The valet leaves Him honored, happy to be of help and with a wish of good mazel, no thanks he’s pleased only a thumb held up in front of a wink (and so, obscuring his recently hirsute face from surveillance). Proudly, the goy struts back to his stand engrossed in Ben’s outermost robe, hotelcomplimentary, and daubed in His blood, its left pocket hanging fully low past its purfle, heavy with the skin of His shed. Once unobserved, how it’s humiliating, though: Ben gets the hulk out of park, takes a moment to realize the emergency’s on, releases it, stiff footwork on the pedals, starts and spurts, stalls, starts and stalls on — trying to remember Heber’s lightly natural routine, that mechanical ritual as unconsciously observed too many mornings in transit, if most of them dreamed halfway to sleep (an inheritance, this techincal debility: like everyone else in their Development, His parents only ever drove automatics: the vans and the minivans, too, the rovers and even Israel’s promotional sportscar that he’d had out on lease for all of a month before being rearended by a towtruck out on the GWB, then trading it in on Hanna’s insistence for a practical coupe with no soul, prone to every complaint ever insured by the responsible, to be handeddown to Rubina, Simone, and Liv in their turns right and left — a fray amid the wires of veins, it must be, this disconnect deep in the blood); He manages how to have it going, to keep it going, soon gone…to turn it around the drive’s short learningcurve; then eventually — heading out.
Ben without chauffeur, though it can’t be too hard, just follow the nose of the road, hound it out. On the wing of a prayer: check mirrors, burn maps. He’s got a ways to go nowhere, both pursued and pursuing…Him to be forktrailed, coattailed by drones, Bens not created by God but recreated by the science of fame: His replica becoming their replican’t, willingly, with each of them lapsed, failed failures, messes and wouldaBes, Messiahs-in-training untamed without name. Wandering throughout the whole of the desert, New Mexico, Arizona, south by southwest, until — ultimately, a landmark’s required: the West Pole, a totemic redwood, a giant sequoia flagged with a flag; having been driven out from the buffet, denied the breaking of the fast the evening next (says the Law, the groom must go without on the day He’s to be married), which reminds: driven, too, from Lillian Shade, almost, not quite, Israelien, which would’ve been real Schade, who tomorrow early would’ve made her arrival on Aeroforce Aleph, its descent better classified, into the semaphored lights: their message, stay away, go back from whence you came, but then the glide to a stop, the gangway would be hauled up and who’s going to be there to greet her and her First Family once this gets out, makes wire and with it, stifles, strangles — an understudy public, a lesser name fallen from the agenda’s marquee? Off the strip, they’re waiting with new letters to hang. Meaning, runawayed. The wind, blowing colder than ever, winds its way into the loosest slots in town, as they’re sold — all proceeds going to the charity of a blind eye, the moon’s. The syncope, the tone: a howl with the windows darked down. Finger a shekel — call your mother goodbye one of these nevers. Tell her you’re not coming home.
To set out through tunnels, over the underpasses, loop around then turn without signal. To drive through the night — no, not to drive but to truck…that’s what the goyim say, what they once said and fast, virilely hard and long, Unaffiliated with the caution required: due westward ho, and once nowhere then deeper, ever further into its myth, its fantastical lore — sandshifts…Sabra prickly pears, Mesozoic lizards, cacti, and the threat of wily coyotes, existential roadrunning past repeating scenery repeating and repeating again, deanimate and so no longer funny but wasting — O the barren Midbar, the gulag that borders Siburbia; the whole contiguous country out there, how it’s one enormous golfcourse…neglected, defiled, destroyed — one hole let’s say three par of a course that breadths the universe entire, it might; or, our earth’s the ball, and it lays foul, from where it must be hit, again…a west to which the sun’s set to putter around in darkness, to waste its waning years paying bills by memory to waking, making increasingly conservative investments in day. Here, where everyone retires — Ben trucks, and Ben lives.
