He and with a silence that seems to twinkle returns to the den, if den it is, takes Benjamin by the hand. He’s a body come to life from the photographs on the stairwell. He’s the father of His father, whose father he might otherwise be. To take him slow, and as gently as you’d expect, naked fist in mitten fringed in tinsely poms, to lead Him to the stairs then up them, three at a time, and down the hall of shutdead doors to His room above the garage and its angelic ladder expected — forget it, you might as well stay a while, won’t you, make yourself comfortable, my house is yours, there’ll soon be beds empty enough; the two of them, Santa and son almost of equal size, stepping high, huge, and damn sleep loud into His room — and then Santa, holding a forefinger through the loose skein of yarn worn to his lips, slams the door bang behind them, though there’s no one left alive to awake.
At the corner of Deaf & Mute, known to most as the intersection of Eastern Parkway & Kingston Avenue, Brooklyn, in sunglasses at night, Mel Chisedic — not blind, but that’s how he makes rent out of season; habits are often stoned into Laws — loiters in front of a display window shattered open to winter, screening the madness as presented on networks owned by the dead. Eleven months out of the year his profession’s the panhandle, begging, predicated on this blindness, which wasn’t as much blindness as it’s more exactly the use of sunglasses, though occasionally there appeared an opening in Retard, an abandoned corner or curb, which estate, retardation, though more difficult to fake was for that very fact all the more lucrative, but this season as for the past decade or two of Xmases, ever since being released from the far from paradisiacal prison island known as Rikers and so reintroduced into the general population of the inexcusably unemployed, he was one of the legions of the Great White, a Santa, though less Santa or even a scrambly Satan as he often laughed than a lush, fat middleaged, more desperate than jolly, more wanty and needy than giving; his lap aching from the sits of adorable, panracial kinder with their marketable talents and astronomical intelligence quotients; his left ear — its ruby shard of earring out inseason — aching from their whispered wishes: for ponies ribboned, wrapped so shinily well they’d asphyxiate, for Mommy and Daddy to not get divorced, to love each other and me all over again, to buy like this new mansion for us to live in together high upon the fluff of an exurbiated cloud, hovering above the beach, Miami, maybe, then for me the sweetest ride, pimped to the maximum military surplus, with marzipan turret and gelatin treads; for this Xmas, all I want is for this scary acute lymphocytic leukemia to go away — is that too much to ask, Santy? Jesus.
Rummy cup of coffee in hand, dopey sack of a hat on his head, those wraparound mirrored sunglasses greasing down the slope of his nose, Mel stands offduty, riveted to the proceedings on the screens displayed as peaceful, orderly looting goes on around him: smashed plate glass, panes from windows and doors, splinters and scrap; hulking goyim of every color and class loading all sorts of kitsch into their idling cars, gaping trucks, highpiled grocerycarts, trashcans not aflame. A vast ziggurat department store specializing in just about every need of a number of minorities lately in the majority, those who hadn’t made the lottery to light out for Siburbia just yet (which designations would apply to Mel, too, whose Santa suit was as oppressive as his poverty and skin), Laz-R-Us is ten bags of stale popcorn away from being declared entirely out of stock, shelves laid bare, then the shelves taken themselves. Though slim pickings after the rush of last weeks, enough merchandise’s gone to worry the CEO of any insuring firm into investing a tenth or so of his own salary into stock in an overseas manufacturer of indigestion pills. The leftover lawn-front nativities they took, the plywood mangers and glittery tangles of hay, the remaindered miniature camels humped in velveteen and those swaddled plasticine babes, factoryseconds without mouths, and voluminous gallons of water, batteries and cannedgoods, everything save the kernels, popping on their own in the fires the looting’s left raging; though all had miraculously left the screens stacked in the window smashed open, amid the glass and glassy tinsel and the signs and the wonders, the pyramids tottering of empty boxes and the decapitated remains of mannequined amputees as if veterans of discount wars and riotous sales — but the screens: not only to leave them but to leave them on as if in the seasonal spirit, a public service, to inform, and to warn; it’s civics, but mute.
