As it’s soon understood, these scholars have been assembled to settle a dispute quote of global importance, of, quote, international scope: theirs a question that seeks not one answer but millions — eighteen million to be precise, the famed Octadecamega as the pollsters would pundit at the very margin of error; it’s to answer with facts, identities, with names, and current mailing addresses and telephone numbers, who to scape now, now that rapture and our redemption and yadda’s out of the question, which question is ours and not theirs, it’s explained; it’s that the people, in conversion and not in their death (though death is perhaps a species of conversion, not one would later suggest), had been essential to redemption, endtimes salvation, and now that that seemed gone all to hell or to heaven and which, what’s next, any ideas — when do we break, where’s the toilet?
This revivified Sanhedrin has been convened to choose a new chosen, to conduct a new selection — to identify a People, according to their missionstatement: to be selected through the will of God, or through those whom that Deity selects…a directive already drafted and ratified by the usual Washington interlopers and upstartists, as if anything they legislated would be signedover in fire by God, the nibbed forefinger of, that willed and willing Deity party and without the hindrance of dissenting votes, as President Shade — assisted by the Mayor of New York, newly named Meir Meyer, here little more than a functionary — takes the lectern to announce, and with no mean modicum of humility, God’s selection of himself and his subsequently deific selection of this Das (apparently, a former advisor, chief of staff to a predecessor better forgotten, a cabinet member, past secretary of the Treasury a few have to remember, a shadow owed much and by many), invested with autonomy as full as it gets, promised no interference, no accountability expected and, anyway, who has the time; this deicidical Das who in turn has ostensibly selected those assembled below, foremost intellectuals, policy wonks, thinktank wizards, and the odd factotums of fictional government to infiltrate, make report, ensure what we once knew as due process — this in an operation financed by the holding escrow of the assets of the dead: to peruse assorted arcana, pursue genealogies, wills and testaments of every ilk and ink in the hopes of ascertaining the representatives of our impending redemption. Or else distraction, popular ruse. And as an assemblage without a mission is as a mensch without a head, the body of choice is already accounted: there’s policy, protocol, they might even have an insignia, a motto (though none knows what those are; each is urged to bring not only pencil or pen, but their own stationary, too), everything except an idea of what anything means. Still, in the following season the scholars are ordered to apply themselves as diligently as desecration can be, and sooner than they’d ever imagine they’re firing off memoranda and missives discreet, regarding the suitability of proposed scapes to colleagues sitting, sleeping, slumped just to their left, to their right, across tables, down halls; a deluge of notes, reports, inscrutable forests of papered waste: hemicovers of books slam closed, cause enormous clouds, dust to eclipse the above, to obscure the silent morning visits of, among others, the dubiously redubbed Mayor, accompanying the President, Das in his General uniform twostarred one day, threestarred plus purplehearted the next, flanked by his innumerable minyans of minions, plainclothed as decalogues, in suits pieced together of drab tablets.
