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CHAPTER FOUR

 

YEAR AD 1942

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3

 

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

11:42 P.M.

 

VINCENT AND LOUISE (parents of a cute little fair-skinned girl named Roberta, who was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom of the Johnston’s house) had celebrated optimistically within the interior of a couple of late hours. Election district tallies of the ballots were now finished, and the names of winning candidates were still being broadcasted from radio and more radios, declaring unbiasedly that their ward’s favorite candidates had successfully captured three aggressively sought-after seats. As is expected customarily within jubilant halls and guest-filled quarters allied to this type of affair, there were platters of refreshments; there were bottles of stimulants; there were clinking drinking vessels and guzzling throats; there were meaningful hurrahs; and, nonstop sounds of gaiety filled nine-tenths of the associate ambience.

 

     There by the dining room commode stood Mr. and Mrs. Dewall, wordlessly—somewhat short, somewhat chubby, somewhat fair-skinned, and somewhat mild-mannered—resembling each other so closely they might very well have harbored evidence of having shared the same womb. There by the open doorway to the kitchen stood the widow Mrs. Alcott, a lean and gray-haired woman of years (said to be a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century Louisa May Alcott—who wrote a large portion of her life into a novel titled Little Women), chatting candidly with Mr. A. Anthony Efrems, and adding well-deserved congratulations. Mr. A. Anthony Efrems and wife had sneaked off from the City Hall and had stopped in to see sweet Auntie Johnston, who, by her own rights, was honorary auntie to half the residents of Syracuse. Mr. A. Anthony Efrems had triumphed in this evening’s election—by a landslide! Not your typical political landslide, mind you, no, but a political landslide so powerful, so devastating to his opponent, so voter-participated (yes, that is what I wrote, and you read correctly), so voter-participated, an estimated ninety-nine percent so voter-participated (the majority having submitted their ballot by no later than suppertime) but leaving an unfolding trail of suspicion suggesting that a handful of ballots, possibly more than two or three, were lost, were tossed, or were totally unsalvageable due to stolen or utterly destroyed voting booths, that if this particular political landslide were assimilate to a major hurricane, not a road would have survived, mudslides would have washed an entire mountain into a river, and the river would have fled its entire self into the sea, to be found not ever again.

 

     There was that A. Anthony Efrems, as I aforementioned—the victor nonpareil of this evening’s political race, accompanied by his petite and emerald-eyed Irish wife, Kathleen Efrems, who was leaning suggestively against the kitchen icebox, twirling a tiny good-luck golden shamrock. “Here, Mayor A. Anthony Efrems, have another brandy, but we got to get back to City Hall.” There were Gertrude Smyth (a young ex-schoolteacher of Vincent’s) and her extremely overfed, over-freckled firstborn, the neighborhood violinist, Curious Oscar (whose un-programmed recital this night so chilled the teeth of his captive audience that they subsequently stated politely to one another, politely beneath their breath that, “A chorus of old and terrified tomcats being stretched alive for their fury little pelts couldn’t have loosed from their terrified lungs a more challenging performance than those of Curious Oscar’s terrified violin strings.”

 

     That Curious Oscar, whose nine younger, overfed and over-freckled sisters (all born an exact year apart from one another, beginning exactly a year after the birth of Curious Oscar), were self-anchored at home. They had both locked and bolted their cute, little pink-ribbon-haired selves in absolute horror behind the giant door of a jointly possessed bedroom, waited in fearful, stark silence until mommy’s searching eye had eclipsed the hallway light from entering the keyhole, “Now!” huddled and shivered in one another’s arms, and had wailed and cried the unswerving blues all that evening, “We don’t wanna go, Mommy! We don’t wanna go to the party and see that scary old Mister Johnston!”

 

     Attending this gay confraternity of the vote, as well, was the wife of, and hers forever, Mr. Engelhardt W. Buschwald, the plump but aging butcher (always more jovial and as carefree as the predominant emotions streaming into the atmosphere during a sunny and white-clouded effectuation encompassing a blithesome county fair on its opening day), whose modest shop of meats, related pleasures, and fishes complemented the three-thousand-block of East Pratt Boulevard, tastefully. Finally, there was the hospitable hostess of this back-patting assemblage of friends and acquaintances: the wife of one Mr. Hansel Johnston. Well, not exactly the wife of, as we shall see in the following paragraph. Nevertheless, she, Mrs. Eleanor Johnston (sweet Auntie), was the hostess of this night’s get-together. A charming woman, Sweet Auntie Johnston, now wearing the sixty-seventh anniversary of her birth, as rosy and silky cheeked as the healthiest newborn, always ready to share with anyone, uncompetitive whether in the home or among the neighbors, of a meek but moderately convivial disposition (if indeed a meek but moderately convivial disposition is achievable) in her household habits, yet practically weightless in her midline, and forever wanting to know more about everyone she met, as well as her expectant guests, Vincent and Louise.

 

     Before the sheer-curtained parlor windows, our final member of the evening, a half-open and somewhat unsophisticated casket lay restfully, and extravagantly flowered, atop a linen-draped gurney (instead of in an expensive funeral home, a common practice among middle-class citizens during the war-torn forties of the twentieth century). Stretched from end to end in this unsophisticated casket (but possibly not so restfully) was the emeritus owner of the house, old Mr. Hansel Johnston (having passed from the living only hours ago; the mini-vault acquired and the body prepared cosmetically and arranged without delay, as was the tradition in those dissolution-conscious days).

     There lay old Mr. Hansel Johnston, a pink, waxy blush now painted thickly upon his unfussy-looking visage, lips red, and jawbones stapled together nearly as tight as the last two bricks fortifying the Fordsworth Street Schoolhouse, and nearly enough talcum powder around his nose to qualify it as an official mineral deposit. “My,” Gertrude Smyth commented, but with considerate solace toward Mrs. Johnston, “they’ve done so gorgeously to his eyelids.”

     Mrs. A. Anthony Efrems passed the open casket, nodded deterministically, and, as she did, lowered her tiny golden charm into it quietly, “Don’t need this, anymore.” Curious Oscar strolled slowly, very reluctantly, but obediently to the mini tomb, focused a skewed glance; and inverting his bulging eyeballs, he screamed, “His nose twitched funny!” and focused a pair of run-away feet toward the front door. “I just saw Mister Johnston’s nose twitch funny…!” And an inquisitive cry from another, “Funeral’s tomorrow, aye?” And a very, very inquisitive, and loud, cry from Mrs. Alcott, “Who was it just whispered that nasty curse?…!” Mr. Engelhardt W. Buschwald squinted an old-country twinkle from his jolly, old-country eyes and calmed the anxious moment. “Vhy, dah meat in my market…” and something remorseful concerning dead cows.

 

     That old Mr. Hansel Johnston, who had, only days ago, after boasting his self-certifiable credentials, “Yas, I’m an upright and church-going and God-fearing Christian,” always shaking a fist fiercely at a barroom mirror, “And I’m on personal terms with the Man!” protested twist-lipped and vehemently to three-quarters of the burgeoning City of Syracuse, interweaving wrathful sentiments against the poor and hungry immigrating from the Island of Ireland to the United States, but leaving his highly fascinated listeners with The Punctilious Legend of the Foot-Wide Grin: “I’d rather be found naked or wearing my mother’s wedding dress in an Irish whorehouse, dead, than ever to see that diabolical mick squab, Efrems, voted into office.”

 

 

LOUISE by qualified occupation a registered nurse, frocked coolly and maternally, had not accepted the stouter drinks, in light of her delicate condition. Her husband, Vincent, however, a clever gambler and talented auto mechanic, a cloudy specter of burning cigarettes and cigars encircling his and his acquaintances’ faces, had more readily imbibed the political inducements, tipping glass up…and upper, tipping glass down—patriotically, not drunkenly, but as they had quipped, “He certainly absorbed well.”

 

     Louise, but soundlessly, made herself scarce from the dimly lit parlor and the merriment at the now host-and-guest-surrounded and buffet-laded table, and laid herself gently onto an overstuffed couch near a wide, matching chair. Vincent took concerned note and followed.

 

     “You okay, honey?”

 

     “This could be it,” she murmured, raising her weary eyes to his. “Could you get the car?”

 

     Exiting the uncomplicated festivities, virtually unnoticed and silently, except to inform friends and satisfy reliable arrangements for little Roberta, Vince and his wife slipped unpretentiously through the rear entry of the colonial-styled house. A porcelain-based bulb above their head, with the shakiest of filaments, crackled blinks of senility with the opening and shutting of the outer door. A number of steps to the end of the shadowy driveway, into their old automobile, and Vincent and Louise were driving composedly but at a high speed, off and into the progressing night.

 

 

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4

 

LYNCOURT, NEW YORK

SAINT MARY’S HOSPITAL

3:42 A.M.

 

A TIRED AND AGED and white-haired, white-smocked Doctor Britt entered the white-walled, white-floored waiting room, strolled noiselessly to a rather drowsy young, dark-complexioned man reclined in tranquility, and nudged his left shoulder, causing the raising of an eyelid. “… … … ….” “I have a what?” “… … … ….” “A boy?…!” “… ….” “A baby boy!”

 

 

NOVEMBER 8

 

SUNDAY

North-side METHODIST CHURCH

 

louise, her baby boy cradled affectionately in her arms, was standing still and at peace before the stained oak gate to the antiquated wooden altar. Minister Dooley, the aging pastor of this neighborhood church, contemplated the infant solemnly. “His name, Louise…so the congregation can hear?”

 

     “Shanan,” She smiled softly, as she handed her baby carefully to the minister.

 

     “Then, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, I baptize you, Shanan Bin. May the good Lord watch over you all the days of your life.” This he spoke as he sprinkled the babe with clean and sanctified water and, with a free hand, rubbed it gently into the newborn’s forehead.

 

Old Mister Johnston borne out of this life;

a child born into it. No Relation.

 

———

 

SHANAN’S was an average childhood: Born allergic to sunlight, every animal, weed, tree (except for the Christmas balsam fir tree), bird, and eatable egg on Earth, he felt truly welcomed by this big, extraordinary world, which scientists were claiming to be a half-million years old. Dr. Maddin and his many colleagues at Syracuse University studied him thoroughly for years, drilling his arms, legs, back, and chest with hundreds of test injections, enabling them to write volumes of observations—in their spare time.

 

 

SHANAN’S MOTHER SCREAMED in the midst of a breezy Fall afternoon. She had raised herself slowly from a nap on the front-room sofa of her mother-in-law’s house and discovered Shanan’s ears had inflated to the size of a little-league catcher’s mitt, his feet double their normal size. He was now three years old, had one new baby brother, Ronald, tan-complexioned, and a new and fair-complexioned baby sister, Florence. Grandmother Bin was sifting wheat flour vigorously in the kitchen, and sensitive allergies of infant bin had grown a severe attraction suddenly for the thick, ashen nebula haunting the air surrounding him.

 

     His mother dialed; the doctor answered. “Throw him and a bag of cornstarch into in a tub of warm water, and let him soak for at least an hour.” The doctor’s ominous recipe altered not the slightest throughout Shanan’s youth. This was not a happy ritual for the rash-ridden, itching, sneezing little boy who hated scrubbing his teeth, baths, and the “Soap Monster, too, mommeeeeeee? Aaaagh…!”

 

 

IN THE MIDST of one very early and chilly Springtime morning, in his fourth fragile year, child Shanan, white but soiled and raggedy little teddy bear clutched tightly in his little hand, bumbled his way from his crib room, down the front stairs, and into his parent’s bedroom. His father had left early for work, but his mother had worked the nightshift at the hospital and was yet lying in slumber. The deeply perplexed tot stood at the side of the large bed, until his half-asleep mother turned over instinctively and noticed him and his worried countenance. The moment she did, he began to cry softly, a small fountain of tears descending from his eyes, rolling glistening tracks down his tiny, red cheeks.

 

     “What’s the matter, honey?” young Mrs. Bin quizzed, ever so compassionately.

 

     Standing pitiably before her, his little hands and teddy bear draped loosely and motionless at his sides, in his little blue jammies from his little round neck to the end of his little blue-jammies-covered toes, Shanan sniffled, “Please don’t ever die, Mommy,” dropped his little teddy bear, marble-eyed as ever, his teeny eyebrows all crumpled up, two little, trembling fists snuggling tightly beneath his tiny nose, and began to weep all the harder. “Oh, Mommy, please don’t ever die….”

 

     Mother Bin’s eyebrows bowed upward above her nose, and her nose sniffed above her budding frown, and her frown curved into a loving smile, as she reached quietly forth and drew the frightened child to beneath the ample blankets of her and her husband’s bed, tenderly gathering Shanan close to a warm and sheltering body. “Oh, honey,” she consoled, “you don’t have to worry about those things. God has everything planned for everybody. But I don’t think he’s ready to take me just yet. I’m right here, my baby. You try to get a little more sleep, okay…?”

 

     These heartfelt words of sympathy seemed to appease the dispirited child, and he snurfled his little self asleep in an instant, his mother, corner of a sheet in hand, lightly dabbing little tear-bathed cheeks. His dreams gave comfort, played games, and frolicked into an unspoiled wonderland, but he would recall off and on through the coming years of his brief life in this world these few but sorrowful minutes.

 

 

WAR-PAINT FACED, lilac-tree bows and arrows ready in hand, wearing only a homemade corduroy breechcloth, playing Indians-and-Indians in the summer of that fourth year of his peculiar life, Shanan sat cross-legged in his backyard, itching animatedly from pollens of the lawn. His younger brother, Ronny, woo-woo-wooing as he danced his teetering pirouettes, tromping a footpath into the grass, threw a half-handled pitchfork at the enemy. Pain? Pain, you say? Indeed. For a week, Shanan’s seven-year-old sister, Berta, would tease, “Here comes Mister Mummy Leg!” Brother Ronny had unpremeditatedly but somewhat conveniently—more a matter of cause and effect—rendered a revenge for the accidental bat-swing to his head smiling Shanan had given him the preceding day.

 

 

AT FIVE vulnerable and unworldly years old, Shanan was tied in a sitting position on the damp ground, to a cherry tree, looped round and round by the three “mean ol’, bad ol’ Auroch boys.” They had apparently (prior to their laughing and giggling return) gone fishing or to Russia, leaving him scared half to death with a vast assortment of surreal horrors running through his imaginative head: Are the mean ol’, bad ol’ lions going to kill me and eat me all up and run away and hide, so Mommy can’t find me? He bawled the whole hour, crying, motionless and rigid, for his “GRAMMA…!” and “JESUS…!” Within an hour—freedom, a very, very memorable freedom—and cookies at Grandma’s!

 

 

TWO DAYS HAD BECOME prehistoric, and at the propitious sight of three wandering lads, Shanan evened the score. He cried to his grandmother, “Those boys threw dirtballs at me.” Catching the Auroch children that very moment footing it expediently the length of the block toward their home, Grandmother Bin gave them a rigid scolding. In reality, if truth were known, and it shall herein be known: Shanan, where he should not have gone, had spent two fun-filled hours that adventurous afternoon tagging pollywogs for the pollywog collection he did not have, nonchalantly in a sheer-sided mud-hole five blocks from his grandmother’s house and had taken a pants-tattling slide on the muck. Now, not that the above cherry-tree-tied episode implies the following tragedies, but Jerome Auroch died of cancer before he was thirty-five; Bennett Auroch was killed in an automobile accident; and Toby, the youngest, was balding before he was thirty. Through subsequent years, however, though Shanan and Toby eventually lost touch with each other, they had developed a reasonably pleasant and adult-like friendship.

 

———

 

YEAR AD 1988

 

LONDON, ENGLAND

SUNDOWN

 

THE WRAITHLIKE WINTER FOG, curling itself into wraithlike associates here and wraithlike ancestors there, was nowhere near as dense or as saturated or as overstuffed with divers populations of microscopic particles of wood and coal soot, wood and coal dust, and wood and coal ashes, hemorrhaging upward to showering downward from the numberless collections of chimney-potted chimneys, often three, six, or nine to a building (depending upon the number of sitting rooms or bedrooms wall-side but not frontal-side), stretching their shielding brickwork or copper-clad throats to precarious heights and arcs, standing perfectly upright or mildly loose-bricked—mildly crooked or mildly goosenecked, as if peeking stealthily at cobblestones beneath scurrying city feet—adding more grime to the already dirty costumes of slushy streets below their scattered footprints, but ornamenting the myriad precipitous rooftops of yesteryear, or as thick as the sparky residue flowing upward and every which breezy way from hand-warming burn-barrels, bottomed with ember-embellished toe-holes for like relief, blackening partially melted snow cropped wearily against curbing, storefronts, or waiting boots, as it was in the wintry days of long-dead these many years, napkin-jawed Charles John Huffam (Boz) Dickens, but the fog was thick—indeed, pea-soup thick.

 

     Indoors of a tiny side-street boutique, not all too distant from mooring docks along the Thames River, near the closing hour of evening, sitting comfortably at a thirteenth-century gold-inlaid writing table set snugly before a frostbitten split-glass sidewalk window (pintsized, smiling children huffing and rubbing pintsized and clear-circled areas into its lower pane), a young, stern-faced Arabian man (evidently well-rounded in the English language) layered heavily in seafarer apparel, another curious customer (who had arrived twelve minutes prior to the entering of the Arabian man), and the owner of the shop sat.

 

     “I captain an oil tanker,” the seafaring man declared, “During my last voyage east, I vacationed and visited Calcutta,” in a bass voice, as he placed a weighty and lidless brass oil lamp, engraved with a thousand Arabian panicles, on the table, “A street vendor sold this to me,” with a tip of the Captain’s head, yet eyes toward the owner of the shop, “How old would you say it is?”

 

———

 

YEAR AD 1948

 

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

 

There was LITTLE SHANAN, pacing nervously in the hallway of the second floor of the residence of his Grandmother Bin and Aunt Hilda (a very petite, middle-aged woman, unmarried her entire life, and the wealthiest among the Bin family, who always called young Shanan her angel-baby). The youngster was now six snooping years of age and well on his slithering way into a dark preoccupation. He peered to the right and quickly to the left (his hand sliding stealthily across the casing of the door) and glided softly sideways from the hallway and into his Aunt’s spacious and book- and bookshelf-filled bedroom. Seven silent, tippy-toed steps swiftly across the oval throw rug, Shanan, in an expeditiously smooth gesture, slid open the upper-right-hand drawer of his aunt’s vanity table. Shanan figured he would impress his giggly little girl buddies at school, if he were observed flaunting a finger encircled with “A real, honest-to-God, ruby ring!”

 

     “What are you doing?” his Aunt Hilda inquired, abruptly, rather stoically, materializing as if from out of the air.

 

      Bulged eyes trapped the mirrored reflection standing behind him, logged it into his startled brain, “Nothing!” he exclaimed, as he spun toward the voice and the eyes electrifying the face of his suddenly four-hundred-foot-tall aunt.

 

     The vanity mirror facing the hallway had revealed Shanan’s clandestine scheme to his aunt, resourcefully. “Put the ring back,” she commanded. “And we’ll not do this again, will we?”

 

     “No, Aunt Hilda,” he whimpered, nearly inaudibly, rather ashamed—at being caught—and in a quandary as to how his aunt had spotted the loot. The thought of carbon-copying this ill-fated deed remained thereafter absent from his ambitions, without the parental type of punishment—thereafter in that home—a new type of freedom.

 

 

AT THE END OF EACH SPIRITED DAY of his young, spirited life, when Nighttime was crawling slowly westward over the North American continent, with her billions of invisible eyes, when being cared for in his grandmother’s home, Grandmother Bin, along with his mother, would tutor and help Shanan recite his Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep and The Lord’s Prayer, as she tucked him into his Uncle Johann’s immense bed. His uncle was a professional government engineer in Buffalo, New York, but would only come home for infrequent visits or the holidays. At the conclusion of each prayer session, Drowse beginning to tug at Shanan’s playful eyelids, Grandmother Bin would rise from the side of the bed, and close the door quietly behind her, allowing only a sliver of hallway light to seep mischievously into the bedroom, which painted an eerie slice of wall, or a touch of excessive imagination. Although Shanan would end his prayers with “Thank you, dear Lord and dear God,” and “Amen,” his recitals mattered not: He still dreaded the vague, and the Stygian silhouettes fluttering lifelessly about the nocturnal walls, and through his imagination. Doubt and fear of the unseen yet lingered in his mortal soul.

 

 

’TWAS A BRIGHT and sunny Saturday afternoon, two nomadic feet stretching an entire city block away from their official front door, and as Shanan was playing with Doris, a round-faced, pigtailed little blonde girl, cute as a pickled smile, neighboring a short block from the house of Bin, he made his speculative move.

 

     “Would you marry me when we grow up…Doris?”

 

     “I’ll have to ask my mommy.”

 

 

TWO EXTREMELY LONG days had inchwormed themselves unhurriedly into a retrospect, and little Doris was playing house on the porch facing the street.

 

     Came a wandering little boy, and— “What did your mommy say about me marrying you?” Shanan queried, in a somewhat reserved tone.

 

     “No.”

 

     He shuffled his feet and dragged himself from the porch, with his head hung to his skinny chest—so relieved. The day he had proposed to Doris, a new little girl moved opportunely into the neighborhood, and—“She’s a whole bunch more cuter.”

 

———

 

MAY, YEAR AD 1948

BEN GURION

SOON TO BE PRIME MINISTER

PROCLAIMED ISRAEL A STATE

 

ISRAEL

NOT MANY MILES EAST OF JERUSALEM

 

Fear not: for I am with thee:

I will bring thy seed from the east,

and gather thee from the west

 

I will say to the north, Give up;
and to the south, Keep not back:
bring my sons from far,

and my daughters from the ends of the earth

 

THE OLD STONE BUILDINGS had weathered grayer than the atom at the heart of the Koh-i-noor diamond and now were more silent than the corpse of Good Intention. Ancient mortar, which had held their stones tightly together down through the forever-uncompromising centuries, was now pitted through and through by the ravaging of countless ages and sand-peppering winds. The majority of these buildings had seen unlimited destruction and despoiling by meteoric passings of lost civilizations and wandering bands of reckless tribes and were now all but covered with earth and drifting desert.

 

     Notwithstanding these vicious elements, a lone building set apart from the others had endured and was standing firm, though half buried by the dust and sand of the wilderness; and its yellowed stones were great but neatly structured. The edifice sat in its grace among a modest collection of half-buried additional buildings: crumbling, lifelessly metamorphosing stone phantoms spreading tortuous shadows across their lifeless foundations.

 

 

THE ANCIENT ONE (long, white curls—snowy-white curls—trimmed to a respectable length: snowier white curls a man could not imagine) was rather quiet as he stepped humbly through the doorless entrance and into a broad room containing six other men. They were seated upon square, thick-wooded benches, and clothed as if they had stepped out of a distant age. This was the Middle East, however; and in nineteen hundred and forty-eight, these archaic-appearing garments were as commonplace as the archaic moon in the archaic heavens.

 

     From a nearby room could be heard women singing low a Psalm of David.

 

     In the broad room, the ancient one walked to the side of a bench by a large, timeworn oaken table, and spoke. “Brothers, the day is here,” Tsedeq declared staidly to the men. “Jacob has returned to Palestine, and this Holy Land is again Israel—restored. The children of Israel are flowing from the world to this land of our Prince. Sheva, please bring us the Scroll of Habakkuk. Let us sound his word for its values.”

 

     Sheva received Tsedeq’s request agreeably, walked to a dark pantry, returned quietly with a frayed coil of leather, unrolled it wide across the sturdy table, and settled onto his bench.

 

     Tsedeq kneeled and, from that position and with a bowed head, raised and spread his hands apart and prayed in the direction of a high, glass^.less window and into the setting of the sun, after which, accordingly he employed his bench. “Harim, please begin from the prayer of Habakkuk.”

 

     As Harim read from the scroll, the ancient one, Tsedeq, as was his custom, interpreted the messages of the reading.

 

     “A prayer of Habakkuk,” Harim read, “the prophet upon Shigionoth.”

 

     “The prophecy of ramblings,” Tsedeq began politely. “The prophecy of errors to be mended and today made clear. I will retranslate the Hebrew of yore into these times which surround us in this land; for these words are of the day of the Lord and are ordained to be reordered in our ears.”

 

     When they had reached the beginning of what we would refer to as the third verse, the illuminations of Tsedeq began to take on a serious form. “God came from Teman,” Harim read.

 

     “Objects of worship,” Tsedeq interpreted: “The scrolls came from—were discovered—by two Arabian men (Edomites), (by two or three witnesses) for the curious have pierced the headlands along the cliffs. Read on, Harim.”

 

     “And the holy one from Mount Paran. Selah.”

 

     Tsedeq nodded with genuine understanding. “The holy one: the separated man—has entered into the world. The scrolls were discovered in Mount Paran (mountain of caves). Read on, my beloved brother.” Tsedeq relaxed, but with a light excitement.

 

     Harim unrolled another foot of the scroll leftward and paused briefly, endeavoring to distinguish an area of rewritten Hebrew characters. “His glory…covered the…heavens.”

 

     “The chosen of God,” Tsedeq clarified, “though temporarily unsettled, now cover his Holy Land.”

 

     “The earth was full of his praise,” Harim read.

 

     “The caves are filled with the scrolls of his Psalms,” Tsedeq intoned, “and his prophets and the Messiah Prophet Isaiah. Furthermore, the people of Israel throughout the world behold His Word—this day! And what more did the Holy Ghost mean when He inspired Zechariah to write ‘and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced’?

 

     “Where there is a question, there is by necessity a solution, or there could not be a question. The solution is twofold, first, found only by you answering this question: What must a man do before he can visibly look upon the Lord? Second: They who have pierced the caves are looking upon the Word of God, though they shall look upon him again in the Last Day. And this…”

 

     The little congregation of men pondered these words, smiled quietly, and indicated an insightful demeanor. Harim resumed his reading. “And his brightness was as the light.”

 

     “The sun,” the ancient confirmed, “showed its morning light.”

 

     Harim let his concentration fall back to the old parchment. “‘He had horns coming out of his hands.’?”

 

     Tsedeq nodded. “The Morning Rays of Light usher Themselves into the caves: the horns along the side-ledges upon the hills and cliffs at our Dead Sea, and peers into them silently.”

 

     Harim shook his head gently, smiled, and again lowered his eyes to the prophecy. “And there was the hiding of his power.”

 

     Tsedeq explained: “The coastal doves hide within the hardness of the walls keeping the ledges of the caves. More importantly, what the coastal doves are hiding in the caves manifests the power of God. Allow Sheva a moment of reading, my friend.”

 

     Now, the brothers seated before Tsedeq sat in anticipating silence. Harim moved with respect to an adjacent seat, as Sheva took his and began to read. “Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth...at his feet.”

 

     Tsedeq bowed his head toward the table top and phrased with obvious grief. “Before the uncovering of our caves, millions of descendents of the House of Levi, the House of Judah, the House of Benjamin, the House of Simeon, and many of the House of Israel, were tortured and, without mercy, burned upon the Earth. The Law and the prophets had to be fulfilled, or this day of the Lord’s glory could not have arrived.”

 

     Wonder filled the room and, as Sheva drew the scroll closer, the minds of his counterparts. “He stood and measured the earth.”

 

     “The Lord rose,” Tsedeq replied, “and judged those nations surrounding us, who he gave for the torment of Israel.”

 

     Sheva finished reading through the passage we would call the third chapter, scribed by the Prophet Habakkuk, and Tsedeq spoke in a low, determined voice. “Europe—is divided, and them from the east of Palestine and the south and the north are being divided and judged, as we speak.”

 

     Sheva read. “I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction, and the curtains of the land of Midian did tremble.”

 

     Tsedeq, moved emotionally but not sympathetically by these portending words, declared their broad significance. “The houses of Cushan: Jordan and Iraq, and Sinai: Egypt, are in throes, now being repelled. And the land of Midian: Arabia, is trembling at the presence of Israel. As brother Zechariah wrote: ‘And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the Earth be gathered together against it.’

 

     “And in that same passage, he scribed: ‘In that day will I make the governors of Judah like an hearth of fire among the wood, and like a torch of fire in a sheaf; and they shall devour all the people round about, on the right hand and on the left: and Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place, even in Jerusalem.’

 

     “And again, he wrote: ‘In that day shall the Lord defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and he that is feeble among them at that day shall be as David; and the house of David shall be as God, as the angel of the Lord before them.’

 

     “And again: ‘And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.’”

 

     Tsedeq said they would delve into the rest of the twelfth chapter of Zechariah at another time. Sheva read into the next passage of Habakkuk. “Was thine anger against the rivers?” Tsedeq answered. “Against those identified in Isaiah eight/seven, as we read, yesterday. Now, the Lord is angry at them who flow unified in their wrath against this new Israel—at them not ordained by God—against his chosen.”

 

     “Was thy wrath against the sea?” Sheva read.

 

     Tsedeq raised his tired eyes and gazed through the high glass^.less window. “Are you, O Lord, angry against this distant Arabian league from which these nations flow as a mighty body, sticking their neck through the doorway of your Holy Israel?”

 

     Tsedeq was wearying, but the others smiled and urged him kindly not to withdraw just yet. He agreed pleasantly; and, without hesitation, Jakim slid the scroll before himself and began to read with quickened excitement. Tsedeq unveiled several subsequent lines from the old scroll and nodded toward Jakim. “Go on, my brother, you are doing fine.”

 

     “The sun and the moon stood still in their habitation.”

 

     Tsedeq again lifted his eyes to God and began to weep, but in a reverent joy as he revealed the relative denotation of those accomplished words of prophecy.

 

     “The Sun…the children of Jacob, and of the House of Rachel: the Moon…they now stand strong and permanent in their given habitation: their Promised Land. And God blest them, and God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the Earth.”

 

     Solemnly, the interpreter rose from his seat to leave the room. “We must rest for now, my friends, for tomorrow is a day of labor: We have to bury this building and move from here to another land—the diggers, the armies, and the curious will be coming, you know? The anointed brethren, among us, will yet have to abide in Jerusalem, now, for prayers cannot cease.”

 

     The women in the adjoining room rejoiced in song, singing the eighty-seventh Psalm. The men were amazed and wept with Tsedeq, lifting their righteous voices of praise to the great God of Israel.

 

 

IN NINETEEN FORTY-FIVE, Christians and Allies from around the world had brought the Second World War to its knees and freed the Jews from their oppressors.

 

Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, saying,

I am innocent of the blood of this just person:

see ye to it.

 

Then answered all the people, and said,

His blood be on us, and on our children.

—Matthew 27:24-25

 

     Now it was four thirty P.M. Friday, May fourteen, in the year of our Lord, Jesus Christ, nineteen hundred and forty-eight. The Sabbath sun was descending. David Ben Gurion and his forces and allies had finally recovered from the enemies of Zion the Promised Land (roughly twenty-five hundred years in the hands of alien nations) and proclaimed it the State of Israel. To the ruling class of Arab nations, and all their classes, this was the equivalent of a declaration of war.

 

Shall I bring to the birth,
and not cause to bring forth?  saith the LORD:
shall I cause to bring forth,

and shut the womb?  saith thy God.

 

     At the Tel Aviv Museum hall, after the signing of a single-page proclamation, Ben Gurion, the soon-to-be Prime Minister, placed his pen on the desk braceletted by the rest of the Jewish leaders. “The Sate of Israel has arisen,” Ben Gurion declared. “The session is closed.” The power and the merciful hand of their loving God, Who had remembered them in their sorrows, would front the ensuing battles, allowing the people of Israel to prevail—and fearlessly! This man-child, Jacob, called Israel, was born again, suddenly a nation without a past, and caught up unto God and to His throne.

 

And the land shall mourn,

every family apart;

the family of the house of David apart,

and their wives apart;

the family of the house of Nathan apart,

and their wives apart

 

The family of the house of Levi apart,

and their wives apart;

the family of Shimei apart,

and their wives apart

 

All the families that remain,

every family apart,

and their wives apart

—ZECHARIAH 12:12, 13, 14

 

Hitler, though killed and burned to a nauseating and gruesome heap of charred nearly black and half-fleshed bones at the end of the war, had given his malevolent decree, and he and his Nazi party had demanded the Jews be burned in the ovens of Europe and had separated unmercifully every Europe-dwelling family of the House of Judah, the House of Benjamin, the House of Simeon, and every Europe-dwelling family of every Jewish religious leader of the House of Levi.

 

I beheld then because of

the voice of the great words

which the horn spake:

I beheld even till the beast was slain,

and his body destroyed,

and given to the burning flame

—DANIEL 7:11

———

 

But now thus saith the LORD that created thee,

O Jacob,

and he that formed thee,

O Israel,

Fear not: for I have redeemed thee,

I have called thee by thy name;

thou art mine

—ISAIAH 43:1

———

 

YEAR AD 1949

 

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

 

THERE WAS SHANAN at seven industrious years of age. He and his brother were hard at pillow-fighting from bed to bed, long after their parents had told them to retire. This was nearly a silent sport, as television shows would assuredly veil their sporadic giggles and lighthearted play. Mom, however, hand-mending rascally trouser knees in the front room below, left her work, and heralded up the front stairs thrice. “Go to sleep, you two, or I’ll tell your father, and he’ll put you to bed.”

 

     In one hemisphere and out the other. “Good ol’ Softy Mommy. She hardly ever means it when she threatens us, huh, Ronny?”

 

     Brother Ronald must have opened his pillowcase and placed a cast-iron anvil in with the pillow before hurling it. Shanan screamed, suddenly witnessing every blazing star God had ever created. Their dad (an appellation preferred affectionately by an editor of this story), a somewhat resourceful man of resourceful means, climbed the stairs secretly and surprised Shanan with just how hot those stars could be as he translocated them onto Shanan’s unveiled fanny.

 

     Shanan usually played the sacrificial lamb. If Ronald and he were getting into mischief, only Shanan would receive the wrath of Pop. Shanan did not care; he loved his brother, and his family. What is more, as time and life progressed in their teachings, and for various and occasionally disclosed reasons, Shanan conceded humbly to himself that the wrath of Pop should have occurred far more often.

 

 

YEAR AD 1950

 

MEXICO

 

JOHN had enjoyed his temporary stay in the tranquil town of Tapachula, by the deep-canyoned border of Guatemala. The young Apostle loved mountainous country and, indeed, so did his llama. These hills were lush with foliage, filled with multi-colored fowl; and shallow, gay brooks gurgled gently their songs of vivacity, as John and his llama followed the narrow dirt road slowly north to the village of Huixtla.

 

     In Huixtla, John would mingle at peace with its inhabitants, changing and opening souls to love, by the radiance of His way.

 

 

YEAR AD 1952

 

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

THE SCHOOLYARD

 

SHANAN was now nine (and a half, as he put it) years old. Scientists were claiming the world was now five million years old, and a baby robin had fallen from its grassy nest high upon a stone ledge overlooking a large window in the aging, red-brick schoolhouse. Our nine-and-a-half-year old found the robin shying away, fear-filled in a corner, and became extremely concerned for its current welfare. Unable, by stature, to climb the vertical and definitely risky arrangement of glass and brick, to replace the little bird back into its mother’s safe haven, the lad stood hopeless, yet picked the bird up compassionately and gazed into its big, frightened eyes.

 

     The robin’s body was feathered enough, though trembling and only half the size of a full-grown, but the life in it seemed to feel a newfound protection in Shanan’s small palm. Although fleshed with baby fat, and warm in Shanan’s hand, the robin would lose its plump before long through its evident soon-coming flying lessons. Shanan loved it forthwith, but his heart was quite aware of the need to find a way to replace the shivering bird to its nest.

 

     “What’cha got der, Shanny?” a stocky boy croaked, popping into the scene. He attended the same school as Shanan but was grades ahead of him.

 

     Presuming the stocky boy was a send from Heaven, Shanan declared very patently. “A baby robin! But I can’t get it back in its nest. His nest is way too high. Maybe you could boost me, and I’ll put him back? Could you help me? Would you please…?”

 

     The stocky boy reached and took the baby robin from Shanan’s hand, but chuckled as he allowed the poor thing to fall clumsily to the concrete sidewalk. Without breathing a single word, he pushed Shanan insensitively aside, jumped a foot and a half into the air, and came crashing maliciously down with both feet stationed together, squashing “—————My baby birdieeee…!” to death. Shanan hushed himself immediately and merely stood there, powerless, eyes beginning to water, and without due consolation.

 

     Cracking a warped and ugly grin, the stocky boy walked brashly off with his bloodied feet, chuckling loudly in his dull voice, “Yer birdieeee would have died, anyway, Shanny! Dah mother would’a kicked him oud-a-dah nest, anyway, because you touched him,” he scribbled verbally into the humid air as he disappeared round a corner of the schoolhouse.

 

     Shanan began to weep openly for the tiny bird; his bewildered heart torn to shreds: Why did that boy have to be so mean? he mulled: He didn’t have to kill my baby birdie. Now, in an emotional mire akin to a light^.less sea bottom, as he turned his steps sadly homeward, feeling a great deal of intimate grief for the plumaged creature, not able to fathom this horrible incident, a little voice inside him, a man’s voice, however, in a soft, velvety tone, spoke calmly, “The wicked, cannot understand.”

 

 

SHANAN’S SCHOOLMASTERS had appointed him crossing guard for children in his vicinity. His teacher and the school’s principal had designated a main intersection: two main and well-driven streets near his home, to guard diligently and to encourage other youngsters to cross alertly as they were on their way to, or returning from, as Shanan described it in his early teens: the red-bricked detention center. On the opposite side of the street from this crossing-guard’s chivalrous post was a friendly (but closed until nine A.M.) neighborhood store called Keeffe’s Groceries.

 

     Each promising morning in those alluring days in front of Mr. Keeffe’s modest store, men and women waiting patiently for their bus placed pennies, nickels, dimes, and on rare occasions a quarter, onto the top of a thick stack of newspapers and took a copy to read on the way to their place of work. Shanan, oh, yes, Guard Shanan, after assuming his morning post—and immoderately cognizant of this unguarded treasure—as each group of persons had boarded the bus, would scoot himself speedily across the boulevard, remove the unguarded coins in haste, stuff them promptly into a pocket, and scoot back to his post to do his respectable guarding.

 

 

ON AN OVERCAST MORNING, as Shanan was avidly counting his ill-gotten gains (for the third avid time), a silver dime slipped inadvertently from his hand and fell unrestricted into a deep, thin crack in the concrete sidewalk. Mr. Crossing Guard, now avidly on his knees, unsuccessfully conjuring his fingers into five steel tweezers, attempted energetically to retrieve the nestled dime for at least ten fretful minutes. Realizing that if he tarried three moments longer, he would certainly be late for school, Shanan, yet on his knees, prayed heart and soul for help from the Lord.

 

     “Dear Jesus, I promise I’ll put the money back. Please… please let me get the dime. Please, Lord!” he pleaded. Abruptly, and as if alive, with his aiding hands and the aiding flip of a discarded Popsicle stick, the dime plinked miraculously to the surface of the concrete walk. Instantly grabbing his emancipated riches, Shanan, now happily pacified, sprinted from his post of guard and diligence, and skipped off to the old, red-bricked schoolhouse, or the other thing.

 

 

A GROUP OF BOYS was exercising gymnastically in the play yard—running, toppling, ducking hastening sneakers, skipping, bumping, human and living carousels, waiting for the last bell to ring its iron cap into an inevitable call to class. Perry, a lanky, easygoing lad, invited Shanan to wrestle.

 

     “Sure,” Shanan replied succinctly and, before another word was spoken, they lunged at each other and tangled one-on-one as if they were bantam roosters at an amateur cockfight—colorfully muddy shirttails and shoelaces flailing wildly instead of feathers, hollers and hoots flowing wildly, from those for or against, into all ears in the play yard. The school bell rang; little Shanan was now occupying a section of upper air in which he, by virtue of an astounding gravitational phenomenon, unoccupied just as quickly; startled brown eyes thrown open wide, staring into the expanding ionosphere; nobody caught him; and he hit the ground, flat as a pancake, shot-putting the wind from within him—to the moon!

 

     Lying deflated and quaking on the grass, his mind reeled: End of world! He choked and gasped desperately for oxygen, laboring like a trapped tunnel worker trying to make passage for a breath to enter his breathless little body.

 

     A six-foot-three-tall, gray-haired, and spectacled schoolteacher, white and navy-blue polka-dotted skirt hemmed scarcely inches above her knee-length- (we will assume, prudently) stockinged ankles, stepped outside and called for the children to get to their classrooms at once. “School is beginni—And why is Shanan lying by first base?” Perry began to sniffle, feeling so guilty and unhappy for hurting his schoolmate.

 

 

During that morning’s class: six-foot-three-tall teacher to a rather short but aspiring writer, “No, Shanan, your article on Why I Love Lizards wouldn’t stand a chance with the Editors of National Geographic, especially those three pages you dedicated to the awesome look of surprise on your little sister’s face.”

 

 

That afternoon, after the closing bell had—at last!—rung her liberties into gladdened psyches, and one idealistic mind, walking briskly homeward from school at a calculating pace, he again counted his newspaper booty, avidly. “Jeepers!” he cried aloud. “Where’n the heck’s my dime? And that quarter! Where’s my shiny quarter…?” He paused for a moment to reexamine this awkward situation internally: Gads! I must have lost them while fighting Perry. Well, more dimes will be on the box tomorrow, and pennies, and nickels, and quarters, his mind waxed boldly (though his post would be given to another within seventy-two hours) as he hopscotched himself buoyantly home for the day.

 

 

YEAR 1953

 

SHANAN had recently turned eleven tender-hearted years of age, and during a Sunday morning in church listened analytically as aging Minister Dooley beckoned the congregation to invite their friends, and strangers likewise, to the following Sunday Service. “Whomsoever you can persuade,” he prompted passionately from the pulpit. Young Shanan took his every word to heart: This man is speaking for God himself! Next week must be really important.

 

 

THROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Minister Dooley’s newly appointed servant to the communion of the saints invited neighbors, who appeared genuinely interested, and neighborhood children, who appeared apathetically interested, by the score. “Please come and attend. You gotta attend our church this Sunday, for sure!” Nevertheless, and regardless of numerical calculations, probabilities, and numbers of unknowns, at the next Sunday morning Service in the North-side Methodist Church, not a one of the invitees showed even a hair. Shanan, rather confused and more than lightly saddened by their seeming lack of interest, questioned correspondingly the efforts of persuasiveness of the rest of the church congregation, as not a single new face was among them, either.

 

     Yet, apart from the absence of potential converts, the pastor did plant a Scriptural seed of astonishment in our young exhorter. “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” If that’s so, the youth’s inquisitive considerations deliberated: How come you haven’t sold everything, Minister Dooley? And, hmm, do the Catholics have a Saint Moses?

 

 

THAT WEDNESDAY ARRIVED finding Shanan shuffling through the front entrance of Herman’s Drugstore, facing straight ahead but roving his eyes to the right and to the left. Upon reaching a shelf- and product-filled aisle of his intended destination, facing straight ahead, roving eyes to the right, to the left, his arm a virtual fan blade, he stuffed two brand-new rhinestone-studded Duncan yo-yos sneakily into his pockets. Thence, he retreated anxiously to enjoy them for the day, in the shadows of the streets, perhaps five feet from the drugstore’s front door. Shanan was still a thief, impatient and without a hint of a conscience.

 

 

FRIDAY MORNING in the old schoolhouse, the above-mentioned yo-yo rustler was sitting un-studiously at his scrimshawed desk. A young, blue-eyed lad sitting at the scrimshawed desk to Shanan’s left reached over and tapped his left elbow surreptitiously, which caused a pair of shifty, brown eyes to glance leftward toward the blue-eyed student.

 

     “Shan…” he whispered, motioning with a covert wave of his hand toward curtainless windows. “Out there on the pole.”

 

     “Out where? What?”

 

     “The pole…out on the pole,” he again whispered. “The top of the telephone pole.” Shanan glanced mutely through an opened window, and raised his eyes.

 

     “Look like your bike, Shanny?” his friend asked.

 

     Shanan had lost his bike, oddly enough, a couple of early evenings prior, and was at a loss as to where it had so promptly vanished. This was not too problematic with him, as materialism was in no way part of his inherent makeup: Things came; things went. Yet, yonder was his bicycle—tires flat and loosed from their rim, inner tubes in ribbons, both wheels and frame mangled and bent around the top few feet of the telephone pole, six inches above the last of ten foot-spikes used by repairmen to assist in their chores of climb and repair.

 

     Shanan’s simple heart, nonetheless, had suffered a disturbed state of affection, and he responded sadly, yet, maintaining an indifferent countenance, while double-checking the feel of a yo-yo in his right pocket.

 

     “You know who did it, right?”

 

     “Yup!”

 

     “Who?”

 

     His friend told him the names of the boys who had stolen the bike, and that they had bragged the morning away to half the other pupils. This presented an imbroglio. The boys were bullies from a nearby neighborhood: older kids and a younger brother of one of them, who were constantly picking on Shanan, and anyone else who fell into their grips; and they, the lot of them, were too tough—“Way too tough…” —for undersized Bin to handle alone.

 

 

STEEPED IN A DREARY SADNESS, but only out of ingenuous confusion, as Shanan departed school on that gloomy afternoon, not even a thought of looking back toward the telephone pole, he heard that voice again, calling from a well of a thirsty heart. “For the rod of the wicked shall not rest upon the lot of the righteous; lest the righteous put forth their hands unto iniquity. As you, Shanan, except you narrow your path….”

 

     Although he loved the voice, he rarely understood what it was saying; thus, he paid it no serious attention. Three fragmented thoughts idled in the upper hollow of a little head, fast-and-loose Monday-through-Friday amnesia devoured his bike woes, and off to his home he ran. “Taddle-dah!” he trumpeted loudly into the unsuspecting sky. “No more school til Monday. No-no, no more schooool! No bad dreams til Mondaaaay! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay…!”

 

 

BOTH NIGHTMARES—AND DREAMS—CAN COME TRUE. Christmas in sixth grade, Jane Pommer had drawn Shanan’s name for the gift exchange and had given him a poorly wrapped five-cent pink baby rattle. She told Shanan she bought the gift just for him, which catapulted his esteem for her into the heavens.

 

     Jane would do practically anything to gain notice and her classmates’ manifest respect, and Shanan provided a convenient opportunity toward that end. In the quiet recesses of his easily impressionable mind, he half knew the gift was a prank, but Shanan’s spirit was so excited, so sadly, naively, Seasonally excited—“Yay! This is our Christmas! Thank you, Jane!” he cheered, “Thank you!” as he carefully and methodically removed the wrapper. Immediately, a morbid, un^.holiday shame bloated his highly sensitive heart, and he dolefully regretted the unwrapping. The other kids laughed—all the other kids. You could find no sympathy. Welcome to the real world. They had taken advantage of Shanan’s weakness again. Had you spoken an ignorant word to him in those days of untrained perception, he would have blindly believed you—unfailingly.

 

     For years, Shanan daydreamed sporadically, wishing he had crushed flat beneath a vanquishing foot that rattling package of utter disappointment before showing the slightest intention of tearing away its sheep’s clothing, and silencing its mocking beads and their plastic echoes forevermore. Yet, soon afterward, Shanan forgave her, unconditionally. Jane, who would be forced to live with this insensitive mistake for the rest of her natural life, was a rather obese young lady, deeply in need of love, and verily shunned by her classmates, as well. Shanan felt elegiacally in his spirit that the day would surely arrive in which Jane would regret her debasing act.

 

     “The dream of every living soul,” Shanan’s Uncle Johann told him on that snowy Christmas morning, “is no different from the dream of every living soul: peace and freedom from injustice, Shanny, peace and love, not agony. I’ve experienced it myself, Shanny. Still and all, millions of nightmares have little or no regard for the myriad souls they subconsciously, and consciously, and so viciously trample upon while hunting their own insatiably greedy peace. You’ll find your freedom.”

 

 

AT THIRTEEN YEARS OF AGE, in the midst of a drizzly April thirteen, in the thirteen hundred block of Rig Street, at one-thirty P.M., carrying thirteen dollars in bills and change from his paper route, Shanan, as he was riding his bicycle homeward, was hit by an automobile as it sped over the top of Rig Street hill; and he, hit the National Enquirer tabloid.

 

THIRTEEN: LUCKY NUMBER FOR PAPERBOY

 

     The colossal knot now hiding the young paperboy’s left eye resembled a New York Yankee’s hardball, not autographed, except with harsh lavender splotches. Mother Bin snapped a convenient photograph, and Shanan’s five-hundred-dollar settlement, later on in his life, would take him to Phoenix, Arizona, for his health and Jail one-o-one. At the time of his accident, by the way, the lad was living at One-thirteen Newcastle Road.

 

 

THERE WAS SHANAN at fifteen—Shanan the scientist, in the basement of his home, held a glass canning jar carefully upside down over an antiquated natural-gas jet. With his palm pressed tightly upon the lid of the canning jar, keeping the gas within from escaping into the air, he gracefully flipped it upright onto the top of a junior workbench, whereupon he struck a big wooden match, quickly raised it to the top of the jar, and awed as the gaseous blue flame danced gaily about its mouth. Unexpected by young Bin, his mother called down the basement stairway, for him to wash his hands and get ready for supper, and he panicked, fearing she was descending the stairs. In a flash (not trying to be too gaudy here), he hunched himself over the jar and blew hard down into it to extinguish the bobbing flame—before the gas had exhausted itself entirely. Have mercy!

 

     During their four-course supper, between forks ascending and descending to hungry and gaping mouths, his family (and in the order of the impending inquisition, I shall herein honor patriarch and matriarch personally, and respectively by seniority and dominance: Vincent and Louise), relatively astonished by, among other personal affects, his newly acquired tan, grilled him (as if the minute-hand of the clock were appointing each speaker sequentially round the table), concerning his beautiful long eyelashes: They had become micro-stubs with tiny melted balls glistening their blackened ends. His face tingled for a day and a half. Thus, another stirring and illustrious chapter in the ever-evolving amalgamation of occupations—Shanan the Scientist!

 

 

SHANAN WAS A CURIOUS BOY. A quick, early life biography, and important things to remember: Those were not chocolate M&M’s; they were Mommy’s special Cascara Segrada pills: Eyes straining wide as physically possible, lilliputian legs and feet dangling inches off the floor, swinging to and fro at a hundred miles per hour, tiny hands desperately gripping the edge of the seat, lest he should become a victim of accidental liftoff—one tremendously intense course in advanced Pottyology.

 

     Not to mention thumbs and gears; heights little boys cannot jump from; speeds not to obtain while riding bicycles; and his dad’s seventy-five-dollar vaporized transistor radio did not get better reception with Shanan’s revolutionary nine-volt battery to one-ten house-current conversion plug. His brain, on the other hand, could receive signals from outer space, while Pop was vaporizing the seat of his britches.

 

     Although a flourishing bush of gardenias does for real produce the smell of buttered popcorn, convincing little girls its flowers are eatable—at a matinee movie—will only induce seven early bedtimes, for self.

 

     Cotton clotheslines are worthless for climbing from second-story bedroom windows—old breath-to-moon syndrome. No matter how hard you huff on them, flies stay dead after removing them from the freezer. A mysterious and physiological relationship indubitably exists between electricity and bulging eyeballs.

 

     Half a worm cannot be grafted to half a grasshopper for better fishing, no matter how long you—“Now, siddown and eat your liver!”—hold them together. Shanan was indeed a curious boy; but, after all, he had the mind for this sort of stuff.

 

     [Additional notes on his lack of insight: His gullibility, if you will, could read only as follows: If Shanan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, listening to the wrong people talking the wrong things, he would not become aware of the gravity of the situation until possibly years afterward. Moreover, Shanan had consumed a goodly amount of Christmas dinners in this world of yours before finally realizing that the CLOSE DOOR button on cheap elevators was inaugurated merely to enhance the sale of tranquilizers. A virtual century passed before Shanan became cognizant that the Potomac River was indeed longer than just the extent of Washington, D.C.]

 

 

SKINNY as a rail in pants, but with a rather handsome, wide-eyed baby face (but without the rounded cheeks), curl^.less, fine brown hair, Shanan tried so very hard at school to make friends with those he believed to be the more important kids of the scene; but they would not allow themselves to be seen with him, let alone befriend him, try as he may. The majority of the students, who were held in high esteem, standing in their fashionable sweaters and relative coordinates, acted as though they truly hated him. They were forever ridiculing his dry skin, his dark complexion, his skinny legs, or “Skinny Coal-Bin’s” poor school grades, which they were.

 

     The beautiful hue of his skin, in reality, favored an Anglo-Polynesian mix with a blend of the Orient. These, however, did not represent his actual backgrounds: He was, colloquially speaking, half beer-bottle German, mixed with a quarter English and a quarter Scottish: essentially half British. Disregarding these inter-socially complimenting features, the kids still avoided him as if he were a plague. Yes, Shanan was slightly different, but not so different. Or, was he? Forty birds (but not crows, sparrows, or pigeons, at sundown in summertime) perched and facing west on a power line, but one always facing east.

 

     Apart from the judgmental school cliques, in his own well-treed neighborhood, Shanan did have four humane friends; and, Skinny Margie from fifth grade actually liked him as a boyfriend, until they had graduated grammar school, at which point, Margie developed into a sought-after-by-the-popular—fox. On top of which, Shanan had quite a strange yet naive way with words, not unlike, “Gee, honey, if you looked just the opposite as you do right this second, you’d be the ugliest girl in the world.”

 

     In Junior High school, Shanan dated not a maiden. He had developed into a loner and in no time had learned to appreciate this type of privacy. Physical sex was a total mystery to him, for he had not the slightest mental image pertaining to this multifaceted subject. In those lost days of fundamental politeness, community endorsed magazines, which held principled messages for many of their readers, had not become as obscene as community endorsed magazines are today. In those old days of proudly worn hats and well-earned halos, the majority of the public disdained unexpected filthy images or unexpected filthy words in literature, as this had not begun to enrapture the minds of the masses until humankind nearly worldwide sanctified the pornographic book Tropic of Cancer, prohibited in the United States on grounds of obscenity, but overruled in state court findings of obscenity, in the early sixties. Shanan’s morals as well as the morals of the world, more or less, had not encountered a moral defeat so immorally efficient—in those relatively moralistic days.

 

     Many birthdays vanished into the winds of yesteryear before Shanan considered himself grateful the important children had chosen not to befriend him and draw him into their ways. A further certification of his gratitude was that he nearly became friends with a boy in grammar school, coveted for his looks, fancy sweaters, and popularity, who became homosexual before he had lived through his teens (in those days, the pristine word Gay, as Shanan had once expounded, was yet pristine but was destined to be corrupted all but completely and into denialed extinction), and fled south to a beauty salon career in Georgia. Friends of the homosexual boy, during his infrequent visits to Syracuse, still appreciated his presence—in those days, ostensibly.

 

     With true compassion, however, Shanan had silently observed the perilous fates of his schoolmates: early pregnancies, abnormal sexual preferences, strange habits, and untimely departures from this life. Because of these unfortunate deviations from the norm, and treading precarious paths, sightlessly submitting themselves to a world of hit-or-miss accidents, many of his school friends, and a fair number of his downtown pals, over the first half of young Bin’s existence, fell like flies into the dominion of room-temperature.

 

     Shanan garbaged his own life, with no outside help; of this he was positive. Nevertheless, regarding certain of his boyhood friends, he mused: Their choices were like, fatal: like they didn’t know, they had no way of escape.

 

†