In which Nero and Mussolini’s Shades Wander through New Jersey
For James Gandolfini
Green Brook Country Club burned down last night and no one’s sure who did it.
The steps taken alongside Hamilton Dr. a reference to autumn leaves crunched at other times of year. But it’s actually autumn now and “you can put that in the bank,” is what he said. Ranch-style homes L-shaped from sky. Utility poles like toothpicks in God’s eyes. A low basketball hoop for children to dunk in. Came up to my shoulder.
The day previous I was riding on the subway with a mask on. I was immune to the sub-par conditions of daily life as we’d come to exist it. There was a woman next to me in scrubs––they were aquatic green––, she had bandages around wrists and looked like she’d come from hospital. She was playing Candy Crush on an iPad with sound on and wearing big synthetic shoes that looked like Crocs. I had just passed by the Balthazar Bakery with The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake under my right armpit. I’d gotten four of those chewy little cake-pastries that taste like burnt and caramel.
Yes, it was autumn then too and I put that in my pipe and smoked it.
Then, having ferried over to opposite shore––first a brief stand on jigsaw pieces of dock that roiled in time with water––, I took my stand in front of Notre Dame Roman Catholic Church. It was a vigil for all those who’d perished in the country-club flames. But the ironic thing I couldn’t help thinking was how most Catholic churches were made of only stone, but this one had a big rectangle of red wood where usually there’d be windows of stained glass and thus would be much easier to burn down as compared to its fellows. Meaning that the vigil in front of this church was also something like a threat. Additionally, at some point during the walk from the Port Imperial Ferry Terminal to the church, I’d seen a Stephen King display in a library window and this had caused me to think about what it was I’d liked reading as a child. Like having to tell my mom about the sex-abuse scene in The Stand––it had to do with a gun barrel and took place in a tunnel filled with corpses––, then my mom made me take the book back to the Whitefish Bay Public Library and I haven’t revisited it since––didn’t even keep reading after the scene––, only bought a paperback copy of It with thick-cut pages and big print during a lonely week in Oxford and the prose was so unbearable that I had to put it down. It was eventually used to prop open a busted window in the graduate common room of my college and destroyed by rain, its bottom half swollen and bowed out. I had enjoyed Revival a few years before that, though, so there was something about seeing window displays of King’s books that set a wave of lush nostalgia to washing through me. A desire for total immersion.
Also as I passed by the library, two men wearing suits––both pretty nondescript: blue shirts, black blazers, and black pants, their loafers boring leather––were listening to a third––holey sweater, white tennis shoes with velcro straps and material they were made of’d gone yellow, sweatpants that looked like pea soup had gone down fronts of legs, the thin man was the kinda guy who sat at computers by entrances intointo public libraries and men who look like him always daring themselves to make child-pornography-centric Google searches, but never quite taking the plunge. Coke-bottle glasses and “ruthless babysitting.”
He stood just in front of the library doors making speech of what he seemed to think was great import to the two others.
“I mean… the fact is that I prefer the, y’know, older style of writing history books… the kinda red-meat style of rip-rollicking ride I’m sure gets torn apart at universities… that seems, erm, preferable from the perspective of both readerly pleasure and communicated info. The books that get put out by university presses are filled with fiber and roughage. You really do feel them clean out your, erm, gut… but I don’t like ‘em… don’t like it when the historian just spends all their time enumerating sources and archaeological methods… like, tell me the story! Rip-rollick me, so to speak… Give me Gibbon over these, erm, ivory-tower elites from across the river at Columbia any day…”
“Abasta!” one of the two suited men shouts.
“Va fungool!” the other chimes in.
The two men are almost indistinguishable except for one is bald and heavyset, whereas the other is skinny, has long hair, and it kinda blends into his mutton chops so’s to form a lopsided halo around his head. A chinstrap that also encompasses scalp.
The heavyset man gives the strange fella a shove and he falls down onto the squares of sidewalk in front of the glass doors, but stops short of banging head. His sweatpants not even torn and the two men in identical suits immediately set off walking alongside curb.
The road cuts through what they see in front of them and there are manhole covers etched into concrete, fire hydrants up on grass, and inelegant mailboxes made entirely of plastic––the post holding up the box as well as the box itself. The ground is flat enough that the sun probably inclined west by this time of day colors the dun reality of an autumnal New Jersey afternoon with golden needles that prick the horizon.
“Where we gonna eat, boss?” the heavyset man speaks up after a few minutes of tense trudging away from scene of crime.
“I dunno…”
The skinnier man’s voice is sharper, cuts through the air. The heavyset mouth sounds filled with cotton. Muffled and low in chest.
“Whadothey even got around here?” the boss again.
“Who knows… a Subway, I think… maybe a Five Guys…”
“Ah, fuck that… fung gool… I’m hungry as shit…”
“Y’know what actually ain’t bad, boss? It’s those, uh, egg sandwiches from Starbucks… they’re better than the McDonald’s ones anyway… I think there oughta be a Starbucks ‘round here somewhere.”
“The fuck??? Egg sandwiches from Starbucks? Ja mook… no chance in hell we go for egg sandwiches from Starbucks. The eggs just sit there cooked all day. Then they put the sandwiches in dem little ovens. They ain’t microwaves, just tiny ovens, I think. And, like, that ain’t even real sausage meat… it’s that Beyond business… nah, fung gool… don be such a mook… think of somethin’ better…”
I regretted having taken the Blake anthology along with me on my trip and the lymph nodes in armpit swollen from its bulky spine. I would have no time to read.
By where the men walk alongside curb, a low stone wall down County Road, a father and his boy tossing football back and forth in front of two-story house that’s lighter shade of baby blue.
The houses in North Caldwell are whole. In Edgewater, there’re high rises and houses split in twain––tall apartments––, plus their facades the same synthetic feel as pixels of video-game buildings. Gilded railings and black stone on one the two men peer into as they passed by, slicking back their hair with ivory-toothed combs.
“Boss… I ain’t tryna be no mook…” he scratches at nape of neck. “But maybe you gotta point, I mean, even Five Guys is a lot fuckin’ better than those egg sandwiches… You ever try Five Guys?”
The thin man purses his lips. And continues walking without answering the question that’s been posed to him. It’s difficult to tell if he’s assenting to this option or making clear just how much it disagrees with him. In any case, neither of them know where to find a Five Guys in the environs and this is a residential zone. Houses stretch out just below the sun-needled sky as far as eye can see. But if the skinnier man in charge were a drone shot up into sky and singing, he’d be surveying the burned-down leisure complex that’s not far from here at all, yes, he’d’ve been playing a cithara as Green Brook burned, he’d’ve been thinking of the blue-collar dudes in the basement kitchen who got ashed, their close-toed shoes firmly planted upon vinyl flooring––light beige and curdled cream––with embedded bits of grit to prevent slips and falls. They were slicing onions or frosting cakes for early AM function next day and the fire caught ‘em by surprise. One was portly dude and had wispy chinstrap plus acne scars. The other was thin and chugging Monster, late hour notwithstanding. The skinnier man sings “andiam, andiam, mio bene, a ristorar le pene d’un innocente amor” and the fat man is a second drone floating up to catch him and also capture North Caldwell and how it turns into Edgewater where, I guess, houses split down the middle of front face means they’re duplexes and black-stone facades aren’t made of Craftsman materials, plus they’re next to U-Haul rental facilities and Macedonian food depots. The views from top floor of either side of split are crowded with other duplexes, it’s overpopulated land out here and whatever it was its denizens were getting away from has a habit of chasing after them. The fat man can’t hold a tune exactly, but he’s in approximate key, so superior doesn’t stop him from singing along. And, in life, both of them were after the “restoration of values,” but didn’t have much to do with “un innocente amor.” They can see across the Hudson and they look at it for a moment before turning attention to what’s around them and they do eventually find a Five Guys in Wayne and that pulls them away from river––they’re not planning to head into NYC anyways. Both drones are back down to earth, the suited men review the intel collected, lament fact that it’s to be a six-mile walk, then gird loins and set off.
“So, boss… why you think that stunade had to get all up in our business? I mean… we’re just walking past and the scecchino suddenly takes it into his head to… I dunno… talk about us, I guess…”
“Why you think he was talkin’ about us? Now you’re the one bein’ a spostata! He was talkin’ about books… we got nothin’ to do with books, right? I mean… did you even fuckin’ understand what he was sayin’? Or are you just… is that head of yours packed full of ri gawt ‘steada brains???”
They walk past a man pacing across sizable lawn with push mower out in front of him and there’s no truck or trailer nearby to suggest he’s been hired––this probably the property’s environmentally conscientious owner. The two suits walking past interrupt their conversation to spit on ground and glare at man plus mower.
“Ja mook…” the fat one says under breath.
The boss returns to main thrust of conversation: “I know what you’re thinkin’, Benny… you’re thinkin’, ‘Yes, madam, I am finished… kaputt… My star has fallen. I have no fight left in me. I work and I try, but know that all of this is just a fuckin’ farce… a buncha candy-ass bullshit… I await the end of the tragedy and—strangely detached from everything… like a spostata even—I don’t feel like much of an actor no more. I feel like the last of spectators… like I’m just left here with my fuckin’ dick out…’ That right, Benny?”
“Maybe… I dunno… I feel more like all of New Jersey’s one big lawn and it’s just me and a dumb fuckin’ push mower ridin’ rough over it… You feel me?”
“Maybe, Benny, may-be,” he delicately enunciates both syllables of his last word.
They proceed past scorched skeleton of Greek Brook Country Club and the boss laughs, begins to whistle, then mouths words to himself. He’s saying, “Là ci darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì…”
“Oh, I’ll give you a gentle ‘sì’, boss…” Benny says and they both burst out laughing. No one currently attending to the blackened beams and boards of the club. They’re letting it be and the church behind it––all the way across the golf course-–is where mourners gather. A thousand or so feet later, Benny stops his boss in front of the Essex County Airport and has an urgent question:
“If that spostata wasn’t talkin’ ‘bout us… then why’d he have to start, y’know, goin’ off like that when we walked past?”
“Pure coincidence, Benny… ‘happenstance’ is what they call it in books…”
Both men watch single guy in orange vest leading diminutive plane with wings that you can see wobble in the breeze back over to terminal. It just landed. The funny thing is that the dude is taller than the plane he’s guiding and usually being on ground with planes at airports seems like overwhelming job in that you’re constantly confronted with bulk of mechanical birds, but this job is almost comical and dude still guides airship with stately gait and waves pylons in hands like conductor’s baton doubled and it’s fiberglass ballet he’s been put in charge of. The other thing is that Benny, already having compared their abodeless wandering across New Jersey to the man with the push mower, now feels urge to liken himself to Essex County Airport employee, knowing in advance that his boss will reject such comparison.
In life, both Benny and boss were responsible for the big planes. They were followed after by great processions, gatherings of men and women (but mostly men) desperate to mimic their every move. And, yes––Benny is kinda thinking now––, it did feel scary to be in charge of those people, en masse they felt like an elephant or a Boeing 747, but when the people did your will, when the people were a ballet of riveted steel moving in perfect time with pylons with lights at end of ‘em like dog erections being waved which way to go, well, that was the sort of spectacle they had both been after. But, like, after that spectacle, they’d found themselves here in New Jersey, black loafers pacing endless steps outward from North Caldwell. Never really sleeping and nowhere to call home. No job to do. Only enough cash in pocket for cheap screws with hookers in motels closer to Newark. They long for corporate-style establishments that smell like AC and clean carpeting down halls and, in those, it feels like sleeping in a magazine, but they don’t have enough dough right now, so they slumber in drainage ditches and upon fields and under trees, but somehow never dirty their suits or shoes. And always wake up in North Caldwell. Or nearby, anyways… never wandering too far…
The sun is stuck at particular point in sky so they’re not afraid of impending dark––and why they would be even if it were impending… They proceed past Phone LCD Parts, Rogers Dance Center, Fairfield Self Storage, U-Haul Neighborhood Dealer, Pet Lovers, All Creatures Great and Small Animal Hospital… One loop of high-tension wire between poles much too convex and Benny makes joking leap up toward it. The skinny man affords back-handed thwack to Benny’s shoulder and says, “stop fuckin’ around, ja mook…”
It’d been the boss’s idea to burn down Green Brook Country Club: an attempt to save selves from own abodelessness. And Benny’d come up with the method of sprinkling the whole place over with gasoline, then exploding two big tanks of the stuff in boiler room, which’d had intended effect. The building was almost entirely wooden and they didn’t know prep chefs would be working well into wee hours––or maybe it was that they’d started their shift real early, though 2am was a little extreme. Boss and Benny hadn’t wanted to kill anyone, but, now that they had, they didn’t exactly regret it, not able to say that it’d been contrary to the desired effect of their action. Their unusually keen appetites while walking today almost seem to be a humorous reference to the deaths of the prep chefs…
AND WHEN I WORKED AS A PREP CHEF AND HAD TO CHOP ONIONS FOR HOURS ON END, I’D WEAR SUNGLASSES BUT STILL BE WEEPING BEHIND THEM, WHICH MADE FOR HILARIOUS SIGHT, AND THE HISPANIC GUYS WHO’D MOLD DICKS OUT OF CREAM CHEESE AND SAY, “MIRA! ERES TÙ, MÁXIMO!”, THEN PROCEED TO PRETEND TO JACK ME OFF WOULD LAUGH AT ME AND ASK, “POR QUÉ ESTÁS TAN TRISTE, AMIGO?” AND I WOULD LAUGH WITH THEM, BUT ALSO I WAS IN CHARGE OF SLICING LIKE 100 ONIONS AND IT WAS SHEER MISERY. BUT I NEVER WAS BLOWN UP AS I LABORED AND THAT WOULD’VE ADDED RATHER A LOT OF INSULT TO INJURY…
On their left is a building that looks like castle with top sheared off, so it’s just maroon building with weird topless turrets at corners, four cylinders around a central rectangle with rounded walls. They’re on a sidewalk now, burweed grown up in cracks in between squares. This is Passaic Avenue, but it’s also the 613 North. They go past Columbia Bank, Just Cheer Gym, First Commerce Bank, then catch sight of several non-franchise restaurants: Tavern 292, Franklin Steakhouse and Tavern, and Boardwalk Pizza. There’s a Wawa further ahead by a Chase Bank, a Target, and the ramps up onto the 46. A hungry spark flashes forth into boss’s eye when he sees the steakhouse, but Benny waves his hand and, “nah, nah… don’ be a stoo nad, boss… Five Guys is where we gotta go…”
And, as they walk, the fella who was pushed over when I first caught sight of Benny and boss sits at computer in front atrium of library. He’s googling nothing now, he just sits and mouths words to self:
“So they knocked me over… no biggie… even though them, uh, pushin’ me over suggested disagreement, the fact is that, by, like, attackin’ me and burnin’ down the country club the night before, their actions were in what y’might call tacit accord with what I was sayin’ to ‘em… Bein’ an NJ shade is no Elysian Field, that’s for fuckin’ sure… It’s more like, y’know, runnin’ your eyes across endless descriptions of method and those dudes want their red-meat behavior back too, they’re sick of all this flyover-state roughage… sick of fibrous push mowers and fiberglass wings trembling delicately in the wind… I mean, they can’t even get their dicks wet in a Ramada or Holiday Inn… they’re stuck in the, y’know, ethnic motels by Newark… a big fuckin’ crock of shit… So, no wonder they burned down Green Brook… and balls to the cooks who got crisped, nobody’ll miss those Monster-drinkin’, pockmarked, motherless fucks… Listenin’ to AFI and savin’ up to snowboard for a week in the winter… Wearin’ Burton snow pants in high-school hallways…”
He’s lost the thread of monologue and, by the time he’s done, Benny and boss have passed by the Fairfield Racquet Club, Jose Tejas, and the unfuckable citadel of La Quinta Inn––where they dream of screwing and sleeping, but cannot. Benny now singing unaccompanied: “Io cangierò tua sorte. Presto… non son più forte. Andiam! Andiam! Andiam!”
They walk along the 46 for three miles with Benny singing non-stop, the same lines over and over and over again, then, finally, after 45 minutes of this––it’s incredible he manages to keep it up for so long, I mean, the same lines over and over again for 45 minutes in his imperfect accent, never belting them out with anything less than total verve, not exactly on top of the notes, but also not really out of key––, his boss turns to him and, as they pass beneath stoplight dangling from wire and begin to head north on Riverview Drive, gives him quick, forceful shove.
“Cut it out, ja mook!”
Benny stumbles, rights self, looks at boss with offense writ large upon face, then turns gaze forwards and they walk in silence for a long, long time.
The William Blake book becomes an increasingly unbearable burden as I get closer to the vigil outside of Notre Dame. I’ve already come to conclusion that Blake’s complex cosmology is a closed system and all I really get out of it is lumbering verse and constant repetitions of the word “vegetable” or “vegetative”. The way I’d expected it to read it based on endorsements by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore maybe more like how I went through Hegel or Heidegger and had luminous little revelations on every two pages or so.
Beyond that, seeing the distance from ferry to church on iPhone map, I thought I’d find a bus to ride, but that didn’t materialize, so I wasn’t reading it and was instead walking with big book (990 pages) as bulky companion.
Benny and boss are at edge of Wayne now. They pass by Emergence Church, U-Haul Moving & Storage of Totowa, Simple Home Improvements, Amish Country Farms, Riverview Gymnastics, then it’s Primrose School of Wayne that’s herald trumpeting their arrival into town where they’re to chow down on Five Guys Burgers and Fries (their shakes also cold milk and spun sugar pouring forth from metal teats).
They stand at intersection and on their left and right are evergreen trees in unruly masses like poorly layered cakes on TV shows that’re begging to be criticized, plus there’s single pillbox or wooden trailer without aluminum siding lacquered in cherry red and it’s Back Care Plus Therapy and Rehab. Both men constantly plagued by lumbar ache, so it’s with longing that they gaze over at pillbox, imagining the woman who could knead at their doughy backs, hairy like whatever’s left on barbershop floor pasted to them. They stand there and sun is setting behind a depot-like building of grey stone on their left plus whatever’s inside of it. The trees that aren’t evergreen are spindly fingers shedding last of earthy leaves, wiggling them off as they shiver in breeze like small plane’s fiberglass wings.
Benny sighs: “oh world… oh poveretta… It’s like I’m the little plane and you’re wavin’ me across the airfield… ain’t that right boss? And New Jersey is like a square of, uh, synthetic stone we can see all four corners of from where we’re standin’…”
His boss laughs. “Come zee bell… Mr. Alighieri over here… Meanwhile I’m so hungry for these Five Guys burgers and fries I’m startin’ to feel heat climbin’ up my throat like fuckin’ agita… heh…”
Benny sighs again: “you think we’ll ever get to ride the big mower or guide the big planes?”
“Stoo gatz… fuck if I know…”
They’re both silent.
“Boss… if we’re just hangin’ around for the night, I wouldn’t mind tryin’ to hitch to the motel and have a screw. It’s been a minute.”
“You text the girls?”
“Nah, not yet…” Benny takes out his Nokia phone. “Should I?”
“While we’re eatin’ you can text ‘em. See if they’re around. Then maybe we can try to hitch.”
Benny puts phone back into pocket.
They are well past massage-pillbox, they are making slight right turn onto Alps Road, then veering left onto Tall Oaks Drive. Places of residence––single-story and ranch-style, rusted drains etched into curb like clown’s satanic fingers creeping out of ‘em, a variety of trees spaced very evenly on the sections of lawn separated from larger chunk abutting house by sidewalk, then they turn right on Seneca Trail. Slats on facades with paint laid on so thick you feel you might be able to chew it. The suburbs are where you come to walk at night with nothing to accompany you but faithful pup, the sound of crickets and cicadas, plus the occasional headlights of passing car.
MY FIRST WEEK IN THE UK, I THOUGHT CAFFÈ NERO HAD TO BE A JOKE… THE COFFEE TASTED OF BURNT AND THE SANDWICHES SEEMED TO BE INFUSED WITH PLASTIC OR SOME OTHER SYNTHETIC THING THAT WAS TASKED WITH CHANGING MY DNA. I DIDN’T KNOW THAT “NERO” MEANT “BLACK” AND THAT, THEREFORE, THE BOSS WAS THE BLACK EMPEROR. THE BURNT-TASTING COFFEE WAS NOT NAMED WITH REFERENCE TO WHAT HE SET FIRE TO (ROME).
Weak headlights of just past nightfall are onto Benny and boss as they are down stone walkway between Packanack Golf Course and tennis courts and Packanack Lake. Eventually, the walkway disappears and they are walking on shoulder of road again. The lake finally hidden by a slight slope ornamented with tall grass and Benny walks on top of the slope for a little while, eyeing the ripples of lake’s surface, hoping to see fish jumping out through it, then stumbling down as car passes by––just barely managing to put brakes on own weight’s momentum before he enters car’s path, but does and boss shakes head kinda amicably.
“Spostata!”
The stone walkway by lake is pastoral idyll, then there are low stone walls in front of houses on Widmer Lane and they feel hidden away from the big, bad world (which is, like, intended effect). But on Cedar Place approaching Route 202, toothache of modernity, endless fluorescent light,. houses get smaller and closer to street, More metal cylinders with intense aspect on utility poles, ewer trees, one is very tall and bark blowing off of it in the wind-–plus what trees have bark that gets so loose it flits off that easy?
In the distance, they can see a car dealership with lot lit up real bright. A Target. A Vitamin Shoppe and they sell CBD oil there now––they’ve got their own in-house brand. They pass by an Enterprise with its recently exposed practice of fraudulent claims after vehicle’s return as to damage sustained, the car dealership is called Paul Miller BMW (and thinking of who this Paul Miller might be), then they’ve reached the Five Guys and it’s across from Royal Carwash and Quick Lube, Cabana Coffee Company, Harmon Face Values, and a Party City.
Maneuver through parking lot and try not to get hit by cars parking too quickly or overly eager to skedaddle. Open glass door and the curved bar they push seems to’ve been rubbed over with burger grease. It’s Steely Dan playing and they’re the only customers in the store. The dude who takes their order is fat spilling over waist of jeans and threatening red shirt with bursting. Skin like feta cheese and pricked over with acne––his hair is thin and color of carrots. They both get cheeseburgers (which means double without having to ask) with the works and a single order of cajun-spiced fries they’re planning to dump malt vinegar over. Plus two large fountain drinks.
Benny: “I can’t believe you’ve never had this before, boss…”
“Yeah, yeah… we’ll see how I like it. Y’sure we should’ve gotten it with the American cheese ‘steada the mutzadell?”
“Yeah, boss, mutzadell wouldn’t be no good on these burgers. It’d be like gettin’ ‘em with gabagool. A real fuckin’ spostata thing to do…”
The skinnier man pays with a twenty and ten he takes out of ass-pocket. The change isn’t much but he puts it back where it came from.
Benny fills paper cradle with peanuts, they both fill waxed paper cups with Diet Coke, then they sit down. There’s something simultaneously fatty and airbrushed-clean about the smell of the restaurant.
Waiting for their order number––64––to get called and it’s David Bowie playing now. “Five Years” and ‘isn’t that ironic…’
They clink waxed paper against waxed paper.
“Saloot a chin don,” Benny says.
“Yeah… saloot a chin done,” his boss echoes.
Benny takes out Nokia phone once again as they’re slurping from straws and smashing peanuts. Punching each number multiple times to get to right letter.
“Fung gool… I’d kill for a good screw…” Benny says as he laboriously types out his message.
“I wouldn’t mind one either…”
“Or two,” Benny says and they both laugh.
There’s no one else in restaurant, but neither man finds it strange.
“Purple Rain” comes on.
“I fuckin’ love this song…” Benny says.
“Ehh… you know me, I’m more a fan of the classics,” and he sets to whistling the same lines that Benny had so tormented him with earlier in the day.
“64!” the cashier calls out from side of counter opposite to where they’d ordered.
Benny goes to get their food.
Outside, the wind howls. The night is blacker and blacker as both men sink teeth into ungainly stacks of bread, meat, and vegetable matter. Everything outside melts away, blown off of whatever it was stuck to before, like the bark detaching from those trees they saw. All that’s left is synthetic stone that soon grinds itself into synthetic sand. And Packanack Lake out of which enormous worms are born, cylindrical concentrations of all the filth contained in small body of water––of all that which was ever dumped into it, like in Beetlejuice, when the dead couple tries to leave their house and everything outside is a desert, and worms eat their way through its surface, then wiggle around, then eat their way back down. And the wind outside the Five Guys is bleaker than even that because the worms that come out of Packanack Lake are blown apart into stony particles almost as soon as they take first breath. And the dad and son playing catch disintegrate, and the plane and the man guiding it too, but the dude who’d been pushing the mower is watching the news on a flatscreen TV in his basement so he stays whole.
It’s at this point that I reach the vigil and those gathered there are immune to the wind’s deformative aspect. Everything around them is gone, including the church, but they stand upright, the wind blowing right past ‘em, clouds hiding the full moon with wicked effectiveness, and they’re all light in a world of sheer dark. The priest stands there and clears throat as if to begin reading from the Bible, but the one issue is he can’t find the book. The congregates look through the whole church, but the wind seems to have turned almost all the texts in there into particulate matter. They find two and come out onto desert plain with discoveries in hand. I offer up Blake, but the priest takes one look at the first page of Jerusalem and “who are these people? I mean… what are these names?” He declines.
“O UNWASHED FOOL,” I SAY ALOUD, “DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT I AM WILLIAM BLAKE AND NEW JERSEY IS MY JERUSALEM?”
A pudgy woman with a pearl necklace and a flower-print dress offers up Dante’s Purgatory. She sniffs with button nose as she hands the book over. He begins to read to the congregation.
“To course across more kindly waters now…”
But the congregation can tell what’s coming, can taste the grease of ground meat at the root of their tongues, and they boo.
A very thin man with a lined visage but only just beginning to bald has found something else. A paperback copy of Stephen King’s The Stand. It’s unexpurgated.
The priest opens this and begins to read. There’s a crow or raven in a blob of blue on the front cover.
“‘Sally.’ A mutter. ‘Wake up now, Sally,’” the priest pauses as if to test his audience’s reaction.
The crowd glows with happy adulation.
The remains of Green Brook Country Club are no longer visible across the now-destroyed golf course. The patterns on the surface of the sand look like Arabic letters.
I pull out my iPhone as Benny texts girls in Newark on his Nokia. They’re done with their burgers. The motel the girls take shelter in might be the only building left standing in NJ––other than the church that is.
My friend Jules texts me that she’s having a tea and a smoked-trout sandwich at the Balthazar Bakery. And reading a work of real historical integrity.
The winds haven’t yet reached Manhattan.
Right after reading the text, my mouth fills with the taste of burnt and caramel and I mouth the word “canelé.”
I remember everything.
