B’s begun trailing this slime behind Him — it might’ve been something He ate, some’ve suggested, a schmear gone wrong: just the last day or so, a viscous and humiliate secretion. He hasn’t yet been to the doctor about it, why, too many conditions to consult, who would treat Him and live, after all, who can trust them, and who’ll pay the bill — this perhaps the relapse of a familiar syndrome, yet again returning familiarly, Tweiss shy: with etiology merely another waitingroom for those with more time than pain, them and the already eulogized, too, in short, the headshrunk, it’s a latent fear of diagnosis He’s suffering from, a fear of treatment, if you want, the generic idiopathic, and sticky, stinging on its way trickling out; this slime, His trail, the solution He’s marking out from the swell of His rear. Once it leaves Him, slowly gloats down His legs then out their pants to meet the pant of the air, it tints a Radzyn royal blue, with a fading hint of Tyrian purple, reflected in the rear of the clouds below the tush of the sun: it’s the shade of techeles, that’s the term in the new language old, apparently a substance the rabbis once lived to leech, a dye obtainable only, it’d been thought, from the hypobranchial gland of the ancient Murex trunculus, dug from that highspired, whorled shell of the snail He appears to have turned into; Him mated with some seep of truculent slug a moon matured from estivation, the dwelled shell atop His back as if a worried hump, a hidden house of burden, with which to wander in search of home, in homing seek of search, all the while His true home just behind Him, if only He could turn; or maybe, as others have said, mystics and their interpreters as argaman in the face in argument as the substance He’s secreting, it’s that upon His return He’s gone the faller, and tumbled hard, into the possession of an angry purple dybbuk, a previously unclassified yet malevolent species of porphira: trailing His wander to stain the pavement in indigo at dusk, dibromoindigo lightening as dusk later turns to light, at dawn. Don’t misrepresent with misheberach, B seems to be seething a substance so supernatural that it’s only later identified, by many amateurs since experted, as that invaluable mediating enzyme known to us as purpurase, the active ingredient of that regal shade so valued by the Romans, and long sought after by our rabbis and us their students, too, scavenging at seaside for any shell washed up from the hoarding of the Flood, and further, less secret: by innumerbably unregenerate generations of the postdiluvian inilluminated, who would use the dark to dye the knotted fringes on what many would have known as a scapular, a lesser lighter shell to be borne by the body, over the skin, with an aperture here, too, but now cut through its very center, to accommodate the swell of a reverent head whose lips would kiss the fringing knots throughout the balming bind of prayer. To today’s observance, however, they’re known as tzitzit — the thin skin a grandfather would keep hidden under the black of his caftan.
