To think: this is what it would’ve been like to live in a city, to be native to this shtus, at home here, a life lived quick and quickly wise…how this is where He would’ve gone to school, too, to yeshiva, though in the boy’s wing, which is just next door, life’s always just next door, He’s thinking — had what happened never happened, that is, had we never moved out and then, died. A mind denied Him — this school the repository of yet another inheritance deferred. The shelves are empty of books, bookended loss; it’s dark in here, better not to tempt the fluorescents — the sweep of the floor, its pencil shavings, chalk remains from the happy clap of appreciative erasers smeared into the spirals of shoes out on permanent recess, their tag you’re it, and skip and jump. Dust gathered thickly on the scarred faces of desks, chewing gum’s wadded on the plastic panels of the ceiling gnawed with wet, snapped pointers heaped at the radiator as kindling, an old flag hanging in flags, a globe’s smashed in, world flattened; calendars fade into maps, so tired, the round white eye of the clock’s shut stopped; there are charts here and there are graphs and there are trees here, a mess of corkboard herald, pushpin fame, gold stars spangle the wall, they fall from their walls from up high near the waterlogged ceiling, below the paper trim that scrolls out the math and the alphabets:
A chalkboard, effaced in clouds to bear heavy weather over the metal of its lower lip, hosting in the beveled curl its scowl, a single wisp of chalk — but no eraser. A blackboard scarred in white, balmed with the puff of gray clouds at its margins, wiped into winter at its center by a palm licked slick, dispersed with the tail of a coat, dispelled with a flick of the cuff: its surface entire a great whirlwind of days, of weeks, or moons, their record scribbled, rescribbled, worn, scrawled into palimpsest then rubbed thin to a unity, dappled pure, this sky streaked light over dark. He jumps from the teacher’s desk to stand, to grab at the chink of chalk. Then, with a fierce stub thrust, He rips the board from the wall; flaking plaster, screws stripped from wood on brick, it comes off in His hands. He ties it around His neck with a ripped stripe of the flag He halves, tying with the more modest fray the wisp of chalk to a boardtop eyelet: leaving the classroom, then the school itself, heading out into the interpreting world, stilled in Shabbos silence. B spits on a finger to erase, a clean slate, saliva daubed with blood. A thumbprint’s trace. Upsidedown, it doesn’t matter…I will write myself.
The sightings taper off to a worm. People have other appetites now…and even the most recent pilgrims, thanatopsical tourists with serious possibly illegitimate income to dispose of packagedin from Hotzeplotz to here, to Miami, their reservations made moons ago, nonrefundable deposits put down, to pay admission as much as their homage at the refurbished sites — nu, even they’re reluctant to make the trip and, if they do, just think of the money they’d lose, then they never purchase souvenirs for anyone of any relation more distant than that of a mother or wife, even splurge on dessert at the still swanky yet woefully understaffed Restaurant Under the Sign of the Imperfectly Toned Pectorals, at which establishment an Oriental tourist of the name Jacob-san, after having waited for over an hour for his order to be taken, then forgotten, then taken again, excuses himself in advance of any question to the paunch of mensch dining at a neighboring table, then asks him in a perfectly unaccented phrasebook grunt what the guidebook has thought fit to omit…ach, what in hell does the name Miami actually mean?
