The Burden of Babylon

On the morning of the second week’s Sunday, following a disquieting conversation with my Sister, Miriam Schoen, I went out into New York City.

I went out into New York City, into Babylon.

I went into the deepest interior of the land which was my Adversary’s, and was consecrated to him.

I surveyed his streets and towers. With my blazing breath, I condemned them; my blazing eyes saw what would become of them.

I listened, without flinching, to the senseless gibbering of my Adversary’s scryers and soothsayers. I beheld, without retching, the barbarous finery that adorned his women.

I saw what my Adversary was making ready. I saw the straw, and the soldered wires.

I saw New York City, microcosmos, monument to emptiness, first beachhead of my Adversary’s war. I saw the false, mindless, manless mass that he was constructing; I saw how he was conceiving chaff, and bringing forth stubble, in imitation and mockery of the creation; I saw the mass that he meant to substitute for the earth, and for the men on the earth.

I saw the straw, hung all across the Valley of Hinnom.

How it hung, like a kingly hearth, readied for Molech. How it was piled up over that deep and wide pit, lifeless and desiccated, like so much firewood.

I opened my mouth, and my breath was like a stream of brimstone, pouring over the kindling there—and kindling it.

 

 

I was Herschel Schoen, walking the formless and futile city.

I repeat: I was HERSCHEL SCHOEN.

I do not have to tell you what this means.

For if you do not know what this means, already—then we will have failed, in our contest with my Adversary, on the twenty-fifth of December, the fourth Wednesday.

And in that case there would really be no purpose in saying anything, or not saying the same. For in that case, there would be no purpose to anything at all, anymore.

I write so that my words shall not be necessary. I write to make a wall of papers which will defend me. I write as a readying, a marshaling of force, a fashioning of armor and armaments.

This page of notebook paper will be of great use on the twenty-fifth of December. But we will not have any need of it at all, in the days that are to come after.

It is my Adversary, not me, who celebrates words, and holds them dear.

It is my Adversary, not me, who gives words to men, and makes them forget; who makes patterns in his sweet and evil breath, sweeping aside and obscuring the superverbal LITERALITY of the body—the light—the Original Knowledge—the Original Creation!

All that is dear to him, and celebrated, I gather unto me. I make myself master of his poisons and his whirling blades. I turn his own methods against him, in order to humiliate him, and so that I might honor his craft and cleverness.

But you must not think, even for a moment, that they are my methods, my poisons and blades. If I make myself Herschel Schoen, whirler of words, it is only for the sake of what is to come after my words have proven their worth, and become dispensable. There are no words for that which is to come after, nor can there ever be.

I write—not to be read—but as armor, and in armament.

I speak—not to be heard—but to set ablaze.

 

 

I walked the preparing ground of my Adversary’s camps, and could walk there with a proud head, for I too was being prepared.

I was Herschel Schoen, bodily, blazing, full and overflowing!

Powers too numerous to name, too luminous to limn, attended and aided me!

Isaiah the son of Amoz attended and aided me, and Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah rode by his side. Ezekiel the son of man ranged through the camp of my body, and lent his blazing breath, to serve for a campfire there.

I am Herschel Schoen. I know what will occur, in days that are to come.

Which is to say: I am Herschel Schoen, prophet.

Does the word startle you, alarm you, make you fearful? It should not. I am only making plain, here, what has been clear enough in all that I have ever written, to anyone who can see past the thinnest of veils and discern what is plainly there, behind them.

I have always known the body of the inevitable. But on the second week’s Sunday, I did not merely know that body.

On the second week’s Sunday, I spoke—and my FULL VOICE set the inevitable into motion.

On the second week’s Sunday, I saw—and my FULL SIGHT bored into the heart of each man, and revealed how he would be laid low and desolated, and his neighbor beside him, and the whole mass of all of them.

I knew and spoke and saw and heard and smelled and tasted what will occur, in days that are to come.

 

 

I went out, into New York City!

Which, to hear men tell it, is microcosmos indeed. Babel, and the heavens to which Babel aspired, in equal measure. The first are there, men say, alongside the last; the highest, alongside the lowest; sublimest form and fullest fullness, alongside utmost vacuum and wholest void.

I went out into—what?

Come, now, young men of the earth! Come, stand up, stand tall, sing!

City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!

Tall masts of Mannahatta! beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

Teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from FORGOTTEN courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally FORGOTTEN!

Sleepless and Cyclopean city, ever watchful, lit from within! Five-fingered hand, spread over the waters!

New York City, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Americans’ pride! Vast fruit of life! World capital, center of the universe!

Babylon, Zion! Faithless Jeshurun, and Jeshurun, set on high above all the nations!

I do not hold myself against you, young men of the earth. Though you sing the city’s praises, while I sing its destruction, I have no quarrel with you. Just as it is fitting for me to sing of bloodshed and ruin, so too it is fitting for you to sing, and for your song to be a song of glory.

For there is everything, in New York City. As there is everything above, awaiting us.

That city’s skyscrapers reach up, in Babylonian ambition, in reverence of Babylonian ungods. And they reach up—without knowing it!—for the true glories which are above them even now, and which are their birthright.

New York City has forgotten itself. That is its fatal error, and its only error.

Were the city to remember what it is?—wake from its slumber, rouse its titanic body from the riverbed, and see itself with opened eyes—?

We would have, then, the Original Creation in its entirety.

We would never again need any other city, or any other thing, of any other kind whatsoever.

 

 

I rode the elevator, crossing the many floors that separated my home from the earth below it.

I crossed the lobby, and the front door of the complex.

I went out, into Brooklyn, New York.

I walked teeming labyrinths of ancient streets, prepared in their twisting profusion, to confound the senses. I saw the dirt and refuse which my Adversary had scattered over the streets and the stoops and the sidewalks, in offense against the weighing and measuring and proportioning of things.

I breathed their rank odor; I breathed their deaths onto them.

I saw the high brick walls of the apartments.

I saw, jutting out from these walls, the twisting hulks of metal that men call fire escapes. They lay prostrate against the brick, suppliant, desperate, in extremis; to abase themselves before some faceless and absent lord, they contorted their bodies against nature, into writhing wretched forms like the skeletons of ancient birds; they lay in wait, trapped in an endless and unendurable moment, for the kingly reprieve or reproof that they sought, and which was never to come.

I watched the smeared shadows which pooled around these unfortunate bodies; which flowed across the stoops and along the sidewalks; which dripped from the denuded and cringing branches of the low shrublike trees. The feeble December sky spilled its listless light onto the earth, carelessly and without passion, having no reverence for the firstmade gift which it, secondmade, was made to give. It shed that gift like so many flakes of dead skin, falling wherever they may.

I walked.

In the pooled darkness at each edge of the street, I glimpsed the beetle-like backs of the crouching cars, arrayed in their orderly rows.

New York is my Adversary’s city; its ways are his ways. So it is that metal beasts creepeth upon that city’s ground, side by side with the vermin and the steeds, and fashioned in imitation of those true and sixthmade beasts. So it is that electric birds fly in the open firmament above that city, in forms that mimic and mock the fifthmade fowl, yet with circuits substituted for hearts inside the hollowed-out cavities of their chests—and, in the hollow voids of their mindless minds, prediction offered up in place of Truth.

New York is my Adversary’s city, but it was not given to him. It is his to hold, and play with, for now—but it will not be his to hold, or play with, for much longer.

New York is my city, and His.

All the city’s things are mine, and His. All of them, down to the last.

As with the Intercessor, even New York’s errors are proper, and fitting, and hallowed.

My Adversary, connoisseur of shadows, thinks he has found something attractively broken here in this city, something winsomely lost, in extremis, which contorts itself against nature, breaking and mangling its own limbs in desperation, and laying its warped body down at last in utmost prostration before him.

He thinks he sees a pretty and pliable clay, upon which he may inflict his evil designs without meeting the least resistance. He is set on high above the broken masses, now, and he is brought to trembling by his lust for re-breaking them. He is coming to believe, through these signs, that his long-sowed plans are now bearing fruit at last. And so, he thinks himself glad.

He thinks himself glad, but he does not know the first thing about gladness.

He holds New York City in his hands, but he does not know the first thing about that city’s nature, my city’s nature. He thinks he has found a mire of error, a mass of wretched refuse well fitted to his wanton tastes; he does not know that all the city’s things have been prepared with an inner meaning. So that even her abominations are hallowed. So that even the empty temples of her ungods are full, their stale air invisibly suffused with those finer substances which are utterly beyond the perception or understanding of any ungod, any Adversary.

It is fitting, and proper, for the metal beasts called cars to swarm on the streets of New York City. These are her natural fauna. They were given to her, and she to them.

They will roam proudly, all across her many streets, in days that are soon to come.

I walked the side streets of Brooklyn, New York, past the huddling masses of cars, yearning to breathe free.

I walked her thoroughfares, and crossed their wide intersections, where the cars in their many colors were woven together in a quiltlike tiling. I moved freely, but they could not; an insoluble gridlock puzzle arrested them. They sulked, sullen and immobile, waiting in vain for some ancient and long-absent king to unravel their bonds with a single swipe of his proud blade.

“Soon!” I proclaimed to the assembled flock of them, waving my arm in a broad arc.

I walked, passing under the tall stalks and budding bulbs of the streetlamps.

I felt their Cyclopean gaze on my back. I felt how their lightless and lidless eyes watched without will, and without cease; I felt how they whispered into the wires which coursed unseen within them, and which spread as roots beneath them, under the earth.

I thought: I walk, and my Adversary does not fail to take note of me.

I thought: his city’s circuits, everywhere and everywhere unseen, are ringing with news of my peregrinations.

I thought: I am watched. With his hundreds of lightless eyes, my Adversary follows my every step, and observes my progress, and takes stock of me.

Fear took hold of me, for a moment. In spite of all that I knew.

My Adversary’s city, I thought. With my Adversary’s ways.

I had strode carelessly onto the gameboard, that morning, wasting my first-mover’s advantage. Now I lay exposed, in full view of his thousandfold eye, and naked before the evil finery of all his conceits and constructs.

Initiative was no longer on my side—and what was more, I would no longer be allowed the luxury of deliberation. Every step I took, on side street or thoroughfare, was a fresh move in our game, unable to be taken back.

I trembled. I thought of turning around, retracing my steps, returning home.

Isaiah the son of Amoz took hold of me, then.

He took my arms, and they were no longer mine, but his. He took my legs, my head, my mouth. His will, not mine, moved me.

I stopped, next to one of the lamps.

I took stock of it. I looked it up and down, appraising its dull and shadow-mottled carapace.

I raised my face to the lightless bud at its tip. I saw that lidless eye, staring into me.

I stared back, and did not blink.

Isaiah the son of Amoz took hold of my fear, showing me its inner meaning.

What I felt was not fear, not any longer. It was the thing that is on the other side of fear, and is fear’s true face, proud and shining.

There is a thing, a great thing, which the fearful forget. Indeed, fear is the forgetting of this great thing, and consists only in the fact of that forgetting.

The thing the fearful forget, I then remembered.

I thought: no, Adversary.

I thought: when I say INEVITABLE, Adversary—do you think I am merely using a figure of speech? Employing hyperbole, for rhetorical effect?

I thought: I am being PERFECTLY LITERAL.

I stared, and did not blink.

A prophet moved my prophet’s lips, to tutor me in their proper use.

I spoke:

Behold, the day of Santa Claus cometh, cruel, and full of wrath and fierce anger! To make New York City a desolation, and to destroy the sinners thereof out of it!

I stared, and saw the things which the mist hides from the eyes of men. I stared into the streetlamp and the sky, and saw these opening to me, revealing themselves to me.

My gaze bore into the bulb of the streetlamp, and through it, and through time.

I saw what would occur, in the first hours of the last day.

In the first hours of the fourth Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of December.

The bulb, glowing, and its fellows glowing alongside it.

The black hush of the night, broken only by the cones of light under the lamps.

The silent city street, empty of men, where substitute flesh kept needless watch over substitute flesh.

The rows of lit and lidless eyes, staring straight down at the metal beasts parked below them. Without blinking, without will, without cease.

I saw the light in them extinguished, all at once, in an instant.

I saw the light in every one of them, extinguished, in the same instant.

 

 

The night glows electric, in New York City.

To do honor to my Adversary, and to give him practice in his evil craft of circuit-spinning, the city is kindled anew each night with a conflagration of false light, sprawling in false constellations and lending them an ill-fitting, over-eager electric brilliance, which mocks the modesty of the true and fourthmade stars!

A crude thing, an accumulated mass of impudence!—rising to drown out the tiny voices of those infinitely small, infinitely pure, infinitely precious stars!—utterly obscuring them from man’s view, night after night, hiding the shadow starlight that is meant to constellate the shadow firmament above man’s head!—blotting out the true and fourthmade night canvas that was given to the men of the earth for their gladness and sustenance!—blotting out the blushing bright shadow of the winsome, well-measured light above, which falls from the stars in the Original Firmament, as they sing endlessly of Him, in infinitely adorable voices of infinite meekness!

This is my Adversary’s way; it is not mine.

And so, it will come to an end, in the first hours of the fourth Wednesday.

I saw the streetlamps flickering off, all at once.

The crude lighted facades of the bars and bodegas, going suddenly dark.

The city, Babylon, laid bare and plunged into darkness.

The city, Zion, laid bare and made open, to receive the glory which had been above it, all along.

The black hush of the night. The city made modest, no longer distinguishable from any other body upon the earth.

The heavens above it opening at last, unfurling their constellated canvas.

The shadows of the fourthmade stars, bright at last above the city.

The stars’ eternal song, in praise of Him, no longer drowned out, but heard clearly.

And now commingled, in playful joy, with a song which is not eternal but seasonal.

A song in praise of their sudden and unaccountable deliverance from captivity; a song of unanticipated gifts, and of the man, their giver. An emended song, not found anywhere in His created liturgy, but added in latter days, by another.

A song which is not His at all—which belongs, wholly and only, to the Intercessor.

 

 

I turned a corner, onto the gaudy and evil thoroughfare which is named Church Avenue, in mockery of a great man.

I had intended to come this way, to reach and traverse the so-named street, as I have done many times before. I did not choose my steps senselessly.

Nonetheless, when I turned the corner and saw the first of the street signs bearing this name, I could not help but laugh.

“Church Avenue”! The gall of it, the overweening impudence!

My Adversary is subtle, but only when he wishes to be. As I have lately noted, his tastes run to the crude. Modesty does not interest him. Show him that which is proper, and well-measured, and he quickly grows bored.

“Church Avenue”! No, he is not subtle at all, except when he needs to be.

I laughed, again. Not at my Adversary’s brutish jest, but at his pretenses to guile. At the way these pretenses contested against his vanity and his coarse humor, and met their match, and gave way.

I thought: do not imagine, Adversary, that I do not see you, watching me and mocking me.

I thought: you are following my progress, Adversary, and taking stock of me. Have you noticed, then, what I am doing, as I walk your city?

I thought: you have a thousand eyes, while I only have these two. Nonetheless—with my two eyes, proud and undaunted—I am following YOUR progress, and taking stock of YOU.

A man, walking in the opposite direction, came quite close to me, nearly brushing my side as he passed. He was loose, shaggy, smiling, gormless.

He waved to me, before passing, as one might wave to a stranger’s dull and pitiful child, thinking that the child will be astonished that you have taken any note of him at all.

I stared at the waving stranger. My gaze bore into him, and through him.

I saw the corpse that he would become, in ten days’ time.

 

 

I reached my destination: the Church Avenue Station.

I walked, smiling, through its great double doors, and into bedlam.

The New York City subway system was made to carry men, and carry them it does. But the city swells up with men, inexorably, and the mass of them have lately become too heavy a burden for the metal beasts of this system to bear with dignity.

Have you seen what men are like, when they gather in unwilling swarms, and pour furiously forth into cramped and narrow spaces? When they find, once inside, that there is simply not enough room for them all—and yet they are all there, nonetheless, pressed indecently against one another? Circled all around by strangers, and held by that converging and constricting circle in a suffocating embrace, so that they come to know their neighbors’ flesh more intimately than any wife knows her own husband’s?

Have you seen the unhuman, reeking paste that men become, in great numbers, under great pressure?

That is what men become in the stations of the New York City subway system, and in that system’s cars.

Even on a Sunday morning. And even at one of the more peripheral stations, such as Church Avenue. Even then, and even there, the men swell and teem until they can no longer be borne with grace.

Still, these men must be borne, from one station to the next, and on to their destinations. They must! Look at the face of any man out of such a mass, and you will see this frenzy, this orgy of necessity (must! must!), burning in his half-mad eyes.

So they are borne. If not with dignity, then without it. If not as individual men, then as formless paste.

I saw the men swarming, beneath the high arched ceiling.

They moved like insects, and the mass of them moved as insects do, when massed. The air was damp with their sweat, and clotted with the sound of their lamentations. Though I knew that the din around me was made up of voices, I could not make out any of them individually. I suppose there must have been words, too, within the din, but these were wholly lost on me, if indeed they existed to begin with. Speech deformed under pressure, and became something else, pastelike and formless.

I pushed my way through them, with practiced steps and gestures.

I have often had cause to ride the subway. I have learned how to carry myself effectively in such an environment, how even to retain a measure of grace, in spite of the place and the hour.

The hot, wet, sickly station air was not a thing to be wished for, under any circumstances. Still, it conferred certain advantages, in spite of itself. A body like mine, recently immersed in the merciless cold of a cruel midwinter day, meets a blessing when it next meets warmth, no matter the circumstances.

Nothing in New York City, I note, can be wholly without advantages, if one knows where to look. For all the city’s things have been prepared, and each has its own inner meaning, if one knows where to look.

I felt the massed heat of the men flow into me, restoring all the strength which my Adversary’s day had tried to sap from my limbs.

I smiled, and thought: these men do not need their strength. They rush, half-mad, towards mortal ends, in service of earthly projects which cannot last, and will soon be swept away. Let their life-heat pour into me, instead, then. They do not need their strength—but I do.

Presently, I arrived at the platform which was the object of my foray into the mass.

The world within the station, though still wordless, did not lack for letters. I saw them, emblazoned on the banner high above the heads of the men.

B, inscribed on an orange circle. And Q, beside it, inscribed on that circle’s yellow sibling.

I thought: orange circle, yellow circle. Last light’s sun, and midday’s.

I thought: abstraction is a false pretense, and is always so. Literality shines out, inexorably, through the holes in its mask.

I thought: all my Adversary’s conceits and constructs, in the end, cannot but reveal their nature, as mere imitations of created bodies.

I thought: he weaves subtly, with his matchless hands, and yet he cannot weave any form that was not already made, long before his time, by an even greater hand.

I thought: he makes his lamps flare out in the night, with an over-eager electric brilliance, and he is proud, and thinks himself glad. But he makes no light of his own—none whatsoever. And so there is no light at all in his many lamps, besides that which spills into them from ANOTHER place, and was never really HIS at all.

Soon enough, the Q train came hurtling into view.

It belched foul mists from its unhuman mouths, as it advanced. The air filled at once with the senseless squeals of that train’s habitual bleating. Meeting the high arched walls of the station, the noise splintered into a succession of echoes and echoes-of-echoes.

I thought: it imitates itself, and imitates its own imitations—in imitation of its own imitative ways. What else can it do?

I thought: there is no sound at all here, besides that which is sung by the cantors of another place, which the city merely overhears, fancying in its FORGETFUL ignorance that these sounds are ITS OWN. But in fact the city can bring forth NO such thing by itself, out of its own futile mouth.

The train disgorged a congealed paste of manlike flesh, as though unaware that the platform had already been filled to capacity, and then filled further still.

With a practiced, insectile fluttering, the mass of flesh on the platform made way for the newcomers, and then reared back on them, to ingest them.

Paste mixed into paste, squeezing all distinguishing characteristics out of the arriving men, so that only paste was left of them, after.

I walked forward, through the solid fog of flesh. My practiced hands brushed men aside, gently, without enmity.

I reached the doors of the train.

I smiled, seeing the familiar bronze arch that crowned these same doors. I smiled, seeing how ornate it was, and how finely made.

It sat uneasily on the brow of that rude, belching beast. Like the crown atop the profane and pimpled head of some dissolute young prince, just now made king against his wishes, through his father’s sudden and untimely death. The law of succession is an ancient compact, and it bends to no man’s whims.

The wordless letter-language of the subway system was inscribed there, above the doors, in gilded letters arranged prettily against the bronze: B. R. T.

I watched the curling, intricate forms of the raised bronze around the edges of the letters. Their lithe sinews cradled the letters, and rocked them to and fro, with a mother’s softness of touch.

Though they were duller and baser than the golden babe they held, there was nonetheless a special glory which was theirs alone. Their coy, coiling intricacy had too much of shadow in it to be viable in the bright soil of gold; their darting play had too much in common with the ancient and holy game called hide-and-seek to be fully feasible for one who is like gold, one whose very hide glitters like the last light over the waters.

They held a king-child in their arms, and what glory was theirs was given entirely unto him. Given in reverence, and given with love.

I smiled, noticing the origin of this special glory.

They held the letters safe, formed in the image of a mother’s arms. They crept and forked, coy and intricate, in the image of a tree’s branches.

What else could they do? Scratch the surface of any latter-day conceit, and you will find the oldest things underneath: sixthmade arms, thirdmade branches.

Truth abounds in the sweltering air of Babylon, if only one knows how to look for it.

I stepped across the threshold, and into the belly of the metal beast which was to carry me over the waters.

I thought: now I go up, into Manhattan, into the city proper.

I thought: do you think me cowed, Adversary? Do you think I fear your towers, your gardens, your vaulting monuments to empty ungods? Watch me now, thousand-eyed watcher, and see what I shall do.

I thought: now I go up, to the seat of the image of jealousy, which provoketh to jealousy.

I thought: now I go, without fear, up to the smooth stones of the valley where the throats of the innocents are slit by the financiers, and the innocents’ blood is spilled out over the rock in offering to Molech. Now I go, proud and spiteful, to the streets where the traders pile up their ill-gotten gold into the shapes of idols, as though they have not heard what HAPPENS, to men who do such things.

I thought: will you defy me, Adversary, on that proving ground? Do you dare test me?

I thought: perhaps you do not appreciate, yet, just who it is that contends against you. In that case, I will not leave you waiting, but will correct your errors promptly, showing you EXACTLY what you have gotten wrong, and tutoring you in the costs of such costly mistakes. For I am, before all else, a TUTOR.

It was pleasant enough, declaiming in this manner for the benefit of an unseen foe, who did not raise his voice to refute me.

I felt perfectly safe, declaiming and taunting in this way, secure in my position atop a high mount raised up in my mind, set above the stones of the valley, overlooking battlefields and proving grounds.

I felt comfortable, there. In that place I was among familiar things, known to the judges and the prophets, known since the beginning.

But—I reminded myself, then—I would not have the luxury of familiar and eternal terrain, in the battles to which I would soon be called, and in which I would soon have to prove my mettle.

The city is mine, eternally. Mine, and His.

But I did not have the luxury of eternity, yet.

Soon enough, the hours would stop succeeding one another. Soon enough, the restless cycles of mortal and changeable time would come to a halt, and be laid to rest. Soon, December’s days would run out, and run down, and cede their mantle and their crown to eternity.

But not yet.

There would come a last hour, and there would be no more. But until that time, it was my duty to contend with the hours, each of them in turn.

It was my duty to face the city, and see it without fetching illusions, as a soldier must.

Not ancient Babylon, known to the prophets, ageless and comfortably immanent—but a mere finite structure heaped up piece by piece, in latter days, out of latter-day brick and steel.

Not a proving ground, set high above the earth, made for devils and lordly preceptors—but a mere collection of houses, made for finite and humble men to live in, with a similar collection of mills and factories heaped up by its side, made for those men’s time-bound toil.

Hour by hour, they toiled. Hour by hour, they traded in their life-heat and their dignity, to secure bread and safety from the elements, and a place for themselves amidst the tumbling of the hours that were to come, one and then the next.

I thought of the city, and felt uneasy.

The city. The towers, falling upward toward the firmament, confounding the senses.

The bricks which were of no significance, and yet were still piled up, one and then the next.

My still-shelled body, falling to the ground in the middle of the street, finally unable to withstand the senseless din of the things which were of no significance, and yet assaulted me still, pounding and drumming on the surface of my holy shell.

Pounding, drumming, on and on, endlessly. So that I could not hear the angels, anymore, or the stars.

I am Herschel Schoen, but my knees do tremble, sometimes.

And give way, under me, sometimes.

There is only so much that can be borne, by anyone. Even the angels measure out their own limits, and refuse to cross the boundary which they have so demarcated.

There is only so much that can be borne. He appreciates this full well, though His creatures sometimes forget, and imagine themselves truly boundless. Do you doubt it? Recall to mind that Cain committed a great evil, and still the weight on his shoulders was made lighter.

What else could be done? He could not bear the weight, and so it was lightened.

I thought of the city, and of my thin legs, quaking inside my shorts, and giving way.

On one summer day, in late June. In the time when I was still shelled, and silent, and could not reveal what I was.

My Sister, Miriam Schoen, calling out to me in alarm.

My Mother, Ruth Schoen, calling out likewise, and venturing out into the crosswalk where I lay, undaunted by the cars that were crossing it, and which threatened my fallen body, and would have crushed it, if they had not all seen me just in time, and swerved madly at the last instant to spare me.

The city. The financial district. Tower of steel, idol of bronze. Monument to nothing, and yet the men still bustle there, counting out the hours. With little patience for eternity, or for strange and silent children.

It was this, that I would have to contend with. This, and my quaking legs, and my finite heart, which could only bear so much.

I thought again of my Mother, Ruth Schoen.

Who was already there, in the city.

Who had forgotten, and did not know that eternity would be hers, only a handful of hours hence.

Who did not know that eternity would indeed be hers, if only she were to accomplish one simple, seemingly easy task: to keep her body safe, hour by hour, until the last hour.

If only she did not—

If she could only preserve her body, for these last ten days, rather than offering it up in sacrifice, at the final—!

I held my head in my hands.

I knew, then, that all my boasts from my high mount were nothing but vanity, air piled on empty air.

“Have no fear,” I proclaimed, to all that would hear. “I go, without fear,” I declaimed, from the safe place in my mind.

And all the while, my Adversary held me in his clutches, watching my every step, and cackling.

Just as he held my Mother, Ruth Schoen, even now, in the deepest belly of his great monster, where his slaughtering fields were laid out over the stones.

 

 

Flesh was packed tight into the confines of the Q train. Men were compressed, there, just as they had been in the subway station. I stood in the midst of their pastelike mass, hemmed in on all sides by arms and backs and heads and bosoms, unable to move.

Unlike the subway station, the train was cold, and cruelly so.

You would not think that a narrow, enclosed corridor, with men packed into it as tightly as durable food is packed into grocery tins, would be capable of such cold.

Nonetheless, so it was. As the New York subway system strained under its burden, and met its limits, unwelcome marvels were made newly possible. The usual laws of air and heat and flesh were seen to bend, and all that was solid melted at last into stale, damp, malodorous air.

I stood, clutching one of the short straps that were hung out above the aisles. I had no need of its anchor, for if the subway car were to pitch or swerve unexpectedly, there were fleshly bodies all around me, ready to absorb my fall.

Still, I clutched the strap, out of habit. And too, perhaps, for the sake of dignity, whose name I held holy even here, among the paste.

For these were men, all around me, I reminded myself—men, and not mere flesh, despite all appearances. These bodies were not made to serve me, as occasional cushions, to be discarded once they were no longer of use. They had their own reasons for being, wholly independent of me.

This is a man, I thought, regarding one of my neighbors.

He was sharply dressed, or rather dressed in a manner that was called sharp by custom, though I cannot say I found much to admire in it, myself.

His hair was styled so as to make a statement. Or, I should rather say, styled in the manner of which one says: this makes a statement. Perhaps it did—but if so, its creed was lost on me.

I saw the close-cropped cliffs of his skull, denuded up to the point of the temples, and slightly beyond. I saw the particolored tufts, tiered like birdfeathers, that rose between those cliffs, and held themselves aloft in a preening pose, defying both gravity and propriety in one stroke.

But if these things were meant to speak to me, making some definite and discernible statement? Then they failed, or I did. I saw no sense in them, only form.

He faced the window, and I did not see his face.

He seemed to be alone, in the sense that he journeyed on his own through the subway system, much as I did. In several other senses, of course, neither of us were alone at all: we had one another’s silent company, after all. And, after all, we were both pinned and immobilized in the midst of the paste, surrounded by sweat and breath, as far as can be imagined from any ordinary notion of solitude, and deprived of all solitude’s pleasures.

He was alone, and yet he spoke.

He faced the window, and spoke, to himself or to no one, as madmen do.

“We gotta get him synced,” my neighbor said, his voice under high pressure. He seemed just at the near edge of panic.

“We gotta get him ramped up,” he said.

I had many neighbors, then. Such was the nature of the paste.

I glanced to my left, and saw the young woman there, who had adorned herself in such a wealth of Babylonian finery that it threatened to overtake and depose her.

One would only have to add a single bracelet to one of her well-braceleted arms, or drape one additional pendant alongside the many baubles already dangling from her neck, and that would be that. The accumulated mass would notice its shape, which approximated her own; it would come to know its worth, and demand its independence; corselet and headtire would preach class consciousness to ring and to nose-jewel, and the sashes of the head would put aside their differences with the anklets of the feet, in the name of unending solidarity for all garmentkind. Then the whole would stir itself, rouse at last from its servile stillness, and—after evicting and casting aside the useless meat within its jeweled carapace—would stride proudly into the city, a walking shell, without innards.

In the city it would live her life, for her, in her stead. Or, it would live some other life, of its own choosing.

“We gotta get him briefed on the new GTM roadmap,” said my tufted neighbor, by the window.

“He needs to be leveraging the new dataviz tools, pronto,” he said.

He gibbered without sense, as madmen do. I felt a pang of fear, then, for this stranger.

He was nothing to me, and still I feared for his sake. Perhaps I made myself feel this because he was nothing to me, as a distracting palliative. A moment’s substitute for the graver and less whimsical fears which threatened, then, to bring me to my own limit and past it, and break me.

“And the sales funnel?” my neighbor said, with rhetorical enthusiasm.

“The sales funnel? I mean, we gotta ram that shit into him, know what I’m talking about?

“Our guys are dying out there. We need him ramped and ready, stat.”

His head bobbed slightly, as if carried aloft on the eddies of his rhetoric, and his feathered hair bobbed atop it.

“He needs to be deploying the new deck left and right,” he said.

“He’s gotta, like, become one with that thing.

“He’s gotta know the KPIs, love the KPIs. Better than he knows and loves his own mommy. Know what I’m saying?”

The train lurched. My much-adorned neighbor lost her footing, briefly, and fell briefly into me. The mass of her rings and bracelets preceded her, and met my flesh first, before her own flesh had the chance. I felt the coldness of their metal in the cold air, and I felt their hard metal edges, digging into my skin.

It was only a moment, but they dug deep. It came as no surprise when, some time later, I glanced at my own arm and found that it was now marred by a series of red slashing marks.

“Prospect Park,” said a disembodied voice from above. It was vaguely distaff in demeanor, but otherwise wholly sexless. And wholly lacking, as well, the spark that separates men from clay.

My Adversary makes metal beasts, and makes circuits in them which feign speech. He has his reasons, and I have no quarrel with those reasons, insofar as they are purely practical. One cannot begrudge an enemy’s prudence without cutting one’s own self down in the same stroke, for prudence is a common good, equally capable of advantaging any man who heeds its maxims.

But if my Adversary has more than prudence in mind?

If he believes that his speaking circuits imitate sixthmade marvels, and bring into question man’s supposed dominion over the lifeless metals of the earth? If so, then I must protest.

These simple toys, with their paltry stockhouses of fixed phrases, would do offense to the parakeet, if offered up as substitutes for that versatile bird. There is no reason whatsoever to speak of these things, and men, in the same breath. My Adversary has wrought true marvels, in his time, but these are not counted among their number.

“Prospect Park,” the speaking circuit repeated, with an identical cadence. It did not know what it had said, before; it did not know anything. It had no memory, and approached each moment as though it were the only moment that existed in mortal time, with no past behind it, and no future still to come.

The paste heaved. Manlike forms were excreted through the doors, and forms similar to them were ingested to fill the void they had left behind.

I looked around me, taking stock of the newcomers. I had to take them in quickly, before they lost their forms, and were fully dissolved into the paste.

I saw a mother boarding the car, near its far end, with her infant strapped onto her chest in a sort of saddle.

I stared at the babe, trying to catch its attention.

After some time, it seemed to notice me. Its amber-colored eyes turned in my direction, and then stopped in their tracks, and turned no more.

It held its face towards me, and held itself very still.

Do you recognize me?, I wondered.

Is that why you stare, so? Because you knew me, before you were given to your mother?

Or, I wondered, do you only stare because you have been cast down into a confounding place? And I am Herschel Schoen, famously odd of countenance, uncommonly confounding to the eye? Herschel Schoen, who does not always take care to keep up appearances, and sometimes moves in a most unmanlike manner, not fully hiding the powers appointed to him that lie latent within his limbs?

The infant mewled, unmanlike, not in happiness nor in woe.

Its mother squinted at it, warily, no doubt wondering whether this latest noise would turn out to be the start of something. An early warning, prelude to a squall of wails and shrieks? Or an esoteric sign, instead, that a diaper had been soiled, and needed changing?

I felt then, in my bones, what I knew already to be true.

I felt that which I knew always, but sometimes merely knew, without feeling it, in my bones.

I felt Truth, in my bones:

I was the only one in this car who UNDERSTOOD the meaning of this infant’s noise.

I understood this infant, and its ways, as its own MOTHER could not.

I feel no joy, noting this now.

Every mother walks a hard road, and is beset with burdens. She labors, and labors, and labors still. And what is more, she is asked to become a fixed anchor set amid the whirling of a confounding world; to make a comforting softness of herself, and stay ever soft, come what may, without yielding; to fashion herself into a warm hearth, and bring a cold iron will to bear on the stoking of herself, so that she stays ever warm, come what may.

We do not expect these marvels and paradoxes of our soldiers, when we send them forth to walk hard roads, and bear burdens. We only ask that they walk the road, and bear the burden—and for that, we deck them in medals and glory, and esteem them above all other men.

But we expect more than this, from every mother. And think nothing of it, and give them no medals, and give them only the most perfunctory sort of esteem, inserted somewhere in the middle of the larded hunks of sentimental platitude which we recite without thinking, at those civic occasions and private gatherings whose customs require from us some measure of sentiment and platitude.

I would not tell any mother this part of what I knew, unless I had to do so. I am not cruel, not in that way.

“He’s gotta live and breathe pipeline velocity,” my mad neighbor said.

I watched the infant’s arms as they waved, unsteady and unanchored. It was unused to shadows, and found its own body as confounding as the others.

I remembered what I saw and felt, when I was its age. How I, too, was confounded.

I looked into its amber eyes.

Have no fear, I thought, silently.

 

 

Tiring of the infant’s intensity, I sought out duller things, without mind.

I turned my gaze upward and out, toward the back wall of the car, and the parts of it that were visible above the massed heads.

The wall was dirty, profane, squalid. If one were asked to produce an illustration which would accompany the definition of the word squalid in a dictionary, I do not know how one could do better than to portray this very wall.

Layers of grime caked it, but they were only the beginning.

Here and there, pieces of refuse clung to the wall, affixed to it by some unknown force. Unwelcome marvels become possible here, in the subway, under the strain.

Scraps of old newspapers were stuck to it, in places. The sides of them were peeling, and their edges were singed brown, as if by fire.

One wishes there were some other word, for such objects. “Newspaper” connotes “news,” which in turn connotes “new.” But there was nothing new about these fragments.

A murk of decay hung about them. I felt, seeing them, as I might feel at the bedside of some senile and used-up old man, wracked with all the usual illnesses of age and other ailments besides, so that he seems nothing but a mere unmanlike bundle of pain and ignorance, and seems to cry out in his wordless confusion for some hand, some blade, to finally cut him down, and let him sleep.

Ancient hunks of well-chewed gum were stuck to the wall, also, with bite marks fossilized forever into their dry and frozen forms.

I note all these things first, but they were not the first thing that one saw. It took some care, in fact, to even see these things.

What one noticed first were the letters.

They were not the crisp, decorous letters of the subway system’s wordless language. They were systemless, crude, lascivious. Scrawled by miscreant hands, and guided by miscreant aims.

They were obscured, here and there, by the piled-up refuse. What I could read, however, I duly read:

FUCK EGG

SHIT

FUCK JOE 222

CUNT JESUS

031

HANG THE BA

FUCK BLOOD IN

SHIT BLOOD OUT

ILL THE BASTAR

RTT 83 ASS CRAK

JESUS SHIT

FUCK CUNT FUCK

I do not reproduce, here, all that I read. There was too much of it to commit to memory. It covered nearly every inch of every wall, and the ceiling, and the floor. The selection above conveys the essential elements, out of which the rest of it was made, in different mixtures, and different orders.

Truth be told, I do not hold myself against the unknown hands which wrote these letters.

Were they miscreants? Ours is a miscreant city, my Adversary’s and mine, and His.

Were their words lascivious, scatological—in a word, yes, profane? Of course. You have read them.

But you have also read “Of Ministry,” and so you know what I have lately learned about the Intercessor, and his temple, and how one pays one’s respects in that hallowed place.

“The ROI?” my neighbor said.

“The ROI is, what? What was that?

“Excuse me? The ROI is . . . TBD?!

“Tell me I misheard that, man. Come on. Throw me a bone, here. Our guys are dying.

“We need him. He’s gotta be slinging artifacts, hitting milestones. He’s gotta be converting, left and right.

“Converting like it’s NBD.

“Like it’s easy, you know what I’m saying?”

 

 

Suddenly, I was blinded.

I cringed and squinted. All was awash with light, and my eyes could not bear the fullness of it, at first.

Halos ridged the edges of things, in the light. I blinked, and they diminished.

I blinked, and continued blinking, until the halos were no more.

The subway car had plunged out of the darkness, and into the daylight. The day was as dark as ever, but even the darkest daylight is blindingly bright, when one has gotten used to any other sort of light.

We are crossing the Manhattan Bridge, I thought.

Now I go up, I thought, into Manhattan, into the city proper.

I did not feel ready. The prophets were with me, and the judges, and the angels, and still I did not feel ready.

I turned to the window, wishing to look out over the waters. One took this opportunity when one could.

I gave my mad neighbor a gentle nudge, trying my hardest to make it seem a request, and not an order, or a threat.

He obliged, instantly, without really seeming to take note of me. He stepped aside, into a momentary and convenient void, prepared for him in the adjacent paste.

I was coming to like him, somehow.

I stood close to the window, and peered out.

I saw a flock of black birds, unimaginable in number, so numerous that they colored the sky with their black, making a night out of the day.

Rather, that is what I thought I saw, at first.

If I erred, I erred forgivably. What marred the sky did in fact look very much like a great flock of black birds.

At first, anyway, if not on closer inspection.

I squinted, watching them wheel and weave, trying to find some form within their chaos which held still, and which one could hold onto.

The way they moved across the sky, I noticed, actually resembled the motion of swarming insects, more so than it resembled that of flocking birds.

The way they moved their own bodies, however, was neither birdlike nor insectile, nor did it resemble any other moving creature, fifthmade or sixthmade.

Their winglike protrusions did not flap or flutter, but were utterly still. Their whole bodies, in fact, did not fold themselves into one form and then the next, as you and I do, and the other creatures. The fliers’ forms were frozen, incapable of reformation, like the fixed and rigid limbs of plastic toys.

And yet they moved, across the sky.

I picked out an individual among the fliers, and watched him in his flying. He did not give me much in the way of demonstration, however. For, mere moments after I had selected him for my quarry, I lost him.

He took a sudden steep dive, as though aware of my attention, and wishing to hide from it. He fell, too fast for me to follow.

I looked down, wondering where he had gone.

I saw the jutting piers of the Navy Yard, below. I saw the black specks of the fliers rising off them, into the gray morning.

A countervailing flow filled the voids that they made, as they departed. I saw black specks descending, as my skittish friend had just done, from the sky to the piers.

They were machines, then, fashioned for war?

And if so, what then? What were they?

Airplanes—in miniature?

Airplanes, in miniature, and multiplied, beyond number?

I thought: oh, my Adversary! Sublime craftsman, with no superior, save for creation’s very architect! What toys you make, in your city’s splendid factories, second only to Santa’s!

My gaze roved over the waters.

There were ships, docked there, at the Navy Yard. Two of them.

I had not seen them, at first, because they were pitch black in color, just like the fliers. It took some care to make out the still, frozen black shapes that lurked in the water, camouflaged by equally black shapes in constant flux, aloft.

I saw their inimitable hulls, vast and all black, save for the rows of lights that were on them, blinking in red and green and white.

I saw their inimitable masts, as black as the hulls. Each of them was a fluxless eye among the fliers, held still at the innermost center of their fluxing hurricane.

Fliers whirled about the masts of the black ships, without cease, in reverence.

They are in the business of war, Frederick had said, of these ships.

They are cleaning up after the last war, he had said.

And making preparations, for the next war.

My hand trembled, against the window.

It was well enough to prance and preach, safe on the high mount in my mind.

From that place, I could conjure up the utmost bloodshed with my bloodless words, and know that my hands were yet unstained, and I was far from harm. From there I could delineate how all the battles would be fought and won, without having to think about what the word battle really means, when it ceases to be a mere word and becomes instead a literality, and makes all men realize how like ants they truly are, as compared with the boundless and bloodied world about them.

It was one thing to prance and preach, on the high mount. It was another thing entirely to see my Adversary’s armaments, spread out over the waters and the firmament.

My Adversary is a connoisseur of shadows, and of great bodies, as well. The city, and the battlefield, are his natural units of measure.

And I—though I am Herschel Schoen—have only a man’s body, insectile, and all too frangible.

I wallowed in my misgivings, and considered the possibility of despair.

Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah came to me, then.

 

 

He sat by my side, on the high mount in my mind.

We sat in silence, for a time.

At my side, he wept, as was his way. He laid his face in his hands, and tore at his sackcloth garments. Twice, his silence was broken by a single, piercing, half-mad wail, after which he lapsed immediately into silence again.

All men know that Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah is a prophet of lamentation; all men know that he weeps. To know him is to know these things.

But the way he weeps—the sound of his wailing—these are lesser known, and less well appreciated.

How do you imagine he sounds, when he cries out, in utmost abjection?

Do you imagine him some meek and sexless thing, making barely any sound at all? Moaning thinly, like a lost kitten, for a moment, and only for a moment—and then folding back into himself, immediately, in blushing modesty, afraid that he has made too much of a racket?

A man of pretty and pliable clay, who lies down without resistance to receive the brand of His punishments? Who relinquishes his will with rather too much readiness, like some perverse and pitiful Yeshuan?

No! Not at all!

When Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah opens his mouth to wail, what comes from him is a marvel, and a terror.

The word lamentation is too weak, too soft, suggesting nothing of that prophet’s terrible strength.

His wailing is half-mad, beastlike, almost a howl. It fills up with grief, and grief pours over its top, but it is not only grief that pools there, and overflows.

One hears rage there, always, waiting beyond the last door in the house of grief. One realizes, hearing him, how closely grief and rage are bound together.

How could it be otherwise, for a prophet of the earth?

For a man who speaks with Him—who speaks, therefore, with the sole and only cause of all his misery? With the sole and sovereign will that wills all his desolations into being, bringing them forth from unformed deeps? The matchless maker of his misery, and of all his people’s misery, and of the very fact that men die, to begin with, of old age if nothing else?

What we call “grief,” in a prophet, is really half rage, in our modern vocabulary. Do you doubt it? Listen to Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah in his keening, and the fact will become terribly clear. You need only listen, and consider the terror that mounts in you: your terror is that very fact, about prophets, now resounding in your bones.

He cries out in grief, yes, and in rage, too. His shrieks are half-mad, unsystematic and unregulated, heeding no limit, pouring over every threshold, upending every altar in every temple.

Which is to say—yes, yes!—when Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah holds his head in his hands, and shrieks, the sound that comes from his mouth is very nearly a laugh. How could it be otherwise?

 

 

He spoke to me, at last, on the high mount.

You, fearful?! he spat at me. All his fury against his own maker, he brought to bear on me, then.

How COULD you be? When your road is so easy, littered with luxuries and wholly devoid of desolation, as no prophet’s ever was before you?

I bowed my head, and listened silently.

He sneered.

Pampered prince of prophets, consider what you have been given, and weigh it against what was given to your forebears. Ask yourself: is there any gratitude left, in my rotted heart, which has softened too long on the vine, and now becomes food for the worms?

I said nothing.

Were you mocked by all, as you prophesied, becoming a laughing-stock all the day? I was.

I might have said, “yes,” but I thought better of it.

Did the chief of the temple smite you, and put you in the stocks? Did you stand trial, with the specter of execution over your head? Were you persecuted, by many hands and without end, on account of your prophesying?

Did Adonai of Hosts come to you, time and time again, to tell you that His wrath was now turned—no, not against some OTHER nation, conveniently set apart from you, and against the empty breath of the idols worshipped THERE—and not against some convenient “Adversary” of yours, either, SOMEONE ELSE’S ungod, and never yours—but against YOU, and YOUR people?

Did you plead for mercy? Did your Master rebuke you, time and time again, and interrupt your sobs in order to reiterate and redouble His list of the ways He would lay waste to YOU, and your family, and all your people?

Did He toy with you, as He did with me?

What have you been told? “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee”? I was told the very same, as a lad, in our first meeting.

But I would not say that I felt SANCTIFIED, hearing all that He was to say to me later.

“And it shall come to pass, when they say unto thee: Whither shall we go forth? then thou shalt tell them: Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword; and such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for captivity, to captivity.

“And I will appoint over them four kinds: the sword to slay, and the dogs to drag, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and to destroy. And I will cause them to be a horror among all the kingdoms of the earth.”

It is a prophet’s duty to speak His words, and bring His message to the people. Such were the messages that I had to bring; there were many more like this one, as you well know.

“I will cause to cease from among them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the lamp.”

This is milder than most of what He told me He would do, but still I single it out. In spite of its mildness, somehow it seems to me the most hideous of all the lines which I wrote, at His bidding. Who could break this news, to his brethren, without himself breaking, inwardly?

We would be routed, and then held captive, in exile: that was the brunt of His message to me, on the day He said that. It would last seventy years. I would die, before it was over.

But what of my people’s children, and their children after them? Could I live out my span in exile, knowing some better thing awaits those who would come after me?

I should have known, by then, not to hope.

What awaited our descendants? An earthwide conflagration, ruining captor and exile alike, ruining ALL, and bringing dishonor to every house equally.

“And the slain of Adonai shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; they shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried; they shall be dung upon the face of the ground.”

THAT was how He would bring the seventy years to an end.

In days of slaughter. And with a cup of fury, which it fell to ME to dispense to all the nations, through the book I wrote at His bidding. Which would outlive me, and continue bringing bad news even when I was under the ground.

This was my yoke, and I did my best to bear it. What is YOURS, Herschel Schoen?

I bowed my head, and thought silently.

It seems light indeed, to me, he said. Your prince’s yoke.

Made of silk, it seems to me, and pleasingly perfumed.

What conflagration was given to you, made yours to prophesy? Only some war in which YOU shall be victorious, and no reckoning will come down upon YOUR house, but ONLY the house of your “Adversary.”

Or so you tell me, and tell everyone.

Even this is not pleasing enough for your jaded heart, it seems. I hear you saying that you are more than just a conquering prince, and will do more than simply win a war.

Conquering prince and prophet: surely that should be enough for any man.

Yet I hear you saying that you will raise all the dead from Sheol, afterwards, as well! So you fancy yourself MESSIAH, then, is that it? Has the seed of David drifted so far from David’s Israel, to sprout HERE, in the wasteland that is beyond the waters?

Oh, there is more! I hear you saying that you will bring an end to the shadows, after that, raising men up into the place that was before birth, to sup on the manna there forevermore.

What a joy it will be, announcing these things to the people! How pleasant your duties are, in comparison to mine!

I raised my face to him, finally.

“I did not choose this,” I said.

“I was given this,” I said. “And I was given, to the earth.”

He nodded.

If that is how it is? Then, so be it.

Why should I waste my breath, envying you? I could go on envying you, and never be done. You live in latter days, when all men are princes, with chariots and hearths of their own.

So you are blessed, then. Praise Him! I will not begrudge a man his blessing.

I only ask, Herschel Schoen, that you BEHAVE like a blessed man.

Why hang your head in fear? Your portents are true, are they not? You will crush your “Adversary,” and raise the shades, and disperse shadows.

“Will I?” I said.

He cringed, and a wail went out from his mouth.

Come now, he said, clasping my chin and forcing my face up to meet his eyes.

Come now, coward.

That is no way to carry yourself, is it?

You know what is to come! What—do you fear to SEE IT?

It will happen, in ten days’ time.

If you fear it now, standing as you do at a safe distance, how do you imagine you will like it THEN, in ten days’ time, when it falls down on your head, and you cannot look away anymore?

Be serious. You are a prince, blessed. If all you say is true, you are the very last of the prophets, and it seems you do not need to wear the heavy yoke of your forebears in order to be worthy of that high title.

I do not like to think that He gave all these blessings to a COWARD.

You have everything, and more. Why, it seems that even Adonai of Hosts is not mighty enough for you!

You did not feel quite safe, in your silken bed, only having His protection. You have summoned another, an ungod of winter feast days, to supplement Him.

“I did not choose the Intercessor,” I said. “He was given.”

Given, given! Yes, you have everything, without needing to toil for any of it.

Now, behave like a man who has everything, and leave off your cowardice.

I shook my head, defying him.

He was terrifying, and it took bravery to defy him. Was I such a coward, then, after all?

“My Mother, Ruth Schoen,” I said.

“I fear for her. I refuse to call this cowardice. I love her, and if she is imperiled—then yes, I fear for her. What would you have me do?”

He brought his hand to my chest, shoving me away in spite.

What are you, a fool?

Let her die, and spend some ten days in Sheol! Then raise her, with the rest!

I was silent.

He glared at me, from a little ways off.

“It is . . . not so simple as that,” I said, uneasily, after some time.

For if it WERE as simple as that, I thought, I never would have feared for her, in the first place.

“I am afraid,” I admitted.

“Perhaps I am a coward,” I said. “So be it.

“I am afraid, and do not know how to stop being afraid.”

He did not answer.

He was dimming, inside me. The high mount, around him, dimmed as well.

I came back to myself, to the Q train, now past the bridge and under darkness.

In Manhattan.

I thought: have I talked too long with the prophet, and missed my stop? Will I have to go back again?

“Canal Street,” said my Adversary’s circuit, in its vigorless voice.

I had very nearly missed my stop. Which meant, of course, that I had not missed it at all: it lay in the palm of my hand, ready to be grasped. Canal Street.

Perhaps, I thought, this was the prophet’s reason for leaving me when he did, cutting short our incandescent disputation, which had in no way reached its natural end.

I knew that his inner storehouse of vituperation was in no way exhausted, at the time he left me. He could well have gone on until nightfall, laying harsh words and harsher ones upon my head; he would have done so, if the day had been given to him to do with as he willed.

But the day had been prepared for another use, and for another man.

For me.

I thought: when He went out among them, in the first days, to pick out the man whom He would make last of the prophets, and sanctify that man, and prepare that man for the last war—did He pick out a COWARD, then?

I thought: did He pick out a meek and useless COWARD, and sanctify a worthless WASTE of a man?

I thought: did He prepare, for the last war, a man who could not even bear to WATCH the battle from a safe distance?

Who would FLEE at the very sight of battle, and run headlong to HIS MOTHER’S lap, and hide his face in HIS MOTHER’S skirts, with an unseemly and unremitting WHINE leaking from his mouth, a WHINE whose ignoble color put the lie to his false claim of kingly blood—indisputably, irrevocably, so no man could doubt it?

He would not have picked out a coward.

So it could not be true, after all, that I was a coward.

I was afraid. But this could not be so.

I was afraid. But it was of shadows, I surmised, that I was afraid. It was a thing which my Adversary had fashioned out of mists, to confound my heart.

I made myself hold my head high, then, though my heart still seemed in no way a king’s.

I made myself walk among the paste as a prophet does among men, holding himself above them—though I cannot say I felt sanctified, as prophets are, and must be.

How might David have carried himself, as he left the Q train and went out into Canal Street station—had David been a king of latter days, and New York City his latter-day kingdom?

As David would have carried himself, so now did I.

 

 

“Canal Street station” is not an individual’s name, but a family’s.

Four siblings bear that name. Several blocks of lower Manhattan are given over to them, as a homestead.

The four “Canal Street” stations resemble one another as brothers do, but only as brothers do, not as a man resembles his own self. Some pedestrian, passing through these streets, could easily catch sight of the one, and then the next, without even suspecting that what he saw was but one man’s seed, and called by a single name.

It is only below the streets, under the ground, that their unity makes itself plain. For there is a cavern, under the ground, which joins the one to the next.

Holding myself with high-born grace, I traversed the low lurking tunnels of that miniature Sheol. With a gentle and lordly hand, I parted the diffuse half-paste of men that milled there, and made my way forth.

Men’s faces loomed and receded in the flickering half-light, trading places with the myriad unmanlike forms around them, and with the pure darkness of the shadows.

Rats and cockroaches scurried in the shadows, and metal things scurried alongside them, fashioned in ratlike and roachlike forms.

Flesh mingled, in the city, with the straw which had been formed in those bodies’ image. My Adversary’s planned day of substitution had not yet come, but it was close at hand—and so my Adversary’s preparations for that day were all around me, mixed in with the very bodies they were intended to depose.

I passed a clearing where two men had set up camp.

Loud, shrill noises rang out from that place, and though I saw immediately how one of the men was cradling a cello, it took me some time to realize that his bowing motions upon the strings had any connection to the cacophony. I had heard men play the cello, before, but I had never heard this.

A moment later, I understood. For I discerned, in the half-light, the snaking bodies of the wires that poured out of the man’s instrument. I saw the squat, unsightly metal boxes that were laid out around him, and how the wires plunged into these boxes, and through them.

It was not a cello this man played, but a system of feedbacks. Fearing lest his own miscreant nature become all too visible when set against the noble spruce and maple of the naked instrument, this man had yoked spruce and maple to metal, to circuitry. Finding beauty not to his taste, he flung electricity through the shrieking depths of his hand-made cybernetic system, so that what came out of it, when he bowed the strings, was safely and thoroughly hideous.

The other man, bearded and evil-eyed, stood by the cellist and his nest, ranting in the tiresome manner of a carnival announcer. His futile mouth barked false and stale prophecies, which had in fact been disproven long before his own birth.

“HERE is wisdom,” he said, waving his hand to me, picking me out of the mass with his unwholesome eyes.

“Here is WISDOM,” he repeated.

“Let him that HATH understanding count the NUMBER of the BEAST!

“For it is the number of a MAN!”

Paying him no mind, I walked on. The cult of Yeshua does not interest me.

I passed another man, shortly after, who spoke in the same barking manner. This one was stout, finely dressed, top-hatted.

“Where will you be, this Christmas? And you—and you—?”

He waved his hand over the passing paste.

“What’s your dinner gonna be, this Christmas? Mom’s home cooking? Think again, boys!

“No disrespect to your ma, now, but I wager I can give ’er a run for ’er money!

“No, you ain’t gonna be suppin’ at home, not this Christmas night! No, what you’re gonna do—and you, and you, too!—is come on down!

“Come on down, to Two-Oh-Seven Bowery—that’s Two, Oh, Seven, you know the place—come on down, I say, for a Christmas feast, that’ll give your ma and everybody’s ma a run for ’er money, and no two ways about it!

“That’s right! This Christmas you—and you too—are gonna dine like kings, on the Big Feller’s own hospitality! That’s right! The Big Feller’s got one of his famous feasts for you, this Christmas! For you, and you, and your neighbor, too!”

This caught my attention.

I knew that this man was crafting his words in order to draw attention, and that I was, therefore, only falling into his trap by giving him mine. Still, I could not do otherwise.

I stopped, and considered him, trying to divine his inner nature and his true intentions. I turned my face halfway toward him, but only halfway; I watched him out of the corner of my eye, not wanting to be noticed, fearing that his heavy sweeping hand would single me out and detain me.

“Come on down, bright and early!” he cried.

“Doors open at eleven in the morning, and don’t close ’till all the plain working people of the whole Lower East Side have supped their fill, and supped some more too! The Big Feller’s goin’ for the big time, this Christmas!”

I considered him, and shook my head.

A famously large man—a universal gift-giver, famous for his feasts—and yet, no. Despite all appearances, the hero of this man’s monologue was not the Intercessor. There was no possibility whatsoever of that.

For the barking man was fully grown, and too far grown to remember anything. Not the Original Knowledge, nor even the aftershock of the Latter-Day Intercession, which rings gladly in the hearts of latter-day children well into their time of talking, but still too falls away in time, and is too forgotten, once one is fully grown.

“Big time!” the man roared. “I’m talkin’ turkey, turkey that’ll make your ma jealous, and all the fixings, too!”

I walked on.

“And beer? Beer, why, we got enough beer to float a dreadnaught, boys! Come on down!”

I walked on, and soon enough I could no longer hear him, for all that he bellowed.

 

 

I stood on a platform, again.

I was immersed, again, in a thick paste of compressed flesh.

I inhaled, and the air gave me no life-breath; too many men had breathed it already, and it had been sucked dry of life by them before it reached my lips. I felt that air’s heat on my skin, and took no life-heat from it.

Manlike forms swirled about me, and metal forms with them, and the senseless forms of unformed things.

Chaff brought forth chaff, and conceived stubble.

All that I saw and heard was but an artless welter, of no significance whatsoever. All that I felt and smelled was but a fallow field, used-up, issuing forth nothing. Yet these things went on, in their way, issuing forth nothing, and raining their nothing down on my head, into my eyes and ears, into my nose and mouth.

They hurled themselves against the hull of my senses, relentlessly, to confound me and break my spirit.

I was wilting, there in the station. I felt weak, and the weakness in me was so complete that I could not even rouse up any indignation at the thought of its presence. I had not had any intention of throwing cares away, but my cares had been taken away nonetheless, by a force outside of me.

I knew my Adversary had not shown even one thousandth of his might to me, yet, that day. And still, I was afraid.

And too thoroughly sapped of life to resist the voice in me which whispered again and again the name of what I was, telling me over and over, on and on, endlessly, that I, Herschel Schoen, last of the prophets, picked out and sanctified at the beginning, was—was a—

COWARD

COWARD, COWARD, COWARD, COWARD, COWARD, COWARD

But He would not have picked out a coward, at the beginning. That was not His way, was it?

I thought: no, Adversary.

I thought: I am Herschel Schoen. I do not fear what IS, for I know what IS TO COME.

I held my head up, and turned it back and forth, surveying the confusion which my Adversary had prepared, thinking he would lay me low through its use.

I looked about me, at the subway platform, and the accumulated paste.

I looked at them, and into them, and through them.

I saw what would become of them, in the coming days.

The platform, no longer overfull with men, but empty.

The station, no longer hot but cruelly cold.

No steady beams spilled out from the electric bulbs on the ceiling. The bulbs flickered limply, their spirits broken, their hearts given over to despair.

Night now rushed in, seizing hold of this place from which it had been artificially banished, and for which it had lusted in its exile.

The bulbs flickered, and let night in; they flickered, and banished it again. Night and day changed places to the quick rhythm of a man’s breath, not at the statelier pace which prevailed outside.

Turning my gaze to a corner of the room, I saw that the platform was not wholly empty. For there was a man, there.

Or rather, a man’s body, there. In the corner.

I saw the bloody gash on his forehead. I saw the stillness of his chest.

He did not have legs, I noticed.

But they were not missing, his legs; it was not hard to make a full accounting of them. Two legs which must have been his were there, in the corner, a little ways off from where he lay. Each of them lay on its own, no longer attached to anything. A dark stain marred the sheen of the floor under them.

The bulbs breathed in and out, casting light forth and recalling it back again.

The man did not breathe with them, but only lay still, legless and ignominiously sprawled, like an insect in which an idle boy had taken a passing interest, and whose dissection and dismemberment had provided that boy with a few minutes of idle amusement.

He lay as dung upon the face of the floor, with no one around to lament, to gather him up, to bury him.

 

 

A few minutes later, I was on the J train, en route at last to the financial district.

Incoherent things rose up, and contested against one another, within my heart.

On the wall facing me, I saw the work of a miscreant with uncommonly steady hands, a miscreant possessed of the bravery to write in large, crisp letters, eschewing the scrawled minuscule that was conventional among his ilk:

HANG THE BASTARDS

And below this, in the same hand, only slightly smaller:

THE PEOPLE WANTS ONLY ITS DUE

I stared at these missives, and they seemed to stare back, watching me, boring into me.

I mulled over the meaning of the second, smaller inscription: “the people wants only its due.”

Its rhetoric was cleverly made, wresting a semblance of significance out of what was in fact a near tautology. Every man wants his due—of course he does, and who would begrudge him this?

But what a man wants is one thing, and what he will receive is another. And what a man does, in an attempt to seize that which he wants, is yet a third thing. It was by collapsing these three into one, and lulling the audience into believing that they were one and not three, that the miscreant’s rhetoric accomplished its mercenary goal.

As on the Q train, I found myself side by side with an unwell man.

On the Q train, my feathered friend had babbled on and on, though there was no one with him to serve as an audience. So, too, did my new neighbor, on the J train.

But I found my new neighbor rather less charming than his predecessor, and his chatter was wholly tiresome, with none of the curious liveliness of the previous man’s monologue. A weary exasperation colored his voice; his tone was to rage as scattered ash is to roaring flame.

“Look, man, I’m done with this shit,” he said.

“You wanna be the greater fool, man, be my guest. Just don’t think you’re bringing me along for the ride.”

He was silent for a moment, as if listening to a reply from his imaginary interlocutor.

“Look, I went over this already,” he said, sighing.

“You wanna buy Eggert Electronic? You wanna buy that shit?

“Do I need to draw the fucking Donchian channels for you, man? Look at the moving average. Look at the fucking moving average, and then look at the price.

“This isn’t rocket science, Terry. Jesus. What’s gotten into you, anyway? Maybe you need to take it easy, man. You know, get some sleep, and shit.

“Get some fucking sleep for once, might knock sense into you.”

He paused again, and sighed again.

“Fundamentals?” he said. His exhaustion was plainly audible. I wondered whether the sleepless ways he imputed, to the specter with whom he was arguing, were in fact a projected image of his own sleeplessness.

On the earth men do go mad, I am told, from sleeplessness. If they draw it out long enough, they do eventually go mad. My unfortunate neighbor, I surmised, had done just this, and was now reaping the consequences.

“Fundamentals?” he said again.

“Don’t even talk to me about fundamentals. You think I’m not on top of fundamentals, Terry? You think I don’t have that shit down, cold?

“Fundamentals were how I got to be short Eggert Multimedia, last year, way before the big boys figured that shit out. Remember that, Terry?

“Fundamentals, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. You know me, Terry. You think I don’t do my homework?

“I’m out here doing deep dives, collecting inside intel, connecting the dots.

“I’m up late on Friday nights, squinting at leaked copies of the shit those scumbags show to their fucking investors, and like, drawing fucking diagrams of the supply chains, fucking diagrams of these scumbags’ big complicated rent-seeking plans, and why they can’t possibly work, and like, how it all connects together . . . and now, Terry, now you’re coming to me, talking about strong fundamentals?

“Look, man, I’m done. I’m done with this shit. Hang yourself for all I care, Terry. Be the greater fool. Be my fucking guest, okay?”

To listen to his weary voice was to grow weary, oneself.

I looked around, and looked within myself.

I sought the inner meanings of things, and the inner meaning of the day.

I thought: on the last day, after the last battle, at the culmination of the last rite, I will go to the high gates of Sheol, and wrest them open. I know all, and know this; this duty was given to me, as all was given to me.

I thought: and the shades will all rush up, out of that dead land, never to return! They will rush joyously, singing as they go, they will rush up, up—up the surface of the Original Earth—and they will see and feel and taste the tangible rays cast down upon that ground by the Greater Light, in all their six thousand six hundred colors!

I thought: but if that is so—if I will wrest open the gates of Sheol, and the shades will rise up—then, why, any man may do anything NOW, and no consequence will come of it!

I thought: any of these men around me could throw himself onto the subway tracks, and meet a grisly end under the treads of the next train, and no consequence would come of it!

I saw, then, the fatal flaw in this doctrine of gruesome optimism, which the prophet had recently pressed me to consider. It was worth considering, but only for the sake of deciding against it, and then holding oneself fully against it, in full knowledge of where it was that one stood.

Jeremiah’s yoke had been heavy, indeed. I could not deny that. But what, exactly, did that yoke consist in?

He was given a message, and given the duty of conveying that message to the people. It was a hard message, and so his was a hard duty. But this was the whole of the duty: to receive a message, and convey it.

And that message? What did it consist in?

HaShem Master of Hosts would rouse up one of the nations of the earth, and turn it upon another nation. The one nation, guided by His will, would lay waste to the other nation, which was also given to Him, and subject to His will.

There was no question as to what would occur, in these contests. For they were not really contests at all, in the end; the same sovereign will moved the victor and the vanquished alike, moving one to victory, the other to ruin.

There was no Adversary, at that time, to upset His orderly plan. There was no Intercessor, at that time, to emend the perfect products of His will.

Incoherent things churned within me, incapable of coming to any resolution.

I knew what would occur. And yet, at the same time, what would occur was in question. For there were forces acting in the world, now, which had no equal in the days of the former prophets.

There were forces in the world, today, with the power to substitute straw for the perfect products of His will—the power, even, to emend the inevitable.

In the paradoxes which it seemed now necessary for me to swallow, I glimpsed the hand of the Intercessor, that lover of risible unions. I heard his famous laugh, ringing through my bones.

I thought: I was given to the earth, and given a duty.

I thought: my duty concerns what is to come, on the twenty-fifth, the fourth Wednesday. Why, then, do I flee from the very thought of that day, fearing what might befall me then, and my Mother, Ruth Schoen, and all my people?

I thought: it was for the sake of that day that I was picked out, and sanctified, at the beginning. Because of that day, I AM. If it were not for that day, there would be no need for a Herschel Schoen, and so there would not BE a Herschel Schoen.

Why was I afraid of my day—of the day that I was made for? The day for whose sake He breathed on the unformed deeps, fashioning a Herschel Schoen out of them, and drawing him up, and hallowing him and his name?

Why? Because I, made for the future, found the future wresting free from my grasp at every opportunity!

Because the future seemed to change shape before my eyes, without cease, in one moment and then again in the next moment, changing, changing, on and on, endlessly!

Because I, given to the earth as a tutor, found the men of the earth turning their faces away from me at every opportunity, making themselves blind to my teaching, and laughing in ignorant glee at what they thought they saw in my lessons, which was really only the sight of the mists that filled the air around them, obscuring my lessons from them!

Because I, given to my Mother, Ruth Schoen, found her turning away from me, and gambling with her body before the barricades and the cameras, as though she had no son, and could do with her body as she pleased!

Because I, given to my Sister, Miriam Schoen, found her too turning away from me, favoring her straw prophet, and gambling away her body and her will, in the name of his creed of complacent passivity and suicidal resignation!

I thought: every man turns away from me, until no one is left who might come to my aid. So be it: I will aid myself, when I need aid. For there are things that I MUST do.

I thought: every man turns away from me, and I do not understand why. The earth makes itself strange to me, and the future wrests from my grip. But it is precisely this that I CANNOT allow, and precisely this which I must EMEND.

I was made for the future. I was made for the last rite, on which the future turned.

And so it fell to me to know the future, and all its ways, and all the things that flow into it and determine it.

Why? Because the last rite, I now understood, must be carried out very precisely, if it is to be carried out at all.

Its specifications are as exacting as the temple’s, and as inflexible as the sovereign will which Jeremiah knew, and lamented, and raged against.

If our victory is inevitable, it is only through me that it is inevitable. It is only through my understanding of the future, and its ways, and all that flows into it, that such things can become inevitable, and then occur, inevitably, and in accordance with my understanding.

I looked around me, at the subway car, and the paste, and the letters of the miscreants.

I turned toward the future, in my mind, and addressed it with my words, saying: show yourself to me. I am your maker.

I saw the subway car, and through it.

I saw its future.

How the voice from the train’s ceiling would no longer carry the tame sound of my Adversary’s circuit, announcing the stops.

How a loud and ceaseless noise, instead, would issue forth from that ceiling.

I heard that harsh and lamenting sound, and I heard how the train was filled by it, and was thus filled always, without cease.

I heard how there was more of music, in that sound, than of speech.

And I heard how it was neither music nor speech, in truth, but another thing, wild and unregulated, like the masterless baying of loosed hounds.

I saw how this would come to be.

I saw the train, hurtling through the darkness, as was its way.

I saw the paste of men, accumulated there. I saw them jostling, lamenting, laughing—as was their way.

I saw the bright electric lights flicker off, leaving the train in darkness. I saw them flicker on again, a moment later, and then go on flickering.

I saw how their flickering was irregular, wholly unsystematic, having no PATTERN in it. I saw how a will moved their flickering, wholly unregulated, wholly incapable of being predicted.

I saw the men, and I saw how each man had a death picked out for him, prepared for him in advance.

I saw the men felled, as their deaths reached them. I saw them fall, all at once.

I saw the bodies fall onto one another, into one another, in their shared rush for that floor which had never been wide enough to contain them.

How were they felled? I saw, and cannot say; I knew, and do not know.

Suppose that a man’s boot steps upon an anthill, laying waste to the ant-kingdom inside, felling its queen and all her many knights; suppose that a single ant survives, out of all of them.

What could one possibly say, to this orphan, about the desolation that has come to all its brothers, at once, in a single instant?

What is a boot, after all, to an ant?

Or a foot, or a leg? Or a stroll in the countryside? Or a moment of distraction, in which one is not looking at ground below one’s feet, because one’s sense of beauty has been roused by the rustling of the sunlight through the far-off trees?

By what means were the men felled? By whirling blades, flung from nowhere; by a plague of infinitesimal mites, dispersed invisibly into the very air; by nothing at all.

If I come before men, and describe these methods of death to those men, I will then have failed, in the describing of them. For we are as ants, crushed under their boot.

In this way were the men cut down; by these means were they separated from their life-breath, and left to fall where they would, and to lie where they fell.

So it was that their corpses were laid down, in the subway car.

So it was that they were laid to rest: not under the ground and with dignity, but in a great heap, piled up like refuse.

All at once, in an instant.

All at once, in the same instant.

 

 

The hands of mortal time ticked on, heedless of all my worries and confusions.

“Broad Street,” said my Adversary’s simpleton, heedless of everything.

I went out, into the station.

And went out, some moments later, through the doors of the same station, onto the street.

I cannot say what I saw, in the station, for my attention was elsewhere. And I cannot say what I thought, as I walked there, for it was too formless to admit of description.

Inchoate worries warred in me; confusions fought with confusions, and confuted them, and were confuted in turn.

I came out from the station, into the financial district.

I came out from the station, onto the corner where Broad Street meets Wall Street.

At this corner, New York City reaches its apex.

At this corner, the city lays bare its most intimate acts of worship and devotion, parading its most precious idols before the masses. Here it is that the city’s most precious ungods are prostituted; here it is that their hallowed bodies are unveiled and bared, so that the voluptuous futility of their forms is offered up for the leering delectation of every man who passes by.

Stand here, and know that you stand face to face with Federal Hall, glory of the Americans’ pride, consecrated to the first of their kings.

Stand here, and know that you stand in the shadow of the New York Stock Exchange, temple of the financiers and the traders, consecrated to their idols of silver and their idols of gold, which their own hands have made unto them for a sin.

Stand here, in the Valley of Hinnom, and you will know in whose name the city slays its children.

Stand here, among the stones, and you will know for whose sake the light in the city’s children is snuffed out. And you will know what it is that is offered up as a substitute for the glories which the city’s children once remembered, before the light left them, and they grew cold.

I stood, at the corner, then.

And yet I could barely see the idols of which I have just spoken.

 

 

What had I expected?

Noise, lights, crowds, cameras.

The flowing tide of the accumulated mass, as it rushed toward the barricades, seeking its due.

The shouts, the screams, the mists and terrors, that rose up when that mass was given its due.

All things made gigantic, and painted in technicolor, as if striving to catch the attention of a nearly insensate audience, and trying to press their case before a room of men close to death, their eyes already half closed, their life-heat already dimming.

I had seen these riots, on the television screen. I had seen all this, and set my expectations accordingly.

But what bared itself before me, then, was far greater than what the television had shown.

The accumulated mass of men, on the streets below, was as tightly packed as the paste that filled the subway system, but it was not that paste. It was another thing, and a prouder thing, knowing its worth, its dignity, its due.

One could not see such men, face to face, without feeling shame that one is not a part of their mass. One could not hear their proud cries and lamentations, and see how the surging of their mass is itself an instrument, in harmony with their song—without reflecting that all one has seen in men before has been but a shadow, while this is the body.

I did feel that shame, for a moment; that reflection did cross my mind, before I dispensed with it.

These men, I reminded myself, had made themselves masters of rhetoric. When they rushed forth, it was not as soldiers do, intending to break the literal BODY of the enemy’s fortification, or to break the literal BODY of the enemy himself. All that they did, they did in the name of an image, and in the name of rhetoric, and to press a point.

They might come, as soldiers do, to the point of breaking literal walls, or literal bones. But if they did, it was not for the sake of destroying these things, but only for the sake of the image that would arise as a secondary consequence.

All that they did was a provocation, meant to seduce. And they were not selective in their provocations, but made so as to seduce any man who might catch sight of them, and draw him into their web, and sway him toward their ends.

I steeled myself.

What I feel is a provocation, I thought, and it provokes me. But I must not allow myself to be seduced. And so I WILL not allow myself to be seduced.

On the television, one sees the barricade line, from close up, again and again. The city’s monuments are seen as a blur, if they are seen at all. They are relegated to the background; they reel and swerve, coming into view and then out of view again, a thing too fast for the eye to collate and study.

One sees little else, on the television, but that barricade line, and the men surging up to it, and falling back.

One knows the people are massed, behind, and so the camera does not need to illustrate this fact, and relegates it to the background. One knows that New York City and its idols are likewise massed, all around the rabble, unimpressed by their displays, secure in their marmoreal dignity; one knows this, and the camera does not waste its time reminding one of it.

But what one knows, watching the television, is not what one sees, standing face to face with the whole of it.

On that day, the city’s idols were not laid bare, but veiled.

I looked about me, seeking the famous columns of the New York Stock Exchange, but I found only a thick, black tarp, hung high over that building’s entire facade.

Around the edges of the tarp, I could see hints of what made it necessary. Wherever a part of the facade was bared for my inspection, I saw there a thing defaced, and laid low, and brought out for mockery.

I saw the paint splattered there, in many colors. I saw the scrawled, miscreant letters, and counted it a blessing that I was too far from them to discern the words they spelled. Here and there, I saw the cracked and broken forms which some vandal had desecrated, with his drill or his hurled bomb; I saw their singed edges, and the ruin that had been made of their glory.

I saw the men, massed, and steeled myself against their seductions. But I would be a liar, if I did not say that I saw the glory in them, and the beauty.

I saw the tall placards that many of them held up, in the name of the image they hawked to their audience. I knew these were crafted in order to seduce me, but still I could not help surveying them, and admiring them, and being in some small way—for the span of some small moment—harmlessly seduced by them.

Many of them were inscribed with nothing more than a single word, in massive red letters:

ENOUGH

For this was the most compressed form of their slogan, which they sometimes chanted, when compression was rhetorically warranted: enough! Enough! Enough!

This word abbreviated a phrase—or rather, several different phrases—which were the most common among their chants, and were what they sang whenever they did not have cause to sing something else, instead:

We’ve had enough! We’ve had enough!

The people have had enough!

Bosses? Enough! Negotiations? Enough! Factory fires—enough! Child labor—enough!

Plunder? Enough! Parasites? Enough! Enough!

Capital—enough!

No more! Never again!

My eyes roved over the assembled signs.

On one, I saw a comical portrait of two working men, sipping beer together, and bringing their sturdy heads together in conspiracy. I read what was written there, in the space around the image:

THE BOSS NEEDS YOU
YOU DON’T NEED HIM

LABOR IS ENTITLED
TO ALL IT CREATES

On another sign, I read:

A SPECTER
IS HAUNTING
NEW YORK CITY

And on a third sign, I saw the image of a rope, tied into a noose and wrapped tight around the neck of a comical, comics-page banker.

His tongue lolled from his mouth; his eyes bulged out from his head, prominently displaying the green dollar signs which, in those eyes, played the role of pupils and irises.

Under this image, in bright blood-red, were the words:

HANG THE BASTARDS!

Shouts rang up, in the street, in the midst of the chants and songs.

A young woman was rushing forward, within the mass. I saw her thinness, and the plainness of her dress, and the wild blood-red streak of dye that ran down the middle of her hair.

“No more!” she screamed, as she ran, in a ragged voice. “Never again!”

The mass parted, warily, to let her pass.

“I’m done!” she cried, running towards the black-veiled facade, toward the barricades.

I saw the flowing tide of the bodies, making way for her. I saw them surging away from the center line, toward the sidewalks, towards the station, towards me.

Placards bobbed above the heads of the flowing men. Their images and slogans loomed close to me, obstructing my view of the mass, and of the woman rushing in it.

Something caught my attention, on one of the signs very close to me.

The image of a man was painted on it.

It was no comic-strip sketch, this image, but a fully wrought and painterly portrait, with a wealth of fine detail. It invited one to inspect it at close range, so as to drink in the subtleties of the man’s shape, and taste his true nature, unsimplified.

I drank him in.

I saw his severe, angular face, and the lines of age and strain that were upon it.

I saw his spectacles, and the way he scowled behind them; I saw how he was not one to suffer fools.

An evil glimmer danced in his eyes, complicating the scowl, and enhancing its air of lordly cruelty.

But what flashed out from his eyes, I realized, was not cruelty, or was not only cruelty. It was a lust for delving and prying; it was a craving to know the secrets of the earth, the firmament, the heavens, the angels; it was a hunger for the destruction of temples, for the smashing of gods.

I saw him gleaming, sorcerous, demoniac. I saw him scowl, and felt he scowled at me, and could not help but fear him.

I saw the foppish tuft of white hair set out in the space between the lips and the chin, and how it lent a single note of whimsy to that otherwise austere visage.

There was something very familiar, about this man.

For a moment, I thought that I beheld my Adversary himself, face to face.

If it was not my Adversary himself, on the sign, then it was a man very close to him. A man set on high above all my Adversary’s lords and generals, to command them utterly, if my Adversary himself was not present.

Three words were written on the sign, above the image of the face:

HANG HIM FIRST

I heard the woman, screaming.

I could not see her, but I could hear the direction of the sound. It came from near the front of the mass, from near the barricades.

“I’ll kill them!” she screamed.

“I’ll kill them!

“Enough! I’m done! Hang the bastards, hang the fucking bastards!”

A wary murmur rose up in the mass, as though it were disputing with itself, deciding what to make of her.

But the murmur soon lost its ambivalence, and became a chant, and then several chants, layered over one another.

The chanting rang out from their massed chorus, in contrapuntal layers, in a thousand voices, in defiance:

Yeah!

Hang the bastards! Enough!

Enough!

Hang EGGERT first!

(No savior from on high delivers—no faith have we in prince or peer—)

Hang him! Hang him!

Workers of the world, unite! Hang the bastards! Hang Eggert!

(Arise ye prisoners of starvation—arise ye wretched of the earth—!)

Hang the bastards, hang them all!

Enough!

(—for justice thunders condemnation—a better world’s in birth—!)

What do we have to lose? Nothing!

Nothing but our chains!

Nothing at all!

The mass flooded, and washed over me. I could not hold my ground against it, and I fell.

I clutched my head in my hands, protecting it from the storm of bodies.

I sat on the steps leading out from the station, on which I had been standing, and over which the torrent of the men was now pouring.

And I listened to the chanting and singing of the mass, which still went on.

No gods, no masters! Nothing to lose!

Hang Eggert! Hang him FIRST!

I thought: Eggert?

I thought: hang him first—hang him—hang Eggert?!

Surely they could not be proposing the execution of dearest Frederick!

For that youth was admirable in all the ways most acclaimed among men, and was blameless, so far as I could see. I had never seen him bring harm to anyone, in any way.

But it was not difficult to puzzle out the meaning of their chant.

Frederick spoke often of his father, his “daddy,” who was quite a famous man, if one were to trust the son as a witness to the father.

“Daddy!”—an illustrious man of science, a lordly king of industry! Technologist of war, and fashioner of peacetime marvels!

“Daddy,” made wealthy beyond measure by his efforts, and yet not one to rest on his laurels, but one who labors and labors on, in spite of his advanced age, and who will no doubt be laboring away in his splendid laboratories at the moment when death finally claims him!

I understood, then, the meaning of the face painted on the sign, and of that face’s familiarity.

My dear friend Frederick had a high place among my Adversary’s retinue, but his daddy’s position put his own to shame. In the face of daddy, I very nearly saw my Adversary himself; the two of them, I knew, bore a very close resemblance.

Ezekiel the son of man came to me, then, to show me how I was to hold myself in such a moment.

He took ownership of my hands, bringing them away from my head, and down to my sides.

He laid claim to my face, and to the eyes that were on it.

He raised my gaze from the ground, turning it back to the placard that bore daddy’s image.

I stared at it, drinking in the form of the enemy, seen here at last, face to face.

Ezekiel the son of man held the billows of my lungs in his hands. He pried my mouth open; with his fiery heart, he made my voice into lightning; my breath flamed out, at his command, attended by the acrid scent of brimstone.

In awe, and in fiercest condemnation, I spoke:

Art thou he of whom He spoke in old time by His servants the prophets of Israel, that prophesied in those days for many years, that He would bring thee against them?

In a last battle and a last rite, on the last day?

I spoke:

Behold, I am AGAINST thee, O Adversary, chief prince of substitution and forgetting!

I spoke:

Thou shalt come from thy place out of the uttermost parts of the city, thou, and many peoples with thee, all of them riding upon streetcars, a great company and a mighty army.

And I will bring thee against my children, and against the Intercessor, lord of children, lord of lords!

And all men shall REMEMBER, and I shall be sanctified THROUGH thee, O Adversary, before their eyes!

Was it true?

My breath flared out like lightning, saying these things. But was it Truth I spoke, and not merely fire and sulfur?

This was easy enough to believe, when Ezekiel the son of man held me, and moved me.

But when he dimmed, receding into my depths, the fire of his heart dimmed with him.

And I was plunged back into the deepest confusion.

I was the last of the prophets, and the worst of them. I knew the future, and knew all, and knew nothing.

I was Herschel Schoen, given to the earth, to cringe and cower there. I was Herschel Schoen, given to his Sister, Miriam Schoen, so that he might flaunt his cowardly woes before her, as he lolled together with her in the bower of the bedroom, and took refuge there from all the pounding shadows of a world which, after all, was not his own.

I was Herschel Schoen, given to his Mother, Ruth Schoen, to be laid low by her, so that the future might forever escape his coward’s grasp.

I heard the mass, chanting, and thought: my Mother, Ruth Schoen, is somewhere among them.

Does she chant with them? When they intone the word hang, is her voice present in that hangman’s chorus?

Where, where is she?

Where? Where?! Take me to her, let me plead with her, let me take her away, into the station, onto the train, away, away, forever!

I was jostled rudely by passing legs. Senseless things, of no significance, pounded upon me.

Adversary, I will not let you have her! I am here, Adversary, look on my face, fear me! I am Herschel Schoen!

I am Herschel Schoen, set down rudely upon the ground like so much dung. I am Herschel Schoen, cringing, and hiding his face.

I thought: I WILL preserve her, and preserve ALL! I will ride into battle on a reindeer’s back, girded with boughs of holly! My mount will carry me through the air over the battlefield, and then down into the fray, with the Intercessor’s sleigh close at its heels!

I thought: I will do it—I WOULD do it, gladly—I will lay down my life, if I have to, in the doing of it—

—I would do it, if only I KNEW HOW!

If only I knew HOW the preparations were to be made—

If only I knew what was required to set the LAST RITE aflame, if only I knew all the infinitely exact specifications against which that rite will be MEASURED, on the last day—

If only I knew ANY ONE of those specifications—if only I knew ANYTHING AT ALL—!

If only I UNDERSTOOD the future, and its ways, instead of—!

Prophets glowed within me, their eyes and tongues aflame. They beseeched me, and castigated me.

Was I a fool? Was I a COWARD?

Come now, that is no way to carry yourself! Are you not the last of the prophets, and the last of the princes?

You are Herschel Schoen, are you not? You are Herschel Schoen, prophet—are you not?

I am, I thought, hanging my face in shame.

Come now, raise your head up! Raise your eyes, and see these men truly! Blast a hole in them, and through them, with your condemning fire!

Receive portents, make hidden things manifest, prophesy!

I hung my head in silence, and in shame.

Fool, said Isaiah the son of Amoz.

Coward, said Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah.

“I’ll kill them! I’ll do it! I’ve got a bomb!” the young woman shrieked, from the front of the mass.

“I’m done! Enough!” she cried, in utmost abjection, having nothing left to lose—except her body, except herself.

Do you have EYES? said the prophets, seething in indignation and impatience. Good, then OPEN them!

No, I could not do it. No, I would not do it! I had eyes, yes, but I would not open them!

I could not bear to see how these proud people, already laid so low, would be treated on the last day, in the last rite.

I could not bear to see that wretched young woman cut down, and bloodied, and tossed rudely onto the ground, like so much dung.

I could not bear to see my Mother, Ruth Schoen, wrecked as an insect might be wrecked under a man’s heel, and left there to rot, with the flies swirling about her.

Do as you will—future, Intercessor, Adversary, tormenter. Bring these things about, in ten days’ time, through the use of your agent, Herschel Schoen. Or do otherwise, as befits your whims. But I will not see it! I will not!

Every man has his limit!

I raised myself up, and turned my back on the mass. If my Mother, Ruth Schoen, was among their number, then I turned my back on her, too.

I went up, into the subway station.

 

 

The train rattled on its tracks, under me. The paste heaved and squirmed, around me.

Men babbled to one another, or to themselves. Their words were nothing to me.

I considered my plans for the day, and the ruin that remained of them.

I would travel the five boroughs, seeing each one in turn, and seeing its future! I would scale the walls of Yankee Stadium, and peer into its maw, seeing the true face of my Adversary within it!

I would stop at the library, and find out for myself what was afoot in its curious closure.

I would do so many things, I had thought, in the comfort of my mind, on my high mount.

I would do so many things, I had thought, as I left the apartment; I would do things which would make my Sister, Miriam Schoen, fall to her knees in wonder before me, and rescind all her foolish words against me.

Every man has his limit.

And what is more, there is a force in this world, opposing and obstructing us. There is a bulwark, set out to limit us prematurely, lest we come too soon to our senses.

I thought: I am Herschel Schoen. There is that, at least.

I thought: the body of the people is damaging itself, in its desperation. It flails against a high wall, in utmost abjection, and gives itself over to oblivion.

I thought: this is what the lords of the earth have sown, and what they are reaping.

The shadows were running down, and nearing their own limit.

The earth itself was well aware that its last days were upon it. The forms in the mist were dispersing, losing shape. They forgot even their own forgetfulness, until finally, at their limit, they forgot to BE, and ceased being, and were not.

There was nothing left, for this earth of the shadows, except the promise of a wholly different thing, made of light. One way or the other, the state of things could not last. If a higher hand did not cut down these men, they would happily do the job themselves.

There was nothing left for the earth, for anyone.

There was no hope, for anyone or anything, save for what I could make through my own ingenuity, and press upon the world in spite of its resolutely closed eyes, in spite of its cries of pain, in spite of its spiteful laughter.

There was nothing but wretchedness, here, laid out over the earth.

Was it true, that Herschel Schoen could lift wretchedness out of itself, making something wholly different out of its body, as one might fashion an image from clay?

It would have to be true, or else there would be wretchedness, and wretchedness, and only that. Until the last hour, and after it.

I steeled myself, and tried to make myself worthy of this yoke.

I had to bear it. That was the only way.

There had never been anyone else, and there never would be.