Ben thanks the mensch with involuntary gropes and grabs, hugs, kisses, throws His weight under the horse’s sagging stuck belly, one thrown rider more away from being turned into glue (with which to bind a book, perhaps, whose pages, hymn, let’s only hope they contain a ruling against that that prohibits even the emergency consumption of the species), and the two, peasant and pursued, groaning, with their shoulders, bone bursting under their skins, free the animal, which stomps then kicks wildly a tack of knobby limbs. To quit them then ascend the hill, Ben slips down the slope with the wind, in the direction of His ascent down to the most starved flank of the horse unstuck and the mensch just past tugging always tugging, who kindly points out to Him the sign again with a wave to stay away. And so He goes to ascend again and then again slides down on His haunches, atop His tush, His face forced down against the wind, squinting, a nosebleed…and still behind, the horsemensch heading in an occidental direction. And so to shimmy up on His stomach, to snakewriggle, sidewind atop ice — to top the violently sloped, cloudbound hillside, then right Himself at its summit with nicks at the elbows and knees and stomach scraped red under the useless white of the sun and the shadelessness of the leafless oak.
Incomprehensible walls line the interior of the valley below, obscuring, this delimiting haze regular and yet in motion, rising and falling only to rise again, then fall — lips of mouths, they seem…teeth, they’re masticating furiously, falling and rising on their own, individually, the entire eastern slope of the hill a vertiginous swarm of rusticated, unserviced dentition between the individual ords of which, deep amid their crenatures, hang other people, flayed carcass and spewed corpse, the face of the whole an inconstant, dizzying up down up down that’s impossible to focus on simultaneously and so He shuts His eyes to understand — to chip and chew at an image frozen, this newest memory, a revelation made of shock. Not walls now or teeth, but teething people…or the walls are themselves people, babies crying, wailing, walling. This is a city of people, of maybe thousands of them, a million, who can count, He wouldn’t know where to begin; the valley nests them, holds in their reek, their scum, their noise, and is them, as well. Bebabbled kibble. Heedlessness sustains. Ben sits tushed at the summit, gazing down upon the valley’s munched mass: moving forms, shadows, moving so much now and so fast it’s as if they don’t move at all, tornadolike going nowhere, a stationary whirlwind as if the about to address you presence of God Himself, His vocal wrath. Ben slides in, Pyramidal once again: down He goes down the iceflume, accumulating speed and mass, weather rounding form — to hit the wall, wall’s people, knocking them inside, sliding directly into the dead, exact middle, into its totally trampling rampage, to surface from out of that maw of knees, elbows, shoulders, and palms to air, only to be swarmed, then trampled again to the earth packed hard with the stomping of feet on the frost.
Name? a voice rasps, its hands or another’s tugging one of His ears wide, and of what are you accused?
And none of that I am that I am shtick, says a voice different but the same, whatever name you want, choose your crime, your victim, flatter yourself — you think we’ll know the difference?
I myself was a saint, name’s Kraus or Krauss now, I forget which, how many esses we’re talking…Ben keeps His silence, too scared to talk, a step upon His tongue; the mensch inquiring drops Him to the enormity’s floor, that darkness stomping still. Another leg up to the surface, a grasping gasp.
Not that it matters, yet another voice says. Silence is an alias as good as any other. An alibi lullaby, you put me to sleep, the z’s.
Hands hold Ben flat, face up to the sky, borne in triage above the muddy throng. His pockets are emptied, of empty, nothing gained, His holes prodded, He thrusts hands to prevent violation. From atop, the valley and hills on both sides, though human, have been reduced to an animal rout.
Don’t think you’re the first person who’s known his rights, is heard. And don’t think living here you’ll live any longer. Hell, don’t think at all…
Registration’s at the western slope, an orientation meeting to follow — hahaha, a general hilarity, which manifests in a gnashing of rank gums.
Stop confusing the boy, an older denizen says.
Refuge, he goes on, asylum, you dig?
Shalom, welcome…groovy, hip, here goes: make love not war but both are money, peace be to you, all that.
These are the rules that aren’t: if you make it here, you deserve to live; if not, not, easy enough — and, another adds, deserving to live doesn’t mean that you will.
