Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

Her daughter that was made that day she gave birth to nine months later into 1989, not in their apartment — their apartment that was anyway no longer communal after her husband had managed to clear their cotenants out into other units in the building and, once they were finished being built, into neighboring towers newly irradiating from the dusty grassless central square of the complex — not on her old metal bed and not on her older wooden carved bed either where even a mother as late as her own had once given birth, but instead in the municipal hospital in a hospitalroom with three other mothers and one doctor collectively pushing, pushing more. A flat bland brown building, the hospital, with curling edges as if it were peeling — like a propaganda poster from the wall of the sky.

The daughter she gave birth to, though she resembled initially a wad of chewing gum, grew up — her ridges stretching into shapely arms and legs, the bubbles in her inflating further into impressive breasts. She was to be a person of more plastics and faster cars, of more freedom. She would live to enjoy the openness and transparency of fallen walls and no dictators with birthmarks in the shapes of tropical islands on their balding heads telling you anymore what dates and coal production facts you had to memorize at school, while, if you had the money, there was travel available to such tropical islands and any movie or book you wanted was yours if you wanted it and even if you didn’t it could be yours still, you could have any food and drink at any restaurant or club because you could hold any job and start any business and could say whatever it was you wanted to say—“Fuck my elected representatives,” “Empathy is Evil,” “World War II never happened”—it no longer mattered in any sense of mattering.

But to her for whom communication was not a juicy long letter written invisibly in citrus or milk but instead a quick click on a keyboard, Dear New York! Dearest Turkey! — to her for whom free and openbordered choice was not a matter of allegiance or belief but instead a test of her appetite or depravity, for her the bed kept in the hall she used to sit on when she tied her shoes whenever she went out, the bed acting as bench under which she kept her shoes for them to sleep if they were tired, for her it was a bed and nothing else — in her childhood she’d hardly registered its existence, you would’ve had to have asked her, pointed it out to her and asked her about it — and the carvings on it were just that, carvings, it didn’t matter what was depicted just that the thing itself was an antique, maybe, and did it have a value, could we sell it, where could we sell it and what kind of money could we get for it? For her the man there was a picture of a man and the woods there a picture of woods and the wood was wood with the value of wood and rather it was the value of the depictions that in her adolescence began to interest her — that a picture could have a value separate from that of its materials she was just becoming aware — when her mother by the year 2006 had gotten sick with a hardness and a rigidity like wood in her stomach and then in her breasts and regularly she had to go to the hospital again sunk in grass faded thick and long like the hair she lost and the weight and her color, this time not to give birth again, not to foal even her tumors, but only to die— Which brings us to the purpose of our story …

This story will not end as it began. No more trashy tellings like this, no more folktales. Here is a folktale that will end as a story, as a novel if we’re lucky, but still nothing to compare to the audio/visual.

Better to just show the bed! Fairies! Better to roll around on the thing and hear it sing! O spirited sprites!

There once was a folktale, but its telling had been forgotten over the course of generations. One day, however, a story was written about a lost folktale. Does it seem that what had been lost is now found? or only, like bone chips and deer tracks, explained?

“Once upon a time there was a bed.” And it was old and slept on as if sleeping itself down through the generations. And the generations generated because everyone married to have children and some of the children were born on the bed and some of the children only slept on the bed intentionally or not in the midst of watching television or listening to dance records or reading, God forbid, reading, and the children were always young but the bed kept getting older. It was falling apart at its seams, at its supporting beams, its boards would creak and give with loose joints, with loose joists, its nails snapping in two. And the parents of the children became grandparents and they too were falling apart —like beds themselves, sleepers fit for the coffin’s lid with splintered limbs and the feeling of an ax pain brought down between chin and chest, termite infestation in the liver.

With her mother cancered in the hospital and dying, this daughter who’s young and beautiful, this skinny gracile sylph nymph left alone for week three of chemotherapy invites over to the house the friend she’d met that evening at a popular pub whose theme was Dublin, “the friend” who doesn’t speak her language and is from another country but still has many dealings with modeling “representatives” “representing” “many” “regional” “publications” and who before leaving his home in American Ohio maxedout a credit card on camera equipment, a light and a microphone to tape to it, which all he trundles up the steep stairs to her mother’s apartment (her father, the engineer, had abandoned them both a while back under circumstances that even the most omniscient of narrators would blush at), hauling this gear with the help of his, “the friend’s,” local pardner, a parttime “event promoter” who also drives their van parked outside and alternates, in their movies, his penis.

When the foreigner had made her the offer at that fancily priced Dublin pub that evening, she’d offered to his pardner who spoke her language as his own, It might be fun? and the pardner agreed.

If I like it in life, why wouldn’t I like it when we’re filming?

No reason, no reason at all.

Not wanting to befoul her mother’s bed — which she lately thinks of as her mother’s sickbed where the woman lies usually so pierced with thermometers in every pit and fissure as to vomit their mercury into the nightstand’s drawer — she leads her guests to the television’s bed, that old wooden heirloom she insists on in a moment, a moment of dignity when “the friend” says, Fucking nice bed! I dig the carvings!

She sits down on the thing and he stands across from her an elasticized waistband’s reach from her nose as they begin with their talking, the script they’re scripting as they go along ignobly worthless and, I’m 16, no say you’re 18, I am 22 years old and say, “This is my first experience”—and suddenly, the rehearsal’s spilling into the rehearsed as he holds her and presses his beery lips onto her he’s taking off her clothing and putting his fingers into her and working around her clitoris with the knot of his thumb. Grk, grrk. Foreplay giving way to penetration as in he goes and out he goes and in, the noise from the bed overwhelming, its protestations offensively loud — her as amatory amateur and him as professional “friend,” they’re fucking the bed apart, the bed will be fucked apart. Grrk, grrhk, with each motion of their fuck being filmed by the pardner who stands across from them in the hallway on a chair pinched from the kitchen then up on the windowsill with a pointed shoe like a crowbar prying at the door — coming in close to zoom in, then going farther away again for a wide shot, and closer, and farther, and closer, and far, with each motion the sound of the dying bed overpowering any sounds they’d make, even any sounds that could be overdubbed by them or pretending others in vanside postproduction.