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That’s the deal, what’s that the kids are saying…tateleh: absolve us of everything, all sins and omissions, everything ever acted upon, ever willed, dreamt up, and even the thought. Are we doing business or what? I’d shake on it except I’ve lost fingers that way — what are you waiting for, a miracle, the hand of whose God? I could smack you, I should. Futz that, what’s yours is mine…why shouldn’t we kill you? I’d like to know. Best get yourself up and pardon away.

You mean you want me to pardon you now? Ben asks like who ever heard.

And they answer him you busy, schmuck, got something better to do, a prior engagement?

And so, standing in any proximate center of this loose and ever loosening circle, Ben’s awkward, with exasperation in the roll of His eyes, them with their own valleys to worry — who could take any of this seriously? — the burning sky, the weather of His head cynical, sarcastic with regard to the ironic, opposing fronts meeting only to flower the winter, to bloom it swollen with blood. He goes and waves His hands wildly, much like Hanna would do before guttering from between the flames of her lips the blessing over the candles for Friday; moans a snatch of glossolalia, a bit of showbiz shtick, stuff He’d pickedup on the circuit, crowdpleasers from the earliest days of the Tour. There in the middle of the throng, in the center fast becoming its clearing, the core of this disparate sphere, He kicks with His foot in the sand as if toeing a word, heeling out whichever line of His hastily effaced, kickedover, recovered with dust unto dust to mud, frozen mud — and soon this ritual, whatever it is, whatever He thinks He’s doing ridiculous, disperses a hole in the whole: people shrink from Him, they cower, step back, and huddle, braid, become knotted — then, they all flee. His gestures, giving and gravidly stupid, part their ways; dirtied limbs fly in every direction…it’s crowded even for a melee, maleficently black and hissing — as they refugee again, this once all at once, through the desert without passage, this desert of every passage, every option of open, through the air’s massed exit exploding their sphere, this seethingly tangling, beardbrambly tumble with Ben deep in the middle sent through it, through this shuffling, scrambling of feet shod, unshod, and spidery blue clumsy cold without nails; this wet web of flesh stepping, tripping, then falling and trampling, leaving the dead behind saprogenically still; a massively tumultuous pushpulling up slip up the icelick opposite the oak (in that surge no way Gelt can spot Him, draw a bead, take Him out), up that other hill then over, overtaking the surly waiters patient for vengeance, overwhelming them in a furious, animal tide…a stampede of shoeless feet then legs without feet, tromping stumps, up and over the hill then down down and down further, as they tip into the valley next, its fall, the buffalo cliff.