Ben’s escorted up, through the excessive doors, which have to be edged open by the harnessed tug of a unionized team who pause every exertion or so to mob Him and His massing twelve bodyguards unveiled, Ben’s rebuffing lookalikes accompanying, for autographs they won’t grant, and miracles He can’t. His breath comes short and private. Up a flare, as if a tongue on fire, a redcarpet leading into the outermost courtyard that feels as if it might melt under His stride — is already melting, squishing underneath with each step, a seepage; the entire space behind Him, in front, under and above, hewn of that outlandishly modified ice that seems as if it, too, must return to a form of water, of air, to nothingness, forgotten, only to pour out new histories to be decided upon the next hardening, the cycle coming — a world destroyed with its faithful then flowing only to solidify all over again, reformed. Ben’s led with His hands out in front of Him, to touch, to feel, to mold: Him to grope through openings forever made and unmade, perpetually unfixed, past walls hung with the fresh flayed skins of test sacrifices, flapping animal tatters, dampened imageless coverings and curtains in a knotted wash, a fraying whorl: through halls left unfinished in holy negligence, secreting the odd ornament or gingerwork, molding, swirls, whirls and flumes, flows and risen waves, Him flailing past candleboats, votivelike buoys, copper basins, casks and flasks and censers, then at the far reach of an inner courtyard, a tarp-shrouded, twinesecured package resting upon a wooden pallet — the Ark of the Covenant, on permanent loan from the Vatican, courtesy of the Pope, Pius Zeppelini. It feels as if this whole edifice around Him, behind Him, in front, above, below, is about to collapse with His progress, to drain away in His passage, swirling Him filthy as profane, profaning, toward the gutter and the sewers, to gurgle out to ocean. Dizzying. And inspiring of guilt that His presence might signal such disaster. A shofar blast, an avalanche. Three short toots followed by one long moot, a tekiah to sound destruction. Ben tries not to breathe, concentrating Himself on following the carpet. Through another momentary gateway, He’s entering the Innermost Courtyard: full of drift, a vastly unsullied spanse — expansively fictile, a world of snow and flake, of gusting dust, germing in white and clearer, to a bluish glassiness, suffusing…the weather here, as it appears this enclosure has its own, is not fall but the scrim of fall, its skin’s fall, this sheer air paling, and then again vivid, revelatory in changing skies, prismatic but always pellucid, like a piacular rainbow whose only color is light in every shade. Set against the furthest wall, another set of doors, also steel though these significantly smaller than those of His initial entrance, now requiring His stoop slid down a flight of stairs — there, under the ice, Der stands decorous, impeccably impatient, leaning against the arch leading to the Holiest of Holies.
Inside’s laidout like a synagogue, a frozen shul grand and heavened with a divinity of outside light, sun and moon; its arched entranceway a soar, then the stadiumed sanctuary tapering, fluming itself intimately, into a modest front: a raised platform topped with pulpitry twinned at opposite ends, facto-rynew still in their swaddles. Between the pulpits, there’s an iron bank vault with combination lock, coming covered with a veil of its own, the ark of the Ark, the hold of the Law. A ruck of work rattles this holiness; it’s whisperish, hurried — this quick, cool chatter of labor, indistinct, as if a weather holding words inside its womb; such air keeping of secrets, freezing them, stilling Ben’s own tongue, to lick silently at His veil. Der escorts Him down the stairs past tiers of pews presently halfinstalled, their auxiliary aisles filled with scrap, cedarwood planks and troughs of coruscant nails. Upon the walls of the shul, scribes aloft in slings from scaffolds and with picks and hammers are rapping into that forgiving substance the names of the Affiliated dead — those of New York’s greater metropolitan region — to eventually, annularly, wind their way around the space, from floor to limitless sky: a miraculous racket, in that it doesn’t bring the house to fall, and they’re only on the B’s…
A hunch rises from a middle pew, a rare woman, if old and dumpy — she’s a yenta, a matchmaker, don’t hold it against her.
There’s silence, as the offer’s His or Der’s — she’s been kept waiting for over an hour.
It’s about time. Who would say this, if not her?
How long were you going to make me wait? Or this?
