At the outskirts, the ramshackle gird of the grid, of failures and fallings, car carapaces, dungbeetlelike burnt like scarabs, swaying palms trunked in plaster, splintered rust…Ben pulls into the lot of a roadhouse being converted into a synagogue to turn Himself around after He misses a turn, and prays, if just for a moment. May my memory in this town be for a whammy, for any who might so deserve It — unto a double, what’s to lose by being so generous, no jackpots, no wins shalt ye merit. Then, behind Him, once pulled back onto the road prominently marked to give itself unto the altar of highway, as if a secular offering to the earth: there’s the call and the echo of fire…lighting up the desert in the rearview mirror and reflected, the same, in the windshield in front and there in His face, it’s a fireworks show; the night before the night, but still, a display almost divine in how violable, without distance. Huge trinities dazzling, they’re banging, they’re bursting, such warming, nostalgic salute — not ending but beginning again, not a covenant new or liturgical levin but a reminder that rainbows can be made by us, too, here and now. Not the engine backfiring, Ben — it’s the rocket’s reddening glary that’s sparkling blue, which once fired to fizzle is white, the ash of their promises made: another whiz, yet another big bang…halos exploding, a sundering of air and a coming together again, both at once: dumped clumps of gunpowder lit hissily to pop, poking holes in even the most spacious of skies, holes that are the skies in the sky — heavens, Heaven, that most blessed of the firmaments known, and the only. O’er amber wanes of grave.
An apparition above, a starry conjunction, a convergence of smokes: the lights fade into darkness, total, leaving only tracework, a serpentine sigh…a gray wispiness, a winding sinuousness, then — space, the emptiness ensuing punctuated only by the twinkle of a planet. Mars, if He had to war with guess, a mote of lava in the eye. In its entirety, though, this smoke’s a known form: half of infinity, a feminine slither — it’s a questionmark that’s up there, and who are we not to oblige? Who’s He not to make manifest any portent above? And so, what’s Ben doing, where’s He headed and why? Hazy, still, hidden in wind…you don’t think you’ll get away that easy, do you? simply disappear into ranks, the hierarchy, no? any route, which way high or free, which interstate of hundreds, of thousands? what about the symbolizing signs, the thisway thataway arrows, ten miles always to the next, ask directions, shun pride. You don’t think you’re your own keeper now, do you? Haven’t you perused at any length the books they’re called Exodus, Leviticus? Numbers, when your own is up, cataloged under
Enough silence, Ben thinks, enough thinking, turn on the radio, turn it up, the one station tonight not playing, not replaying Him: this noname, no-lettered signal up on numbers exiled way off the dial then around it again, sixsixsix point six probably broadcast out of the basement of a longsuffering mother; jackalcrackle, croupy static, and — Shalom Shalom — we’re givingout a sermon by the new Rabbi of Albuquerque, the Albuquerquer Rebbe is what they’re calling him nowadays, alternating his remarks, which what with late and its liquor tend to stray incoherently (the tone that of Father Coughlin with a bad cough, only the hatred’s reversed), then station identification, you’re listening to the time and the weather, life fiddling away in a frail style, coming to you live from the Circle-K Ranch.
