As for Joysey, it’s irretrievable, fogged in smoke. We’re talking banks of the stuff, a run on them, craziness in a last hurried looting of the air for air. Flames consume even the silent bushes, the few remaining shrubs along the Garden’s waterfront. Here still in pajamas under his gown, Die with a cap atop his bald shaped like the moon slouching back toward black — who could take orders from one so appareled — how he suddenly realizes, with the fall of wax on his hand, that this entire time he’s been holding a candle, clutched from his nightstand as he rose into flight: a separate lone flame, having served to illuminate his escape until now; it still hasn’t gone out, but rather’s been melted to his forefinger, and what’s troubling is that he can’t feel its burn. He sits on the icy earth rocking, shrouded in bedsheets Mada’s draped over his shoulders. Chattering, the bite of frost. Soon, and in gross violation of standard ops, he’s surrounded by the faithful surviving: Hamm, and Gelt (an expanse of singleply sucked from the jut of the latter’s weak heel, the whitened sick tongue of his slippers — he’d been disturbed on the toilet), along with a smattering of Kush daughters in only their sequined bedclothes blown suggestively tight in the wind that’s helping the fire along…suddenly turning around in the opposite direction at the sound of another explosion, wondering where Wall Street’s gone, whether Mitteltown’s made off along with it: Manhattan’s skyline nothing but a dark horizon, a burnt finger poked through the smoke it’s accusing; and so already, the assignation of blame, and this with the flames still the rage. Firemenschs having been finally admitted on order of Mada who’s taken initiative when no one else can, they’re inventing a chain of command and with it, attempting to strangle: they’re massing around their trucks schmoozing, kibitzniks, they’re arguing with one another over where their water, which as it’s little is precious, is to go next, and who, for that matter, gets to determine the flow: they trip over their own hoses, they’re flung into the air with variable pressures of spray, their nozzles spouting what water in chains binding whether misered or — as the fire melts the ice, and the melt is tapped — wastefully massive: dousing Israel’s books burnbound, Hanna’s albums of photographs lain open to surge, the kitchen wretched apart in slivers of tile, a gasleak, a rupture in everything’s main, the livingroom a soaked inferno of sofas, charred furniture antique as of yesterday hacked apart with, oyf kapores — axes; hidden under the seared doormat of His house, a scalding key that unlocks no secret…all of it gray on the way to white, in this return to purity, to void: a burntoffering to be refused by God, returned to us on earth as half ash, half watery carcass.
