They’ve been flown in from cities — from the aeroports of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Forth Worth, Denver, Detroit, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., with flights to those points of international departure from the hubs of Minneapolis/St. Paul, New Orleans, Seattle, St. Louis, Honolulu, and Juneau, having driven or been driven to any of these points of origin from way out in Siburbia, from Longport, Margate, and Ventnor down the Shore, Joysey, from the City by way of those Rockaways Near and Far, these Five Towns, purely White Plains, deepest Scarsdale, easternmost Westchester, the Sleepiest Hollows along the Hudson due north…the liquidation of Central & Mountain, the purge of the West: a utility vehicle parked in a relative’s driveway in Los Siegeles so that they’ll only lose one is the thought…left there until a return that’ll never depart — a lonely unmarried nulliparous aunt driving them out to the facility in her wagon so that they don’t have to take theirs then leave it for whom, a taxi sold for scrap, a limousine junked, masstransit transfers to terminal feet…an extermination without resistance, except with regard to its price; with stopoffs where and for, urination at the Manfred “Manno” Marx Memorial Service Plaza located twenty or so miles outside the limits of Angels, horsefeed and watering at a condemned gas station in Danbury, Connecticut, caffeine, the succor of a last phonecall, a goodbye cry amid the glassed bosom of nowhere, now former, to be filed under “as, previously known,” yesterday’s, to be repossessed by the Affiliated; arrived tomorrow and whichever way at whatever aeroport then waited, soon to miss, everything, routine, ritual, the illusion of the interminable, the long for forever…they wait almost in a suspension, in a Messiah’s slow time, late and latening, in the lagging pace of quicktime, never enough — O never forget, never waste a forgetting: always a people in transit, in motion, on the move, with yesterday’s or tomorrow’s newspapers already to pass the time passing, to waste the time wasting, comics with their bubbles popped empty, glossed magazines, tabloids and rags, other miscellaneous leisure reading material of a let’s be honest fairly unimpressive intellectual level; then, they’re shuttled everywhere, shunted, to places only imagined, voicedover in advertisements, announcements, orders, the Law, dispersed beholden to all conveniences of transit to gates, at which they waited, and wait, patiently laughing at their passport photos, passing them around passing, impatient, waiting, still laughing, waiting to wait — then they left.
An Affiliated bled on fences everywhere, bleeds…a village becomes a town becomes a city, has a Square around a Church around a mensch there, an Affiliated — the others always lived downhill, though, where the sewage flowed to, flows, and everywhere is like that with huge fields between everywheres: a town bombed does not rebuild its Square — all roads there lead to all roads there, road, and not to expectation, a holy vacancy, holying, an empty nakedness, the void, denuded; the Church like an old giant roach, perched atop the head of an ancient snake…maybe the river that halves the town, swallows other snakes, the snakes swallow rats, perhaps, poison becomes poisoned, the snakes swallow plaguecolumns whole, slither themselves into the streets around houses, homes their doorposts once marked now spackled over in reddened black, scales.
