by Joshua Cohen
As he could pass, Heber’s been turned loose himself, as a gobetween, a messenger, sent up north to unofficially monitor Mormon HQ, to relay reports from the Quorum of Elders and its High Priesthood lately governing the territory while engaged in seccession talks with D.C.: one generous jowl they are, an entire wifeload of trustworthy deportment—even with a volunteer army and, gevalt, a reenfranchised militia or two massing at the southwesternmost nib of Wyoming. A deal’s offered to turn him doubleagent: Ben for a pardon’s what they’re proposing to Heber, come back to the fold, ingather, deliver your mensch and avert the wrath of your people, your father you escaped for opportunity east—that and just name a sum involving as many zeros as fair and smiley enough that you could drive your limo dead through them and into any future that pleases…Heber—having been uncovered, blown as Gelt’s facilitator, zeroing in on the holes not only in their thinking but those in which Ben might’ve been abandoned for sale in the west (peering in pits, casing the caves)—instead failing the directive to become his own brother-in-arms’ lock-&-keeper, to make sure we’re both in the same interest here, on the same page, which is blank…IA not just the acronym of the home of the recently influential Des Moinesher Rebbe, it’s also the abbreviated shibboleth for paranoia, affairs as internal as they’ll ever get: not trusting your left hand while his right grips the wheel, pulls southerly out, deported with escort through the pearly gates and back through Nevada into Californ-I-A and its Angels on a wink and a prayer, with nothing to declare save further disillusion. Wives are huddled into a single skirt. Splinter factions are formed by the wind like the violent sharps of badlanded cliffs. A blond nation’s laying in supplies for their lattermost days, growing blonder by the night, accounts have it, unto transparency, is what a handful of Mormon defectors report; until you could see right through them, see through the whole state to the other side, eventually, and their intentions, their modus immodest: a nation of light, pure; up there days’ll last forever even in a winter as wintry as this should’ve been summer, and so maybe Ben did have the time—or else, Gelt thinks, maybe ursine He’s due in for an appropriately unseasonal hibernation, Yo Semite National Park, or a low lie in the Dakotas, those Badlands then the worse lands and then the lands that get just evermore progressively terrible up toward the Canadian border, dynamited Rushmore territory and further, Alaska, when Gelt he’s in enough of a rush already, out here alone, payphoning collect to the opposite coast, will you accept the charges back to the Garden and Der, who’s returned to the east himself, to plan for any eventuality, his own and Ben’s both. Not that it’s just hushed, unofficial, that they’re biding their bidden: how it’s public, too, citizenry called to account—they’re told, search Him out under your beds, in your closets, pianos, bathrooms, stuck one leg down your laundrychutes, where. Warrants might even be waived for futz anyone knows, issuance, free license to bounty Ben made implicit; I swear it’s around here somewhere or other, and Gelt pats himself down.
Not alone, Gelt has judgment on his side, though it might be as impetuous as it’s interpretive, perpetually arguable, given down in a stone that can always be smashed in confusion. After all, this needs be held accountable to a Law ever newer, or older, just greater: pursuant to article, nu, who knows which, and which is whose portion, who are we to prosecute or judge (the punishment for the sin of a tiny quill slipped amid margins, the only sign of a letter omitted from record—that’s why this detail, that’s why this depth)—unless, that is, suspect heads for a refuge, one of an ornamentally small but for now holding steady number of participating outlets that still dot the interior, stipulated autonomous; the suspect, the large-at-large, having picked up this useful schmeck of information, follows His own finger pointing due east, makes it inland to the foot of a hill, there stops a mensch and his whinnying, reeling horse, the both of them stuck in the mud.
Know where I could find a haven around here? Ben asks him or the horse, rolling up His sleeves, off the cuff casual, and the mensch points, a hairy stump raised to a sign up the road iced ahead, summitting its hill, a tatter of poster tacked to the flesh of a leaning oak:
Refuge (nearer than you think)
Ben thanks the mensch with involuntary gropes and grabs, hugs, kisses, throws His weight under the horse’s sagging stuck belly, one thrown rider more away from being turned into glue (with which to bind a book, perhaps, whose pages, hymn, let’s only hope they contain a ruling against that that prohibits even the emergency consumption of the species), and the two, peasant and pursued, groaning, with their shoulders, bone bursting under their skins, free the animal, which stomps then kicks wildly a tack of knobby limbs. To quit them then ascend the hill, Ben slips down the slope with the wind, in the direction of His ascent down to the most starved flank of the horse unstuck and the mensch just past tugging always tugging, who kindly points out to Him the sign again with a wave to stay away. And so He goes to ascend again and then again slides down on His haunches, atop His tush, His face forced down against the wind, squinting, a nosebleed…and still behind, the horsemensch heading in an occidental direction. And so to shimmy up on His stomach, to snakewriggle, sidewind atop ice—to top the violently sloped, cloudbound hillside, then right Himself at its summit with nicks at the elbows and knees and stomach scraped red under the useless white of the sun and the shadelessness of the leafless oak.
Incomprehensible walls line the interior of the valley below, obscuring, this delimiting haze regular and yet in motion, rising and falling only to rise again, then fall—lips of mouths, they seem…teeth, they’re masticating furiously, falling and rising on their own, individually, the entire eastern slope of the hill a vertiginous swarm of rusticated, unserviced dentition between the individual ords of which, deep amid their crenatures, hang other people, flayed carcass and spewed corpse, the face of the whole an inconstant, dizzying up down up down that’s impossible to focus on simultaneously and so He shuts His eyes to understand—to chip and chew at an image frozen, this newest memory, a revelation made of shock. Not walls now or teeth, but teething people…or the walls are themselves people, babies crying, wailing, walling. This is a city of people, of maybe thousands of them, a million, who can count, He wouldn’t know where to begin; the valley nests them, holds in their reek, their scum, their noise, and is them, as well. Bebabbled kibble. Heedlessness sustains. Ben sits tushed at the summit, gazing down upon the valley’s munched mass: moving forms, shadows, moving so much now and so fast it’s as if they don’t move at all, tornadolike going nowhere, a stationary whirlwind as if the about to address you presence of God Himself, His vocal wrath. Ben slides in, Pyramidal once again: down He goes down the iceflume, accumulating speed and mass, weather rounding form—to hit the wall, wall’s people, knocking them inside, sliding directly into the dead, exact middle, into its totally trampling rampage, to surface from out of that maw of knees, elbows, shoulders, and palms to air, only to be swarmed, then trampled again to the earth packed hard with the stomping of feet on the frost.
Name? a voice rasps, its hands or another’s tugging one of His ears wide, and of what are you accused?
And none of that I am that I am shtick, says a voice different but the same, whatever name you want, choose your crime, your victim, flatter yourself—you think we’ll know the difference?
I myself was a saint, name’s Kraus or Krauss now, I forget which, how many esses we’re talking…Ben keeps His silence, too scared to talk, a step upon His tongue; the mensch inquiring drops Him to the enormity’s floor, that darkness stomping still. Another leg up to the surface, a grasping gasp.
Not that it matters, yet another voice says. Silence is an alias as good as any other. An alibi lullaby, you put me to sleep, the z’s.
Hands hold Ben flat, face up to the sky, borne in triage above the muddy throng. His pockets are emptied, of empty, nothing gained, His holes prodded, He thrusts hands to prevent violation. From atop, the valley and hills on both sides, though human, have been reduced to an animal rout.
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Don’t think you’re the first person who’s known his rights, is heard. And don’t think living here you’ll live any longer. Hell, don’t think at all…
Registration’s at the western slope, an orientation meeting to follow—hahaha, a general hilarity, which manifests in a gnashing of rank gums.
Stop confusing the boy, an older denizen says.
Refuge, he goes on, asylum, you dig?
Shalom, welcome…groovy, hip, here goes: make love not war but both are money, peace be to you, all that.
These are the rules that aren’t: if you make it here, you deserve to live; if not, not, easy enough—and, another adds, deserving to live doesn’t mean that you will.
But, to begin: no one here’s anyone’s anything…we’re all equal, the same: farout degenerates and dippy dropouts, gratuitous grudgeholders, zonked lowlifes, and petties; the walkingwounded veterans of private, unsanctioned aggressions…
An older refugee it has to be, another atop the swarming, the whirling whorl, how he shrieks out almost unheard to Him, God, I know you, I know you, I do, how he’s insistent this putz, won’t give up: Israelien, remember me? I was there that day in Mudville you wowed them all? Under which rock you been hiding? Not here. Been stoned? I would’ve noticed, even in this.
Yet another and another passes and greets with a twofingered, onefingered, nofingered grope as Ben’s passed around for recognizance—as if one of their own, and despite.
I’m sorry, Ben’s crying, help me, forgive me, forgive (lines from the Show, the Tour’s patter His memory can’t quite shake, or won’t) and a voice says back to Him, wait up, forgiveness? you’ve got Refuge, brother, you sure you’re not aiming for Exile? asks a mensch depluming his chin, feeding hairs to his protector who done chomping gummily asks, where’s that? Answer is, a day’s walk in any direction. Ben’s handed from mamzer to shmuck down to schmegegge to schmendrick, the greasily unwashed and the gracemad, the hippy hippie fallen on hard times, no great shakes, the losing, the lost. A commune bit dust and rusted and aged to entitlement, rage: burntout bug vans and veedoubleu’s, overgrown with tiedye and hemp. An air dayglowed with smoke pungent from where and with failure. An exceptional deformity rides up to Him on a bubble bursting, is passed on from hand to mouth in approach: he’s eyeless and toothless, too, with a nose just nosing on. Psht! he asks in a whisper, pssshht, I’ll trade you an eye for an eye and flashes the ripped fray of his jacket to expose mucosal wares. No? Howabout a tooth for a tooth? I’m talking top quality incisors, none of that denture dreck. Limited time offer, friend. Going fast until you’re robbed broke and blind. You’ll find me if you want to. As he’s hauled away he yells behind him, ask for Mendy, then when they tell you they don’t know from no Mendy you should say, you know, that Mendy…it’s obvious, then, that there are darkening markets of ever darker markets here, unto pitch, and that even their goods and services are tightly rationed by avarice, or secularist greed, the extinction of latest hopes and radical will, the triumph of desert over a dinosaur’s dream; obvious, too, that everyone robs everyone, that robbed stuff is robbed, rerobbed loot robbed then robbed again, as the dead pile up underfoot, counter the culture—there’s no Law, and everyone’s in on it.
Freestanding, eminently wandering, emanatingly wanderable, these refuges providing shelter for the homeless, the broke bust heimatlos, whom society seeks to destroy and now more than ever before, have been set up on no money, only grudging permission, and’ve decayed from the first, becoming less about honoring the provision of the Law than about finding any loophole providing, then—inhabiting it, a temporary noose, looser than most. God Above, how excessively fringed, how faded: intention, respect, a sense of place, standing, a feeling for land. Debauched without habitus, amid the spiraling mud. Though it’s important to make this distinction: this city of refuge is not a city qua city, classically speaking it’s no city at all, only a gathered mass of land, of lands, and their refugees, formed to the give of a valley, the left mess of leftbehind people, outcast undesirables sleeping on each other, waking up on each other, as each other, eating and drinking one another, it’s sick: with no aid from the outside, no intervention, how these people have become their own beds, knives, forks, spoons and cups, transportation, people are shelters from the unaccustomed harshest of elements, people as floors over the earth, people as roofs, sexual implements, sites of excretion, means of execution; the people are the city and the city is the people, and so the decay it’s transmittable, transmutable, how it follows them, waxes and wanes with their migration, their wandering devastation as if they’re a swarm of locusts, not a disorganization of parasite humans—destruction the legacy of this city that’s no city, the sole and so lucrative if ever desired export product of Refuge. And so the exact, on the map location of this city of refuge, of all the cities of refuge, of all the cities that are the one and only city of refuge, up and moves often, is moved, inexacts itself, imports itself then takes leave, wanders and roams widely with its refugees and as them, too, in their tight, evasive spheres, their madmuddied paranoid spins and loops, backtracks and longcuts and yadda and blah—and so the pleasant, peasant mensch with the poor horse stuck whose route of trade takes them past or around and around the Refuge wherever it is often thinks to move the sign, an oaktag placard of his own design if and when his ride obliges; his ride that is his trade, and his only possession: he’s been trying to offload the horse now for moons. Traditionally, though, the refuge roams itself coast-to-coast, accumulating refugees all the slow slogging while: wandering’s forever, as people that tightly knit and wound, grouped for safety, survival, braided and dreaded in curls, they tend to trip each other up, sort of fall for and backward over one another, on top and under, in an intoxicated and intoxicating to participate in or even observe stigmatiferous staggering from platz to plotz, it’s hypnotic.
At Ben’s arrival, they’re heading east again, if roughly, and this valley’ll serve for a pleasant spell, recently popularly voted to be surroundings suitable for a welcome moment of repose, a refuge from Refuge pop. ilimitable, before moving on to ruin the next town, to leave it smoking, wasted; there wherever a mouthful of people to move on out to the edges, daring to, feeling strong enough it’s tempting, to transact business with shops along the way, to purchase sundries and packagegoods at the price of favors, humiliations, disgrace, to say Shalom, send a letter or telegram, make a phonecall, find a new mate or victim beyond the walls of the city unwalled. The people of the wall are regarded by many scholars as those possessing the most guilt, those who’ve decided, freewilled their own standing out there on the outs to functionalize form, structure, stolidity; the most unfortunate of them, edged up against the tumbling hillside, becoming eternally crushed. Otherwise, the wall that is all of people are those who just happen to be, whether through fate, the leaning fall of happenstance, abated natural strength, who happen to have found themselves left to the skirts, banished by the decree of no God they believe in out to the periphery of such a violent, illintentioned throng, the unwilling fighting and gnashing to get in deeper, to the destruction at middle where it’ll still hurt but you’ve got a better shot at dying by the hands of your own brethren companions (if hands they still have, and free), which has to seem, at least in the way of dignity, preferable to most to death from without, to being murdered by those who lie in wait for a refugee remade. In the interior, amid the ruin of tattered tents and leantos and threadbare teepees and hogans and wigwams, among the remains of doomed domed gardens and farms and a dry, witheringly lumbered pen for the raising of livestock gone missing, which animals they’d agreed, or once thought they did, to maintain and care for communally and then to slaughter and divide up equally their flesh fed on dream—everyone’s lost their personalities, also their ages and sexes: female like male, kinder the elderly, kinder who’d done their parents wrong, elderly who’d sinned against their kinder, who’d murdered to enjoy the sorrow of outliving in anything but this peace and quiet however deserved
. An encampment of families mixed and broken, converted to lives without name. By dint of sheer width, Ben—after His initial inspection atop the mass, after He’s strangled back down—abides like a lodestone at center, immovable but molten, a star’s burning core; liberally not planetary but sunlike, that around which all must revolve. In this middle, the epicenter of such seismic scorn—with limb shattered to limbs, throats stomped to sucking death—everyone’s trod upon, but Him, He’s the exception, always is: there wombsafe, coddlecradled, a babe.
Ringing the valley, pulsing, on the hilltop, are obscurant forms, establishing, establishment shadows—businesstypes, respectables, former congress-menschs they look or talk like, MD-PhD’s, editor/esquires…people in waiting. Mandated to remain outside the Refuge, they wait to exercise their right to exact punishment from the refugee should he, she, or it ever take leave of the city and so, its protection, should they ever quit the company of their sins: ever prepared, dysnfunctionally vigilant and yet patient to win such vengeance with axes, splinterhandled, incomplete sets of kitchen knives, with swords of elaborate letteropeners, factorysecond nailfiles, cactiburrs made maces, found hunks of masonry, unfinished railroad spurs, ties, rocks, meltsharpened icicles, wormlengths of scrapwood. Passing the time, dust from sand they sieve with their mouths, hanging open, panting, not shocked at the valley but impatient for its opportunity, when—for a future not to be occupied so wastefully; their ties slung heroically over their shoulders, the sleeves of their suitjackets rolled up as if for heavy lifting, for toil.