As the sun rises a slight clearing, again the blur of Manhattan’s very south, a wisped glimpse of Joysey beach, crabgrass and the hummocked dune beyond of industry’s smote sprawl…the Great Hall’s revealed, lost, the ghost of its guests, completely cinderdestroyed, utterly unutterably tinder: to go the way of the lives it once hosted, whisked up vaultways through smokestacks of smoke with smoke pouring through them ever exalted; its remains fall apart in the hands, fall through the sifting of fingers and stain, memory, until washed away through a melt in the ice, a hole — a polynya, a negative island. Spotfires rumble at perimeter, pockets smoldering, fume. Stray doorknobs tumble hotly across the square fronting foundational ruin. Tanks go out then the melt reserves, exhausted; eyes and mouths hold the only water and are losing it quickly; through a thinrimmed, dangerous opening whether melted or smashed with axes or trucks what with the weight of their tires, they’re soon pumping the lower Hudson directly, bailing the bay, it’s too late…reinforcements have been slow to arrive, thanks in part to a few guards at the Joysey approach still screening: orders are orders, always just following the order of orders, the protocol of detritus, procedure sunk deep in pondy pits, dug out by hoses by their steady focus and pressure, to be followed only by a directive to preserve — the Administration to take over the Island, to oversee it personally, Shaded protected, an army of agents safeguarding schlub and rub, keeping the remains from any element that hasn’t yet savaged: lengths of flute, revetments fallen, crumbs of column lining the edge of ashen decline to ice melting, melt melting…the door to His house, goldenyellow — Hanna had chosen the color, Israel’d hated it, a landmark argument (she’d called the Koenigsburg’s crying, the shoulder that was Edy’s phone, cradled between the ear and the shoulder with both multitasking), let’s not get into it, not the right time — it’s being carried by two firemenschs one on each side, carrying it to salvage: they heave it to a hulking sledge, to totter atop a mound of similar relics; still in its frame, not yet unhinged, it’s just hanging and so opening nowhere, without an up or down or an in or out or anything, melted from its wall of morning: it’s the same shade as the dawn, the color of fire, a bruised fruit sunrisefire, morning’s purge, the shake of dead branch, from its bark a page blank, aged to brittle — and an island, an Island is the only darkened thing, and darkening still, as if its own shadow, its blackburn a castdown remnant of the night; it lies in the bay becoming ocean as a wound, an openly weeping wound, floating always at the edge of this hemisphere, turning, only to teeter upon, then fall from, the very edge, right off this flattening world — never to heal.
