Threestar General Ariel Support dips a schmeck tabak, an imported brand he plugs deep in his cheek; riding shotgun, he sneers spit to his underlings as they make their seventh and ultimate rotation around the perimeter. At Camp, action’s calming, becoming routine: the horizon’s a mass of hair, of blondhair, of yellowhair and goldilocked, flaxen, platinum, and towlike, ginger, and strawberry sunned, auburn and otherwise Caucasianally burnt: plaits of the stuff, reeds and weeds of it, tangles thicketed, brambles barbed wiry.
Fire from the sky and all that mishegas, the General’s yelling over the engine with the windows cranked down, then we’re hauled in to deal with the mess, that’s the infantry, son…he’s preaching to his driver, a recent enlistee just in from Monsey or Muncie (check his mailcall, a relation once shipped him a challah postmarked Walla-Walla) — you should’ve talked to a lawyer before you signed up. Visibility edging the rim of zero, the same nullity as that of the temp. General Support’s in field camos, his neck and ears warmed with the worn of a stolen chinchilla. Their vehicle’s a wonderful new feldgrau Mercedes, shanghaied just last week outside Marienbad and ingeniously refitted: a turretmounted machinegun, a handful of surface to airs. Support’s spitting orders for an end to what’s been a cursory search: interlocking circles of like Mercedes and caterpillaring tanks never to make butterfly rank, to converge treads and wingless tires at the apex of Zaol II, is what it’s known as — to ensure no one’s survived.
After this last and seventh panzerpass through, this Camp’s to be closed, Zaol officially decommissioned, demoted to the status of field. Then, to be reconstructed, though first, it has to be cleaned: that’s why this maternal embed’s been ordered, maids to be parachuted in later today. Millionthgeneration transplanted maybe they’re Romans pouring dead into northeastern morning, scorched in the freeze. After all, someone has to pick up after them, and their own mothers, they’re dead…someone has to tidy up, featherdust if fosterly at dawning’s remains: they’ll be dressed appropriately for the wetwork, babushkad in shifts, armed with brooms and mops, dustbusters and vacuums galore. Infantry’ll provide support from the ground, in contact with the cover Above. A winged formation suddenly swoops, everyone raises their heads and gasps deep. Call it the Last Crusade, Support’s saying, those used to be Abulafia bombers — Jerusalem fell in a day. This revamped Holocaust has forced them to reexamine their relationship to regression, technology as the way to best preserve the tradition — we got the best military in the world, Support’s saying, forget that it’s the only one now, all its hardware and more menschs than we know what to do with. Answer me, son — what’s the idea of a past when it’s not invoked against any hostile present? with only them making the history now, imposing the history, with only us left? That wasn’t a question — at ease. Have to rethink, rework, back to the modernly basics — rekindling advancement, the resurrection of progress in light of the exigencies of the pure. It’s inevitably fast, in the wink of an eye. We’ve radared Judea. Behold Samaria in all its missiled glory, which severs the earth from the heavens above. General Support straightens his yarmulke, which is fastened around his head on a leather thong tied with a bow under his chin. As for his driver whose name Support doesn’t remember, never knew — as they slow to a stop, he fingers his tzitzit for luck: they’ve been made to stop bullets; his tefillin are bandoliers, one boxed onto the arm he doesn’t shift with, the other piled atop his head, which is shaved and nodding along. All this is an assimilation. Don’t ask — it feels natural enough.
Goddamnit, General Support yells to himself, he yells everything, can you believe? Their dreck stunk in a week. We didn’t even have to fight over Shabbos…turns to his driver idling their Merc: you ever look deep into those eyes, son, I mean deep, cold and blue, unfeeling, stupid, I’m talking animaldumb? Nothing’s there, empty, knockknock, nobody’s home. He opens his door and jumps out to what’d been base camp HQ, his paunch wobbling crazily on impact, he’s put on twenty pounds since assuming command. He spits another thick wad, on a boot, then steadies himself amid the swirly dust and the skeletal sky, places that boot dripping on the tush of an old pair of uniform pants, issued by the renewed Levi-Strauss. He scans the goy’s number from the label — the name’s “Dowd, Peter Paul,” then radios into the SS, those Scrimpers & Savers, an unofficially cracked, ragbony platoon flown in from Upper Merion’s King of Prussia and Affiliate malls up and down the Siburban seaboard, northeast; the emes, a squad made up of the cheapest rattiest bastards ever raised by the most mental of mothers Rodentia: I’ve got clothes to cash, he says, I’ve got your pants here, your jeans, denim, real nice, say, tenthousand pair, decent condition, need a bit mending, shirts, too, size (checks a few collars from Dowd’s fellow grave) mostly XtraLarge, socks and shoes salvageable, Over, why not. Why’d we bother to clothe them, don’t ask me. Or bathe them and house them or what. I don’t give orders, I follow. Wallets and watches are mine, Over, but you better get here right quick for the organs — this Dowd’s passable young, liver and kidneys’ve got years.
At the further curve of their furthest circumambulation, way past the perimeter fence, into the spill of latterdays’ death — last nights ordered a rush, a mad frothing into morning’s calm bed, strawstrewn with dawn’s reddish strandlings, its braided rivers of blood…how they’d been directed to martyr quickfast, doubletime before that doubling month of Adar returned, and with it its moon ordaining that newest of holidays, the festival of Purim rededicated, with the Sanhedrin proclaiming it V-Day — the impassioned observance of our most recent miracle lately usurping an olden salvation, the random succor of lots (who gets to scavenge, who goes without); then beyond…Zaol I–VII, each encampment circumscribing the victory in an inset of rings, as if targets rippling out from camp to camps over fields that are field, plod after plot of this soaked, soaking earth, anything but plain — matted a rasp in barbarous curls, ringlets, snips, spikes, licks, and locks; a harvest wildly wilted this devastatingly untonsured spanse of wildform growth, this if not yet thinning, blondbrowning ground. A scatter of jaundice, scalps expressionlessly blank as picked clean of features…and then atop this all, red heifers, which are less prized nowadays considering they’ve been bred by the hundreds of heads, leaning to fat from their previous starve, they’ve been engineered to graze hereupon, to grave, teething up the crown of the crop: this yellowed to blond, this dark ginger darkening in its tear to dreck’s brown, exposed, with highlights of light henna, last dye grown out, still growing out even in death, lightest red streaked skylike with peroxide. Hair, coming up from the fields, as if grown by the very bald of the earth: there are heads buried down there, they’re up to their necks in it, mouthed nosedeep, at the eyes and then deeper toward the brittle crown, the pastured scalp; not screaming or shouting for help, not even blinking eyes or crinkling ears with wrinkly foreheads, no pain, and not much face left to time or interpret with: worms make their wriggly hurtles from nostril to nostril, socket to whistle of air between what teeth remain. Bodies planted, many suspect they’ve been purposefully planted: be patient, your certificate must be still in the mail…as a reminder to whatever fight might remnant a muster, a Resistance, Underground the underground, a.ny a.cronym that might never have had any name, whether boulder or bold, under which to wig or disguise (it was all, it’s been said, this sick Kapo’s idea, the work of the Austiner Rebbe, unofficially held to be one of the most vicious schmucks ordaining around).