Thrashing under the water under the ice, He flails, He founders…He but not yet He, Ben not yet: only a dimness, a trifle of dark, diffusing in the depths of the bath to cleanse Him of He…purified, but into and for what: not fetal but unshaped in the solution, enwombed without form save flub, glub, and the bubbling — I can’t breathe, which given the wetness sounds only as ripples, as waves. Limbs liquefying, not their loss through melting but to become remade, to be crucibled. He tides into seas and oceans, turning up wake. Viscous uterine life. Maternal syrup. Paternal stick. Its eyes stinging, its nose, too, then its mouth and throat, then no eyes to sting, no nose nor mouth, tongue dissolving at the hint of honey, the faint taste of urine, then, of silvery poison: sensing its last…a substance that Hanna would’ve kept under the sink, always offlimits, kept locked.
Will you shut the goddamned tentflap? the traveling photographer yells.
Who’s he again, who does he think he is? A mensch time out of mind — he looks any way you want him to look, though most of the timeless you can’t see him because he’s looking at you.
Here, hold these — and there’s a great shuffling of glass sound, a crashing, the breaking of plates…pass that nitrate over here, will you, the sound of fumbles around. He’s yelling at his assistant, a slow, dullwitted girl disguised as a boy with bangs, the rest of her hair gathered in a pile under his cap, a slight moustache smudged on with tint; her first name’s Never, and as for her last name, Forget. Or else we’ll do the albumen, he says to him, or the gelatin; forget it, we’ll do it all, we’ve got the time. Smash those eggs for me, will you? And, this time, don’t forget to separate the yolks…
To stir, then tong flat — picked up then hung, they seem thousands of Him, they seem millions, Hims suspended from heaven by a pinch of the trees, their wooden reaches pinned to horizons. Dripping emulsion, He’s patted down with sheets, these sheets His selves in the sopped love of image engendering images. These padding clouds. He’s bent, then checked; memory’s done entirely inhouse; ripped already, pretorn, folded thrice, then shrunk, then enlarged: pores of an infinite process, He’s inhaling this whole time, in-taking, passingout, comingto, elementally, being assembled from every gradation of the mnemosynic bath; given focus only to dry: in a black & white encompassing every slowslipping tint, which if anything they might first yellow on their slow ways to, disappeared. To be developed, finally, then exiled out to the edge, posterity’s furthest diaspora. There, at last, to be framed. That is, if anything can ever contain Him.
Ben’s image will precede Him everywhere except here, it appears, amid these trees unknotted with signs, these forests left barren of martyring tacks through His face: this the most religious enclave of recent adherents, enemies of representation, of the modern, of even the olden made new — the land of the people formerly known as the Amish, the Pennsylvania Deutsch, if you’ve heard. At least for them, conversion hasn’t been tough; they’d already grown the hair, bought the hats. If yesterday’s habits die hard, what about its people, community, brotherhood. What else to do, they’ve already committed to black. In a field, Ben wakes to a rain, a drippingly dense precipitate, intermittent if implacably slow, deliberate, and thick. Ruddish raw milk, irritatingly unprocessed. He turns His face to the tasteless heavens, the pinked underside of a naturally nonhomogenate moon. He’s under an udder, bovine, that of a Joysey cow, not just any: a heifer red and so rare, whose bloodlet ashes would’ve served to purify the sins of His people back in the days of the pioneer temples. Exhausted from the trek, His owners who deep in their souls are the owned, masters and hosts of underground trade, that moneychanging hands passing hands fingering change, the cartrides then the horserides, the changes of horse and cart then the portage, hiding in steamers and trunks, amid bags, boxes, and crates, His entire smuggle wormhollowed, spoondug — He opens His lips now only to spit, as if there’s anything left to be said; this after having been ignominiously dropped, left in the Keystone, abandoned without ceremony or cerement as not worth the skin He’d been born shrouded into — that and His onerous appetites, this sleeping lazily late until too tired to wake — the pinchednasal kvetch of the slave whose soul’s the enslaving. He closes His mouth to the weather of this cow on the graze, turns away and sleeps on, the ingrate, not thirsty.
