Joshua Cohen: A Heaven of Others

First Responders , archangelic professionals uniformed all in white, with their protective masks and their sanitary gloves because to even see or to touch or to be touched by an entity so holy would mean a life worse than death, might mean a life lived out on one leg, for one, without the suck of a lung, for instance or two or the sponge of a liver, all thanks to the intercession of these Tzadikim Aba always said always with their booties and their beards, their flightless wings mere flutters of tape that serve to separate the living from the dead, to protect the exploded and now ascending from the unexploded and unascendant, the sudden arrival of onlookers, journalists on scene, adulterers and the electrician, all these dusky sirens that Turn turn turn just like rubies, those roseate pearls they seem pealing distantly more and more silent in their twilit settings of silver tarnished so delicately now and so small that they seem to be cities, Moshav and Kibbutz, the Multiplex and the Hypermarket with their lots empty for “ample parking,” as seen from this high up and higher heard until not seen anymore and further deafened forever by the stars that fall and the wails I’m constantly boosting from and climbing, clambering ever fainter from, past the snorting squealing discordant pigs, piglets, sows and tapirs maybe even like from WITH ATTRACTIVE TRICOLOR PLATES, the illustrations from the KETER encyclopedia set Volumes I throughI forget that Aba had given me (ninth birthday) and let me keep in my room up on the seventh highest shelf of the widest and only bookshelf in my bedroom he built the seven shelves with his own two hands like these rungs that I’m reaching at, stretchstraining one to another up on tiptoeing for. Firsthand all the way. To the head.

He’s not even sure if it is a true ladder but not thinking this either, because all he knows of it is a single leg, just a single leg is all and with all of its many myriad rungs extending off to one side (east, if), and so far he’s unable to discern or even sense a second or any other leg otherwise numbered — but who has the time to count, an end at all to these numinous rungs that for all I know might flow out on forever, growing weaker and weaker, and weaker forever on, less like rungs more like rungs of water, as if streams through utter nothingness to step splash down into and fall through forever, and so I cleave, cling tight to the one and only leg, and climb, just climb the ladder I found climbing abandoned by everyone else inside the emptied footloose shoestore: indeed this ladder was the grownup, morphed around just like on the TV ladder of the small stepstair stepladder (actually three-step-ladder), the employees of the shoestore used to use to grab up their merchandise, grubbing all the different sizes and shades from the higher than infinite shelves. Whenever I opened my eyes and found myself alone and what’s more possibly, probably, dead I walked into the shoestore — small yet sepulchral bells hung like heads, as if the speaking of tongues had been emptied from the very innards of chimes sounding hallowedly hollow, Tituslike tintinnabulation of timbrel to sentinel my entrance (through the no glass that was left, past strewn dispersion everywhere amid empty shoes, estrays flung far from soulmates and) — walked into the shoestore as if to find there Aba and the Queen but they weren’t there and I was because actually nobody was, then finding this ladder grown up right in front of me like the stalk of a skyscraper I don’t know why I began to ascend but I did, just like Spideyman I don’t know why I ascended but I have and by the first rung pitched at the height of the roof I scaled how I’ll never know why I found the ladder flowing up ever higher, up and up into sky up and then into void void of void. Stratospheric and further beyond into nothingness and its absence, which is nothing if it’s not the very proof of nothingness just through the hole blown into the blown up roof of the shoestore.

Now that he has made his ascent, he is wrong. In the wrong. Being dead, he’s correct. But being dead where he is, he’s in error. Incorrectly mistaken. Not him but here is what’s wrong, all wrong, because everything about this heaven is wrong, and the timing of it too, for him, for now and for here.

Pigs tried to take me unto their squigglies, their hypnotically spiraling tails and hairy and rotting though citric oiled flanks (due to a vicinity citrus stand), exposed hunks of bunched phosphorescent bone to hug with thighs tightened against the grease of the wind, oinked me to grab on, snouted me out to hold on and hold still, offering me to ride them out to wherever their flights might end, terminus, maybe hoping I’d guide them to safer, smoother landings. But I ignored them because of climbing, climbing is enough.

Yes I’m not as Dummmmmmmmkopf as Aba he once said and then apologized more for the Queen than to me: I know I am deader than dead. And that the boy whoever he is, whoever he was went and exploded me because he was one of them and I one of mine. And maybe still am or no. My parents are dead too. Perhaps. They were also of mine. As the boy’s parents were most definitely one of his, most probably are. And that they were one of his made him one of his, still makes and blah blah. In return. Maybe it’s because he hugged me, and so tightly, that I’m here. He squeezed me in with him, possible. Like just managed to. Embrace it. But here, which is in the wrong heaven. His. Theirs and not mine. A heaven of others, Not for me.

He expects me to do something I can’t.

Though some appeal, most won’t.

Politics were always on the radio when I was alive. Whenever we listened to politics were on the radio Kol Israel 98.4 on your FM dial all I ever heard was the sound of goat. Sound of tragedy the sound of goat. Radio said Goat and I listened. Bleat bleated to bleat in bleat at bleat, bleats bleat of bleat and baa baaa bleating. Hungry goat senseless as goat as hungry but when I listened it was always with a full stomach (an empty head). Why I say politics is that I want to say goat, and why I say goat is that the radiowaves traveled through the air and past me (INFO, from Informashun , is the word in American, an acquirement thanks to my dictionary, ALCALAY shelved alongside my encyclopedia set), radiowaves announcing the death of a boy named the same as I’d been back then — and the deaths of his parents too, I think I heard and that of others and their parents and static, István Jontovics, 72, Raya Malesa, 23—but the radiowaves that sounded to me as if the sounding of goats they bounced off the pigs that were flying, bounced, rebounded, redounded, were deflected, repelled, ricocheted, shuttleshunted, became babble bebabbled and so all the while ascending the ladder, its rungs, I heard my name, I am sure of it — and many other names as well, such as those of Nir Pershits, 32, Einat Yavin, “only 18”—but I heard them all strange, all goatish or goatified and the sounds further said upside down, outside in. But how I knew, how finally uti possidetis as Aba used to say — wrongly — in the Latin of our terra nullius he said Aelia Capitolina if you know it I knew and know I was and am really truly totally dead Absolutely so is that at the very summit of the ladder (or just on an amazingly huge, filled with heaven rung and me, I’m none the wiser) I found myself once again in Jerusalem, my home in Jerusalem and what’s more in Jerusalem on its Tchernichovsky Street, the street of my house (our apartment), the street of my school with the shoestore adjacent (the toystore was always “just around the corner”), and what’s worse once again in front of the shoestore itself and in good repair as if the ladder had ascended up into air up into space only to emerge through a merely mundane sewer just now steaming open, the mist listing my stagger onto the street I had only just left in the proverbial down below. It was strange. And the same. Except that here the shoes were back in their boxes. The boxes were back on their shelves. Intact, the window was too. Though alone.

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