Ben tries to sit up, falls back. With the glass off, all’s fuzzy again, unfocused, bright — how the comforter of the bed’s white tucking toward pink, and the pillow under Him, too, but the sheets staining the mattress darker, they’re mudflecked, covered with streaks of pests exploded, crushed between antic fingers. With the glass off, the chair’s upholstery has come unholstered, a cheap recliner its seat and back slashed, degeneratively red — the curtains of the window, though, they seem to be only His lashes. With the glass on again, He can espy the webbed patterns of doilies draped, lace, a shatter without glass. Then, He holds to the other eye, to take sight of the shelves across the room, empty, undusted, sagging: what’re only spare troughs and farrowingcrates shelved for the mending; their books must’ve already been burned. Must be smoke. A sty. He raises His other hand to remove the lens but can’t, finds His wrist bolted, chained ostentatiously to the knob of the door. Sitting up, He has bruises upon His arms and legs, a prodigious spoil nipples each breast.
A crucifix on the wall, used as a hatrack: it’s empty except for a cap whose logo says,
A jeansed mensch comes to the door, knocks once then opens it, sneers his chaw to a windowside spittoon. He takes the recliner in hand and screeches it across the room to sit opposite Ben who’s itching at the gargly marks left by bedbugs.
He takes a pistol from a pocket, takes it apart then wipes everything down; when he’s done, he can’t put it back together and so he sits in silence and mopes — only to startle, throwing the gun exploded to parts to the floor, then kicking them to clatter under the bed, at three sudden knocks at the door.
He rises, knocks in response, lets her in. Amateur, like.
She’s young, younger than him, just in from the shuttered piggery in flannelplaid, spandex under a skirt, workgloves and slopwaders; she’s carrying a tray topped with two glasses, vodka in a flask and a case.
Honey, he twangs to her, meet our new investment. Take a good gander — does He look like retirement to you?
She blushes to the color of a cozy carnation; if possible her hair shocks even higher and sharper, like the electrified spikes they’d used to keep their pigs in the pen: their backfats and baconers, feeders and sucklings, barrows, cull sows.
The mensch takes the tray from her, kisses her away, opens the case and hands Ben His new specs.
He pours out the drink, takes both shots himself without intelligible blessing.
All is clear, or soon will be.
You took quite a beating back there, the mensch says. There’ve been riots. Unrest, with you sleeping. Army went in, the reserves. You’re lucky to still be alive. Let’s just say it was costly, a whole heap of payola. I mortgaged the farm, that and the money I’m making not to raise treyf anymore. But don’t worry about me, I’ll make it back double. There’re people I’m talking to, I’m learning the language. I got me a primer, and me and the wife we’re studying nights with a rav.
I’m your new host, the name’s Adam.
Believe it, I didn’t have to change it or nothing.
Utz all you want that this has been welcomed, deserved, that He’s all this time been asking for it, begging on knees and on the stiff merit of boredom, even that in the end He’s better off bound with gags — slavery’s what He’s in for, to be bargained for, bought and sold, His person possessed. Anyway, the most inclusive of our interpreters offer, slavery means different things to different people, that there are as many slaveries as there are lives, and that bondage can just mean like you know respiring, bound to life, gettingby: Monday morning, Wednesday’s hump upon which the moon was created, then broken for the healing of Friday, the weekend, a job or a spouse. Through the grind. And to be sure, our sages agree, Ben’s isn’t a subservience of the hard labor stripe, which if more slimming is still that much too productive, worthwhile, ensuring the fattened happiness and health of another: owning Him matters more than working Him, which — working — is not quite His shteyger. And so what if it’s not Egypt the real, or Moses with Abraham Lincoln goes south, should that make any difference to us, temper our sympathy for one so abused, ultimately, by Himself? A slave to sciomachy. If not slavery then how else, please, to explicate such a geography of wandering: from family to family, from house to house; nothing this looned’s ever done on your lonesome. Master to host. If not slavery, how to explain such unquestioning surrender to others, their wills, His fate, to a God He doesn’t even believe in (others, wills, fate, God — the same, if only we knew what that was), to a God now — God knows why — Who’s worshipped in every burg Ben’s sold off in, exalted in every dorf He’s auctioned off to?
