Listen, it’s red, I’m talking real red, and it milks like there’s no tomorrow — it’ll go for its weight in gold.
You know, if gold’s your thing. If you’re into it. A heifer.
I can see it’s a heifer, he’s squinting through a face of all hair…I’m dumb, but not blind, not just yet, poo poo poo. You got any papers for it? Rabbinic certification? Aha, that old handl.
None, but it’s legit, trust me, echt, it’s kosher, glatt, a hundred percent, not a blemish, it never gave birth…reaches back, pries loose one of its hooves not to turn a left or right but a profit, holds it out for inspection and the Gatekeeper scrapes the nail of a forefinger down the thing’s leg, attempting to do away with the dye, but his finger emerges clean, at least as clean as it was before he’d inspected.
Amen, but you didn’t hear it from me…and I’ve never seen you before — you’ve got a deal…and he goes to the hut, raises the guardrail. Geschwind, whoever you are, hurry up. Welcome to One Thousand Cedars!
Ben with a groan unloads the heifer onto the sidewalk, where it sits, good boychick on its haunches as if to schnorr for littered scraps. Then, with a nod of thanking Shalom to the Keeper, He heads inside, scamperingly, and impatient, as if expecting what — for His life once within…His house to be known only through its other, with Him unsuspecting its grave, its cinderstood basementholed lot. Regard the Island’s, then, as His winterhouse — an investment in memory perhaps not worth the properties of its taxes: the burden, the fear of breakin, or fire; the Hill’s vacational double, its unseasonal reflection, an image of an image, resurrected because relocated, transported, only moved. He’s making for the house He remembers exactly — how else, if at all — from its stand upon a spur of rock at the edge of the Garden, overlooking the ocean and waste. Here, though, had been its hearth; here, His home itself was at home.
Ben walks unburdened blocks familiar, block after blocks. Up from under the freeze the sidewalk comes to kiss at His feet, to smack His soles with lips that are cracks. Brokenbacks. Obeisance, the denial of one self in the service of another. How habit, and this despite its particularity — even if grand and luxury and maximally moneyed — always seems humble, modest, and small as too known. This is because we can adapt, we must, get used to anything, get used. But still, we’re aware of this capacity, always, of our ability to change — and so the lure of origins, the tempt of what we have been. How being here, and especially alone, it’s like living again, for the first. Though it’s not so much that He’d loved it here (how could He have, how long had He been here), or that He’d lived for so long, not long enough, in its displaced dwelling, under its exiled roof; it’s not that He was born here either that makes this all, wasted, destroyed, so true, and so intimate, and this despite the lack of stroller or sisters’ share: what makes this Siburbia so comforting, so comfortable, isn’t the lapse of time, no, neither is it the impression of time lost upon the impressionable, the able and willing, the wistful or sentimental nostalgic, think again — it’s that Siburbia itself had been built familiar, that One Thousand Cedars was built to be familiar from the very beginning, welcoming, Shalom and stay a while, take off your shoes, take a seat then holy us with conversation over coffee or tea; how it’d been intended to be indistinguishable, immediately, from any other annex, extension, or subdivision of this Development we know of as earth, as America — the freest if most dangerous and perhaps damning of possible worlds: only the fundamentally uninteresting, the absolutely anti interesting, could be so familiar as to transcend its particular existence, its particular name, its geography, and specific time. In essence, without essence, nonexistent, no life: and how it’s this very nonexistence that allows us to encounter it as we want to encounter it, however — to make its meaning whatever we want, tophet or home, whether nowhere or the only.
