting out their crude existences, stuck in the mud of their own minds, their mindlessness, seeking only to satisfy the barest, the basest — survival: the awareness that they are, they recognize that, and that they must be — that, too; and then, that their purpose is that they must keep on being until, and in the face of it All, which is a thousandeyed, a millionmouthed, with too many ears to pierce into servitude, and too many feet to knowingly toe. It’s amazing to some, how humbling, debasing, destructive if one isn’t strong; others think it grand, life in this bestial city, that it’s exciting, ennobling, inspirational even. God bless them, God save them and keep them — they know not what they do; they know not who they are, only if. For them, for now, that’s enough.
