Though who could tell from the ground, One Thousand Cedars had been laidout as a circle, as a concentric Abandon all hope centered around what had been the plot of the roomiest, the most spacious, house, the Israelien’s. From the eyes of birds, nested as if a target — the eye of a urus, an auroch, a sacrificial bull. Directly past the Gatekeeper’s, inside its perimeter fence, there are the poorest houses, or were: stubby ranchers set way the far back on these small stubbly lots, vinylsiding wrecks their roofs wanting for shingles, held up by the very fences they’re backed onto, wire strangling wood to splinter. And then a circular road, which separates one ring from its inset better: in this next, there’s a round of larger houses, twostories, the bedrooms up top, waking life down below, lawns respectable if still mowed by their owners. Development Maintenance had always been reserved for the homes of the three inner rings, that’s what help the prices here bought you: another road, then the rich threestory houses, colonials of ruddy brick and sparkling fieldstone; another road then the fourstory houses of better brick, never to spall, hand-made in shades mottled and faded, duskily suggestive of the old, of the made old and by hand, the venerable and the lasting; such houses a defiance of impermanence, an entitled dare to fire, privileged in their security when all’s wellinsured. And then, the largest and widest swath of fivestory houses: an inner, defensive wall of them almost, overprotective as they’re set on immense lawns lined with shrubbery of an immaculate levelheadedness, trim and fit and ready: houses with multiple drives, endless entrance porticos decked with flags in recent favor (change the regime, they’ll change the decoration), imperial façades clean and neatly marbled, their white the purest blank. Inground pools emptied or frozen, cement graves marked by the tombs of cabañas, a tiki memorial to gardenpartied wakes. And then another road, a curb, a sidewalk, an even, domepitched circular lawn — and here, set atop it, the Development’s jewel, purported to be its grandest, and most luxurious, the Israelien home. Or where it once had been, where it would have been still, if not for the Garden — where it’s since been converted into an imposing museum of Him, the Metropolitan Israelien, of late less and less visited, it’s unfortunate. Initially, it’s open only one day a week, for an hour…
He takes the arcing turn from sidewalk to sidewalk — how tiny it is, how have I grown, a miniature life…existence matured within the shadow of the demeaning, the diminutive, Benya, my little boychick, meine Zaimele, be careful, keep safe: despite no traffic He’s still pausing at each intersection to look both ways left, right, then left again. Ima would be proud, Aba, too, would’ve been. A hexagonal sign says to Him,
