On our planet, just follow me here, and there on permanent display — having been made available for inspection subject of course to a nominal charge, are the last novelty items: glo-in-the-dark vomit and poop, the lapel squirting-flower, the buzzer, the cushion that makes you make whoopee. We have Misses Stahl’s last knish, the last car of the last Q train that once lined from the bottom of the Park down all the way to Coney Island, Seventh Avenue to Stillwell, then the last seltzer nozzle from Canarsie found rusted, its bottle shattered down at the end of the L. What else. The last pocketwatch. The last threepiecesuit, though, admittedly, there are holes in the vest. We don’t do restoration. We don’t do replica. Nor facsimile, neither reproduction. Come to think of it, the list of what we don’t do wouldn’t fit in your universe. Number the stars. Kiss the sand. Ours is the last temptation. An enshrining of kitsch. An ennobling of the fleet, and forgotten. To begin again at the end, the ideal. Doesn’t matter, you don’t want that either. We have most of the last things, and only from your planet’s what. Other planets, other peoples, have other collectors, aggregators of their own, private interests with private capital, their own personal private manias; obsessional, it’s like a madness with them. We have you. It’s our shared fate, as they say. Symbiotic, yadda. And we would have this last of everything, not just to have it, no, but to hold it, preserve — to keep it in its decline, maybe, outside of your destruction, outside of your time.
Preserve what for what, and why’d you want to go and do a thing like that — having finally found His mouth, kept numbed around the smoke: no way there’s much money in the last if all you do is keep it locked up, like sleep with it, why. Seems strange. Icky. Aberrant. Unclean. A thing weird uncles would do.
You’re not understanding. It’s that the lastness of last things taken altogether, it’s not a lastness, it’s more like a nonlastness, a firstness, no, an extraordinary unordinal, you with me?
A whatness for whoness of whyness now?
In our time, which is not your time, which is outside your time much as your Einstein once thought, if you know him, you might, the one with the hair and the mc2…we have the last black & white photograph, listen up, the last phonograph record ever pressed, the Ninth Symphony of Mahler, conducted by your landsmann, sehr langsam; his name was Bernstein, like amber. We have, also, the last book ever published, though its title escapes me, its author unheard of. No one’s read it; we don’t want to break any bindings. Anyway, to explain: these three items, each the last of its kind, these three times together, they’re no longer the last — together, they fill in each other, reconstitute, recreate, repopulate the world that once made them…regeneration, reincarnation, not really, not quite; more like resurrection, that’s right: the last things of any world, at the instant they’re the last,
And so? He wants to know.
And so, your presence is requested.
Me?
Yes, not now, though, soon enough…as if to say, I’m sorry, sir, your incredulity’s no longer good here. All the arrangements have been made. Everything’s paid already. Up front. Posterity’s been booked long in advance. A palace is waiting, like Solomon’s, Herod’s, whichever, a real Temple…that is, if you want it, a manger, a Mecca, a White House, all yours — and in it the last two Philistine women, now I have your attention, aloelipped, myrrhhaired twins both above and below how you wouldn’t believe, luckily enough for you they’ve got the last four perfect mammæ in your universe: they’ll attend to your every need, they’ll wait on you hand and hoof. We have, as well, the last of every species allowed to you, and if and when you finish them, and we’ll allow you to subsist on them, to eat and to drink them — that’s how important you are to us — you can start in on the tablets, which have been clinically proven to successfully simulate among the tastes of many other foodstuffs both that of kosher deli and takeout Chinese.
And why are you, answer me this, indulge me…Ben ashes His Schwantz into an attending green nurse’s He thinks it’s its cleavage, a pulsating bust itself interplanetary — why are you so interested, so obsessed, with this lastness?
