It isn’t night just yet, it’s only the eve, that of Xmas — soon to be the first of January, which is false and forgotten, a year unrenewed. Tonight, it’s the yahrezeit, the Anniversary of the Death (A.D., as it’s respectfully, avoidingly, mentioned), which is anyway only slightly remembered, commemorated by few and that strictly officially, a matter of governmental not of popular mind: all are seemingly too occupied with their new identities, their own Affiliation, to be bothered much with the whiskered past; besides, it’s just too painful to remember, to be reminded not as much of a celebratory loss as of their own illegitimacy, again, a future loss of their own: what with kinder being born, and time. To remember now would mean to lose the present’s meaning, and, too, its hope for tomorrow: send a giftbasket out to whoever scripted that one, that and a poinsettia for the wife. All is nigh within the Great Hall, the Garden: settled deceptively firm in its foundations, the money, the power, the trash and the bodies shored around; doors exhale drafts into overheated, underventilated, basrelieved hallways, their rooms are silent in disuse and dark; outside clouds assemble, churn themselves up churlishly, into aggravated masses: everything below’s in suspension, seems only to attend upon a Fall…the very first of the night, a single perfect and softly falling flake with which to tender the evening, none of this unpredictable, unpredicate weather, just a sweet, sharp, and gasping drift of flak that might remind how hospitable nature could be, not too much to ask…which would be forbidden as aeromancy, anyway, now made subject to rabbinic wrath (if you weren’t aware, you’re no prophet). Quarters here still being used by the remaining employees, those who haven’t been let go thanks to quarterly financials, or who haven’t yet left to save themselves, are decorated with trees of their own, miniaturized mistled models in plastic of the real tree evergreened amid the Registry: wooden nutcracker and egg ornaments, with tissuepaper flowers and tinsel, lacy angels atop with model trains on tracks spiked across bibs tied around trunks. A ball as if a blob of misplaced ink bounces down heavily on the lightest of lyrics:
Sensing this to be the last of this holiday he’ll know but not yet why, Die’s ordered up an observance he’ll never forget, no one will, its expense and luxurious fury, the implacable tide of this Yule waked between the coasts of Joysey and that of the icicle of Manhattan: after all, someone has to keep up the old ways, their traditions — if not now, when; if not me, then tell me who better? He faces away from this in truth disappointing, depressing, gathering of these his last few adherents, employees along with any weathering friends, hangerson, anyone desperate enough to remain in contact, in business with him or his: fifty guests tonight, and how they’d expected a few hundred, which means — leftovers; abandoned by Shade and so by the Administration entire, the government, the Abulafias, too, who not, there aren’t that many left. And it’s hard not to notice that most of the fifty gathered are just remaining staff required to attend, paid to be here, ten of whom’ve been especially hired to attend to the tree, the Baum as it’s been called by the Teutonic site supervisor, overseer of a staff hired to prune, snip, trim, and wreathe, to decorate and deck. Ornaments have been hauled up in last century’s steamer trunks from their subterranean storage unit, each trunk labeled as to style of its contents (ball, lace, gingerbread kinder, marzipan snowflake, glitterencrusted pine-cone — stop me when it’s been enough), with each ornament itself labeled as to its appearance and provenance: ball, red, gift of the Russian Ambassador; each guest’s required to hang at least one, as if proof of loyalty, the oppression of that ole tradition again. This staff of fayg decorators flown in from Europa leaps over sofas and endtables to midwife the proceedings; they’ve planned this year’s Baum to a limpid perfection, after having labored for a moon over diagrams of ornament distribution, lacepatterning, tinsel saturation schematics…the scaffold’s erected, hydrauliclift driven inside through the doubledoors of the Hall’s portico, upsets a vase (to say nothing of its florist); Kush daughters grim, hired to replace the Marys disappeared to God knows where, and with the Garden not willing to spend the gelt to find them, they tidy up efficiently, are shooed away with the limp flicks of wrists.
