At Ben’s arrival, they’re heading east again, if roughly, and this valley’ll serve for a pleasant spell, recently popularly voted to be surroundings suitable for a welcome moment of repose, a refuge from Refuge pop. ilimitable, before moving on to ruin the next town, to leave it smoking, wasted; there wherever a mouthful of people to move on out to the edges, daring to, feeling strong enough it’s tempting, to transact business with shops along the way, to purchase sundries and packagegoods at the price of favors, humiliations, disgrace, to say Shalom, send a letter or telegram, make a phonecall, find a new mate or victim beyond the walls of the city unwalled. The people of the wall are regarded by many scholars as those possessing the most guilt, those who’ve decided, freewilled their own standing out there on the outs to functionalize form, structure, stolidity; the most unfortunate of them, edged up against the tumbling hillside, becoming eternally crushed. Otherwise, the wall that is all of people are those who just happen to be, whether through fate, the leaning fall of happenstance, abated natural strength, who happen to have found themselves left to the skirts, banished by the decree of no God they believe in out to the periphery of such a violent, illintentioned throng, the unwilling fighting and gnashing to get in deeper, to the destruction at middle where it’ll still hurt but you’ve got a better shot at dying by the hands of your own brethren companions (if hands they still have, and free), which has to seem, at least in the way of dignity, preferable to most to death from without, to being murdered by those who lie in wait for a refugee remade. In the interior, amid the ruin of tattered tents and leantos and threadbare teepees and hogans and wigwams, among the remains of doomed domed gardens and farms and a dry, witheringly lumbered pen for the raising of livestock gone missing, which animals they’d agreed, or once thought they did, to maintain and care for communally and then to slaughter and divide up equally their flesh fed on dream — everyone’s lost their personalities, also their ages and sexes: female like male, kinder the elderly, kinder who’d done their parents wrong, elderly who’d sinned against their kinder, who’d murdered to enjoy the sorrow of outliving in anything but this peace and quiet however deserved. An encampment of families mixed and broken, converted to lives without name. By dint of sheer width, Ben — after His initial inspection atop the mass, after He’s strangled back down — abides like a lodestone at center, immovable but molten, a star’s burning core; liberally not planetary but sunlike, that around which all must revolve. In this middle, the epicenter of such seismic scorn — with limb shattered to limbs, throats stomped to sucking death — everyone’s trod upon, but Him, He’s the exception, always is: there wombsafe, coddlecradled, a babe.
Ringing the valley, pulsing, on the hilltop, are obscurant forms, establishing, establishment shadows — businesstypes, respectables, former congress-menschs they look or talk like, MD-PhD’s, editor/esquires…people in waiting. Mandated to remain outside the Refuge, they wait to exercise their right to exact punishment from the refugee should he, she, or it ever take leave of the city and so, its protection, should they ever quit the company of their sins: ever prepared, dysnfunctionally vigilant and yet patient to win such vengeance with axes, splinterhandled, incomplete sets of kitchen knives, with swords of elaborate letteropeners, factorysecond nailfiles, cactiburrs made maces, found hunks of masonry, unfinished railroad spurs, ties, rocks, meltsharpened icicles, wormlengths of scrapwood. Passing the time, dust from sand they sieve with their mouths, hanging open, panting, not shocked at the valley but impatient for its opportunity, when — for a future not to be occupied so wastefully; their ties slung heroically over their shoulders, the sleeves of their suitjackets rolled up as if for heavy lifting, for toil.
After rimming the valley thrice, circumambulations conducting him down and up hills, a goy rare to these parts arrives at the hill further to wait amongst these revengers revenant in their eminent labcoats and lawrobes, others legitimizing in the uniforms of the police, fire, and military, finally takes a seat on an outcrop, down next to a mensch who’s palming a pipe.
Waiting for anyone special?
The schmuck who knocked up my daughter, that’s who, the mensch says, and the moment he gets smart, takes one step out from the group…
And what’s your spiel? asks a mensch sharpening a butcher’s cleaver with the thick of his thumb.
I’m out for a mensch who, Gelt’s thinking…He killed my father — let’s leave it at that.
