Offshore, Liberty stands untouched, and untouchable, if already tarnished, and as such modest in her grief: arrayed in mourning robes, this metallic sackcloth, her torch a memorycandle snuffed in bronze for safety. As for her book — even if burnt, it’s still open. And as for that other monument, the tree, their Baum outlasting if only by a moment, a mere speck in the Island’s eye, all those other baums, and bergs, too, these krantzs and zweigs dead themselves, stumped graveless — once standing flagless, rude and proud in the midst of the Registry of the Great Hall halfextinguished, it’s a nothing now of choking, clawlike roots, to be upended for the mulch. Understand, this is assimilation: the transference of one element to another, one state as to its voided other, fire to smoke, tree to ashing away on the wind that seeds, and sorrows…O if only that smoke, that ash, it all, could be reassembled into the lost, but how, made manifest again and whole through some, any, allied alchemical effort…to be made then remade in perpetual recreation, what would that cost, what would that be worth — what’s a resurrected life, especially when you have to buy new possessions, when you have to chase after new desires by which to become possessed all over again? Air hovers, impacted, tight — heavy, as if the sky’s one spanless angel’s wing beating its hot thick breath against the faces assembled, too near, the holiness, it stifles. Guests standing outside loitering an uncertain future amid the certain morning, in diverse prodigalities of undress, they stare themselves into a mindful wakefulness, they have to, force themselves already to a newer purpose, inevitable and yet clutching anything they can: souvenirs, mementos mori, one mensch’s treasure another’s pagan trash, it’s said, jewelry, complimentary towels, bars and bottles of shampoo and soap emblazoned with the Garden’s seal — a tree’s star lonelier only than the Island upon which it stands, or stood, its logos the illiterate wind…grouphugging especially one another, themselves in their distress and shock as the monkeys now, the apes great and not so much, those forefathering creationary chimps, escaped from their subterranean vault, the Garden’s until presently secret Scriptorium in which they’d been enslaved and set to parchment copying, churning out their soferwork, the scrolls that are the Torah’s law: they’re flinging palmed wells of ink at everyone, hollering they’re hooting, swinging up from foundations revealed, grasping at beams and columns both falling and fallen to swing themselves, each other, with linked hands and arms from rafter to gird, antenna onto aerial then struts, with their quills as if daring letteropeners held between teeth, the Nachmachen alone in their midst and unhooded trying in vain to bribe them down and calm with the promise of a single banana he’s managed to save, just a peel, he’s sorry, from the Commissaries’ compost still flaming. Then, up from the deepest remains of underground life, as if the very unconscious of the structure destroyed, here comes the canine: dogs redeemed from the Kieferöde wildly spoiled by primal nature and yet retrained to work for their keep, hauling the sleds and the dead, with a pack following of the firemenschs’ dalmatians converted during the very siege of this catastrophe to the collarless cult of madness and so, to an impure, slobbering mate, they’re on fire and yelping and tearing through the assembled froth how they won’t tame down.
