It takes a full lunation to recover from the procedure, from the subsequent infection, then from the infection of the infection, unto health again — which is, at heart diseased and failing, only the ideal of health, its hope and so consoling until the advent of what calamity dawns next — the wound yawning the distance between Ben and His body, its perfection, its willingness to go on; His mind or a mere tremulous semblance of recouped from the croup of medications, side effectual shvitzes and aches and languorous lolls, the lifting of the masked and measured fog, the recuperation of regret after this period of an occupation less fruitful, a surgical measure of selfpity recurring more virulently than ever through a moon of stay, inhome. For recovery, He’s housed in a northeasterly turret of the Great Hall, a towering growth from which you’d rescue a princess, clambering up the cascade of her hair, the platinum ash hung down as a shade from the sills of the windows of the height’s lone room, set with four small Oriental slits allowing incomparable views when the shutters aren’t on; a stay fully insured, it’s assured, Garden’s coverage complete to put His mind at what’ll have to pass with doping drug for ease, and then — once returned to the flush of youth, and it won’t be soon enough, once the ramifications of this operation have been explained, contextualized, psychologically massaged away as vital component of His therapy, then apologized for with sympathy and toys — license is His to shtup with impunity, they’ve promised, without much reservation: something to look forward to, they’ll tell Him something like that, another mutilation, sell Him a new life, just wait, sold, you’ll love what we’ve gone and done — the slice, the peel, the cut and its cauterization, the sutures, then the swelling, the numb dissipating from His waist on down, the extremity’s tingle, His feet, His toes, needling life in resistance to such ascetic anesthetic.
Though as for that heedlessly promissory promiscuity, that happiness is still weeks off, a moon away. An entire lunation spent in rolling moaning wake and dream and sleep, selenitically wasteful in flattened fit atop this luxurious bed commandeered from Long Island’s Hospital Under the Sign of Everything, last belief ’s Health Care Facility of the Year, lyingin state of the art this unit wired for comfort, programmed for calm, a multiadjustable slab, a posteurpedic grave. Demonically idle with the hands not allowed to stray below the navel’s hairy scar…Ben thinking just thinking like, what’s it all worth: with the branch bowed, its line ending with Him, familytree hacked to trunk; when He’ll rise weak in the knees and needs His testes hanging between His stumps like seedless fruit — He opens the shutters west and gazes out the window at the appletrees barren, chopped and stacked, the hollow knot, the cicatrix, barkveined cores, their wither a wrinkle past a sill…Stammbaum reduced to Stammsprout, hacked, hatcheted, axed, downsized to kneehigh and nothing after, uprooted, never to grow again; no, despite the dreaming, despite the time to dream, the opportunity to forget the day as night sleeps through the day only to reveal, if inspired by luck, an inner light, an intuit, a glimmer — He isn’t able to work up any image of a kid; any apparition of any offspring’s of Him, as His own immutable self, pure ego, an infantility incarnated as walking and talking already, fully formed as He was, is Him this taking after Him, showing Him the sand ropes, demonsrative, immersive; initiating Him the Other Him in the most deeply shushed rituals of Sloth, the most lazily hermetic initiatives of Waste, imparting the secret formulæ, the incantations and hidden practice: that Schlemielundshlimazelkeit (Ben’s Ben as an updated Faust, younger, impressionable, irreparably Semitic, handling poorly, making a fool’s trade: Himself for another, an even schlumpier heir of Schelumiel son of Simeon, Numbers II, loser of wars, mensch of schlimm Mazel), that whole brand of pathos, that copywrit inheritance of guilt — managerial, patriarchal, Godlike; after all, what else’s a father for…how would I know?
