He offered the boy his eagles to eat as a meal and the boy wrapped the eagles in his headdress that would not burn and buried it under the sand under the fire that required no logs or sticks or twigs nor the tinder of HEADLINES.
Our meal will be ready soon the boy said.
I asked the boy Who are you?
I’m hungry.
Let me introduce you to starving.
And then the boy said he was a boy who had died.
I asked the boy how he had died and the boy asked me the same Who are you?
And so I said to the boy I am a stranger here, a stranger to you in a heaven not mine and the boy asked me How did you come to be here? and so I said to the boy I had been exploded and the boy asked me Who exploded you and why? and so I said to the boy that a boy exploded me, a boy about my same age and yours too, who had hugged me then exploded me outside of a shoestore located on Tchernichovsky Street in Jerusalem the Third City of at least one Empire and the boy said to me he had once — embraced and — exploded someone or other himself, indeed that that’s how he had merited here, by martyring himself he’d earned for his death this life after life and a death that was glorious and so I asked the boy Who? and the boy said to me I don’t know and so I asked him again Who was it? and the boy said all he knew was that it was a boy about his own age and mine too, outside of a shoestore on a street named for a Russian of sorts, he remembered, maybe a Finn the boy said in Jerusalem I’m not sure, though he called it Al Quds (Abul Ala al-Maari Way, he said, maybe it was, a writer, I’m feeling a poet), which is home to Quabbat As-Sakhrah and Al Aqsa meaning the Furthest have I ever been there That far, I asked the boy why as in Why did you do it? and the boy said to me He was not you, do not worry — And he was not you either was what I said to the boy who said to me that our meal was ready and that We should wash before we eat but there was no water to be found, only smoke and a tire.
They ate (in heaven, no food is forbidden), though neither would fill.
As I turned to take leave of the boy the boy said to me Wait a sec.
I asked the boy Why? and the boy said to me You must wait here until I’ll return momentarily and so again I asked the boy Why?
And the boy said to me You have provided the meal of the two quailing eagles and so I must provide in return. Understand. Please and thank you. That you have given me a gift and so in return a gift from me is required. You get it. My man. Understand was what the boy said to me and so I said to the boy it’s not necessary and what’s more it’s not even wanted I said Don’t get angry with me because a wait and a return and its gift however required or merited will only delay me and I must not delay instead I must seek the Two Mountains and I must find the Two Mountains and the Valley between in which I must seek the man named Mohammed and in which I must find the man named Mohammed so as to set everything but everything right, please understand and yes thank you no you. Slap me one. All I have. But by the time I’d finished saying my meaning to him the boy had risen like smoke and was gone and many multitudinously beastly creatures, jackals, had surrounded the fire and prevented my leaving—they were jackals, but were odd, emaciated, crescentshaped and up on the hindmost legs of their twelve: they opened their great alabaster jaws to slash me to my stand, circling they were closing in on me constantly nearer and tighter, furling always as if a scroll of living, sinewy parchment on which was written I would say inscrutable laws (an alphabet of rips, slashmarks, selfinflicted bites, cuts and ingrammatical tears), coming closer ever closer just to smother me into sustenance, theirs, until I could stand just in the fire itself and atop its very flame, which I did knowing I could survive the fire longer if not by that much than I could survive, have survived the fifty it seemed jackals they seemed that they were constantly circling me and closing in on me and so I stood in the fire that instead of burning me or further charring the exploded and so already burnt, died underneath me to a pillar then an ashy wisp in the air and all was again dark and only the sound, the smacking screech of the jackals, which were manifestations of their hunger as insatiable as Time, said to me the jackals still were, where they were still and that I was not theirs, I mean yet.
I stood in the pit ringed with a tire and there awaited the return of the boy.
But just as boys lack so does heaven.
Heaven has no continuity. After before. Heaven has no consequence. No cause of causality. Without let’s say Æffect. A covenant broken. An upheaval, overturned twice. For one: After living a life of morality an eternity is necessary in which to become accustomed to amorality. This is why many of the righteous become many of the wicked in heaven and why they are punished there. Here is why hell, which is as amoral as heaven, hosts more of the righteous than he will encounter anywhere ever.
Morning if you will, the golden plate returned but empty as always.
He walked long and unshod to the Two Mountains to their Valley and so to the man named Mohammed. As he had nothing left of the supplies packed for him by Queen Houri (scavenged willowpills, gnawable hides, scraps of bark, dried beetles and a small sackling of orificial lint), he was again hungry, thirsty and exhausted now too, despite passing wonderments on his way that he had never once before wondered, and that (and the hunger and thirst) (and the exhaustion as well) might have been why they did him nothing at alclass="underline" For one, the calves that dwelt in the abandoned enormously abaloneous shells of extinct snails enriched him to nihil. For another, neither the rams trumptrumpeting his arrival (rams that to communicate blow and intake through their own horns as their sole means of respiring, horns that in this heaven are attached to these rams, which are so breathing and so communicating understandably endangered, in the reverse of their terrestrial disposition). Nor the fallen brigade of just pubescent boys with wicks set into their nipples, waxen wicks dribbling a sexual sebum from the dead middles of their intumesced areolæ, the wicks fuselike, first pubes first braided then lit — or else the ancient people desiccated to the ostensibly leprous, stuffed with earth (heaven’s provision being the opposite of terra’s: instead of burying a person in the ground heaven burying the ground inside of a person), their arms out legs spread, leaking earth and spitting worms through green mucous reddening membranes while shouting to him screaming at once in a vomitus of that fishbowl gravel and routedirt, Salaam Salaaam Salaaaam — all this rendering him no whys, maybe also because his eyes were fixed as ahead as ahead can ever hope to become fixed in a desert: he had sought and he had found the Valley of Nails.
This was the Valley between the Two Mountains that had been going to him as he had been coming to it.
Dwellingplace of Mohammed, who would right wrong, who would left right. Place of Mohammed who would map the nonexistent. Ruled by Allah the inextant, who would teach the dead.
But was heaven, was the true heaven if it even existed, worth this descent, such a fall through the Valley of Nails, of rusty, bent battered nails, of all these old oxidized, dead senseless, headhammered to wilting nails bloodcaked, dripping remnants, the remains of all flesh, their iron lengths tapering violently to the dullest point possible that still would pierce skin if with the most martyring of pain, points dappled with manifold shards of rust, strands of sinew, hunks of tendon smeared with yellowish and oily fat, spiraled serpentine in intricate nearly King Solomonaic ornaments of hair in many hues: a lightly spread carpet hovering just above the slumberous bed, a netting of heads’ hair and toupees’ and wigs’ meshing in a rumor of transparency, in the sheerest shades of black, lightest gold, gingy red and gray to smoke’s white floating just atop these nails pointing every which way as if in the shock of total accusation, the sting of absolute blame?