I know you’re there, you have to be, this is how it goes down…I had this dream, last night, or the night before last, what does it matter: there were seven beds for seven brothers, a hotel was burning and in the lobby there were cows servicing crows with the faces of inlaws, I think they were mine, that and a droughty famine in Sheboygan, or Oshkosh, or…I know how it all happens, don’t ask, I just don’t get why.
We admit, we had our suspicions…but we knew you weren’t yourself a firstborn once Passover passed. That proved it, sealed your goyishness with the New Year, and, as such, the gates. You’ve been trapped. Cornered. Put to bed. Nowhere left. He scratches at his breath of a beard, tugs payos, waits, takes his hat, all ten gallons of it from his head and leaves it on the desk to bare the yarmulke beneath, which is black and leather, expensive. I’ve been asked, nevermind by Whom, to attempt to save you one last time. You’ll have no further opportunities after this — are we understood…and he rubs the cap down over his skull, the kippah keppied between the eyes as a third eye, negativedark as if omniscient of everything wrong with the room: you’re here, you’re still alive, this I know…
He shpritzes tabakinate spit through his teeth to the floor, no matter, no one has to live here much longer…his mouth, a host of gold caps, dulled with black cud, whose essence is humming, Hatikvah — softly, it’s more for himself.
Enough already, there’s a voice from under the sag as if it’s the fisted talk of a last lost sock — and after all I did for that schmuck, that ingrate, B…
We don’t speak that name anymore, says the Rebbe, He’s not one of us. He’s the only.
I’ll be the first to admit it: we once were misled, a mistake, we relent and repent the required, the slichus and vidui by the minhag most recent, most true, but listen, it’s this…we realized it was our responsibility to further the nation, ours and none others’—not only to keep them, but to keep their memory, too, I mean burning…let’s speak honestly, though, the ninth commandment, I’m told: The millennium was upon us, the whole West was at stake, God was being debased, if not forgotten whether as He, She, It, or ideal, the entire world, you might remember, was going insane…and amid all this, you just can’t let a people like ours come to nothing, and only for power, only for profit — neither of you were to be trusted…
And now you want to destroy Him, the only inheritance left…Die rolls over to face his voice out into the room, hits his head on a spring unwound into nail, improvident, dull, gives a rusty gasp that knocks the frame’s knees, unsteadies the paws upon which everything rests, uneasily: God how He angers you, gets under your skin, on your nerves and not in your veins, no matter how much you suck, graft or grasp; anyway you slice it, I’m saying, He’s in the way, He’s too much the symbol, it pricks, how it hurts — the memory vex: His very existence, it reminds you of your own…
How could He have been an heir, He couldn’t be worthy — He was false, misleading, everything about Him was wrong…Him and not us. Fat glasses with a bad beard and uncultured, unculturable, I suspect, couldn’t get by, get along. Not great with people, do I have to remind?
Illegitimacy’s what I was saying, still is…He might’ve been what we made Him, though as that only half, a mixedmarriage.
What you made Him? bad blood — Shade backed you, then you went and abused privilege, public trust all for bubkiss.
What’s that we’re always told to say? I was only following orders? I was only following orders.
And so, what am I? Chopped liverish, chump?
What do you think I’m doing here, nu?
Hymn, I’ll tell you.
What I’m doing is waiting, patience now patient forever, we’re abiding while biding, call it a multitasked calling, dayeinu, genug. We await the Messiah, the true Moshiach the one and only, any day’s what I’m saying, soon, there’s been talk, soon enough, we’ve been assured, we’ve been blessed by assurance. Many believe His coming will be hastened by your, shall we say…
And if I Affiliate? and of all times he decides now to whisper.
The Rebbe rises, paces step step step over to sit down on the bed, gently, sagging onto the sprawl of his victim.
He asks, does it hurt?
The Rebbe tugs at the frayed fringe of the damask tester above — an overgrown treetop, a mourning mane grown by the dead.
Can I still? to ask a question of heels.
