To serve no one but yourself is to live too freely, among so much Developmental openness, amid so much possible, potential, God how to live up to it, how to live down or at all, how to remember when you’re free to invent? History goes garbled. More libraries’ books burnt in irrelevant fire. Tapes get erased. Herein, His degeneration: Adam the former pigfarmer and futzer of that other Manhattan, a landlocked, hillflinty little apple located in the northeastern negation of Kansas, will sell Ben able to Cain, who would altar Him to Topeka Seth; Methusaleh the goy said his name was of Lawrence to hold onto Him forever. He’s a stooped mensch, caneclawed, from another age: he carries a briefcase wrinkled deeper than his face; to negotiate he sets his hat on the table crown down, as not to destroy the meticulous brim. He’s tired in the eyes though the mouth says froth, medicated excited but worried, too, around the rodential twitch of the nose; he’s splurged his whole pension to acquire our schmuck. He takes Him home, feeds Him until the food runs out, the taps go dry, the breathing becomes labored in vain. In the morning in his waincart he carts himself he hauls Ben out through the flatlands toward the Missouri line, leaves Him there with a sigh and a sandwich not on rye but of it, a nod toward the promise of St. Louis, just now in the process of being renamed (a referendum’s been called, streetside prophets casting their tongues).
To wander the river’s edge, icebound, and bound, too, to a calling: the Mississippi, it is, under the sinlessly white rime of which there’s only a trickling sheen, slitherine…Ben’s roaming the bordering bank north to south, toward a loose assemblage of insipid figures draped fittingly formless in a pale that no one should have to behold in the light of the sun this early in the winter of morning; it’s blinding, a blur. Too bright, and the bright it’s too clean. Heavy, though, even their smiles are heavy, lumberously overweight. He’s interrupted some ritual or other ongoing, walked into a ceremony in which He doesn’t belong, whether as honored, honoring, or hardware. Call it a mass debaptism. A disconfirmation, an unconsecration — it’s a Kashering, a making holy, made whole. Holes’ve been smashed into the ice, to the water frothing below, cleanly bleached from frost by the sun above the sunken silt, the muddy crust at bottom — and around clear to the other bank, are tiny tchotchkes getting dunked. People in yarmulkes, in their too short, too tight white kittels where do they get them (their bedclothes repurposed, sheets and slips), are sinking their plates and pans and pots and utensils down into the water freed to soak, led by a mensch, longhaired, neatgoateed, quiverlipped and tall, standing far out on the water itself, it seems, miraculously, not quite, mundanely descending a shiver into a hole he’s destroyed for himself at a shallow; submerged now to the knees, with a sharp rim of ice at his waist he’s mispronouncing vaguely Affiliated words from the sides of his mouth, givingout snippets of prayer, liturgical snatch delivered in a terrible voice mired in schlocky melisma. And not just household goods, provisions of the sleepy domestic — everything’s getting anointed today, must go damped down to holy: pets herded toward the lap of the frozen, womenfolk tugging roped their families’ goats to slip hooves out over the icing, old television sets and stereos and refrigerators, obsolesced computers and calculators and radios and telephone units, impractical electrical appliances still plugged by extension cord into sockets hosted on the only interior walls of neighboring mobilehome units, elders’ doublewides, parking the riverbank (an electrocutionary risk illadvised, but God will save us, always does), newspapers runny, clothes and socks and shoes, officesupplies, paperclips and rubberbands, pottedferns and filingcabinets removed from the offices and backrooms of storefront and stripmall churches defunct, their Sunday School desks, tables, chairs, and pews, sand, shore, and the river itself, getting wet, rendered allowable for household use if not that of the sacred; cars, vans, and trucks fishtailing out onto the scaling, towed by horses and mules and then their own owners, them, harnessed with ropes tied to chassis and bumper, vehicles hauledout to fall into their own weight, to jut up their rearwheels as if icicles expurgated from other holes stomped into the river’s midst, spouting stilled, jagged metal springs: a technological potlatch, a mass giving up, such divestment of the profane.
