From the glass atop the sharp rise of His accommodation, Ben’s stepping past the kingsized serviced with two macaroons of His own, served up each to a pillow, how thoughtful; their grease as if leeching His shadow across the eggshell carpet, deckward: the open and wide desert just a fall past volition, a gust flings open the door to screen midnight’s sky. The stars have been annulled in favor of the lights burning below, downed to the lampposts in deference, due respect dimmed to the blinking cold and the signs. Enumerate that lower stellular, then its sands gardened, too, and may that number be the wondrous sum of thy kinder — no way, you got the wrong me. Why should He marry her, how could He, why would He, know what a decent reception for onethousand maybe friends and no family costs you these days — it’s His money, not that it’s His to spend, but…emotionally, He means; know what kind of expectations are involved, what failures might lie in wait under every placarded table, what curses can be writ in the cards? Ben steps over the threshold, through the air, into sky. And there, at the greediest, pyramidal pitch of His occupancy: His head itself a greenish eye appraising, allseeing, seeking value unlidded, unlashed atop worth…Exile — the desert endless and endlessly unforgiving; utterly foreign, yet if only in its ideal, an inheritance, too: this desert the wilder younger brother of an easterly nowhere, the desert that formed Affiliation, years before civilization, ages before culture — an unpromised land; and, at its furthest western edge, another ocean, which promises to be purer than that that lapped us over here those generations dead long ago. Arise, then go down. Don’t let the wind hit you on the way out. Deserts have this way of turning people to prophets, sheep into shepherds, making rules into exceptions that then grow bushes of fiery beard and strike miracles from the faces of rocks.
