A ding, the elevator doors open with Him about to step inside but instead He’s crowded back and out by more Bens piling out, too many, too much even for Him who’s been Himself all His life — what little of life there’s been, both personally with regard to fulfillment and, also, speaking of time. Huffpuff Ben goes to find the door to a stairwell in case of divinely intercessory fire and there in the hall tries at the handles and finds one unlocked and so opens it, He’s sorry: inside the room and sitting on a twinbed’s a mensch, a nearmensch, an almost there, close but not quite, who he looks though — superficially, the suspicion’s only a feeling — just like what His twin would’ve been in reflection, in a mirror hutched on the opposite desk; he’s naked from a hotwaterwasting, fogmirrored shower now drying and draping himself for modesty’s sake with a pair of tzitzit that barely hides the wound of a circumcision that just has to be recent. To this particular Benjaminite’s credit, even his squeal retails real — Him fleeing from the sound of His own voice, through the hall down to its end trying all the doors along the way, locked jimmies locked, then tries the last, the one whose name is Stairs lettered in the holy tongue, too, across its window in red, shoulders into its give to tumble down a flight to a landing whose door opens back into the lobby. But it’s an emergency exit, rigged, wired, and so above there’s an alarm ringing like slots ping in zeros of sound, an openmouthed, untongued everymensch for Himself, no one gets out of the desert alive — people flinging aside even panic, fleeing themselves as one self that is Himself, too, to lobby exits lit and conspicuous, blatant and yet too narrow to accommodate such padded passage as if the very openings, the needle’s eye gateway, to Heaven Itself, which is bright and cold and pavedover with tar…Ben approaches the desk and without really asking Himself what He’s doing asks for a vehicle, demands as if with all the credit in the world behind Him anything with wheels and like now.
And what’s your name, sir? the ancient, fisticfaced hop wants to know.
And the mensch laughs a scar until Ben gives up Jacobson, Esq., with what room I forget…no, #108, the number of the room from which He’d just been evicted by ululant force. The hop sobers professional as the sprinklers rain down on his head and the water gathers in the cistern bowled between his prognathic lower lip and his gums. He nods Him out with a you’ll have to speak with the valet through the revolving doors through which He spins planetarily, revolting around and around, then finally outside and dizzied, lit and alarmed into night, its vastness human and waged: starryvested valets at their stands, amid intricately stranding constellations of velvet, webs suspended fine and strong between tarnished poles. Police arrive as wolves, with the tails of scorpions and the disgruntled foreheads of fathers at the siren of fivetrumpet alarm. He rips His nametag from His robes, throws it to the sidewalk, stands out unacknowledged. Then, bends His knee to pick up that nametag, walks over to the trashcan aside the entrance, throws it properly away — Hanna would be proud, would’ve been.
