Joshua Cohen: A Heaven of Others

I am in the wrong heaven I said to Queen Houri.

I walked in strange to them shoes around and around the trunk of the Tree around and around their infinite ring (or at least never remembering one of them the women twice in thrice and more around) and around the trunk of the Tree and said to them I was embraced by explosion into this paradise that is yours and not mine, that I do not belong here because you say I don’t belong here (I listened), and that I am I only because you are you.

Why? Queen Houri asked as one.

Why not become one of us?

And as the sound stretched across their infinite mouths, the softly grown heads of the Tree shook the question to the ground as if No.

Yes asked the virgins, their sisters grown from the Tree Why disappointed?

Just as death is a renunciation of life they said I have now only to renounce that that’s survived it. Me. But you can’t.

Why bitch? Aba would ask.

He meant the Queen would say Why complain?

But Queen Houri, the fullgrown virgins to ripeness, picked up the gems penning in their ring (excess flesh that turned to jewel in their hands), and with them pelted the heads and partiformed faces of their becoming sisters because these still growing, nascent virgins are not only not permitted to say anything but, further, are prohibited from even eavesdropping upon any of the sayings of their fully formed, allrealized sisters below much as Aba he once said that Other people believe if you eavesdrop on (which?) heaven God throws down flaming stars aimed at your head, which in my case has since been blown up. But these rocks and stones like the fluorescent pebbles I used to scoop from the fishbowl where I kept Dag and the other Dag after the first Dag died and we flushed him away, plunging him into Aba’s oozy smell, into the woozy wake of his turds these hot, hard and dirty implements are aimed not only at the soft of their heads, the ears of those who could and so would listen in — as if they could help it, this happy patronization of their newfound protrusions — but are aimed also at their bodies, at their own lesser wet voids, everywhere and so maybe it is from this very hurling and lobbing that their flaws exist but are perhaps only evident when the virgins hit ground. And as hard as virgins. And are thusly explained, said so away.

But none of this had been explained to me as one woman, a portion of Queen Houri — a toe of the Queen, I like to think, a majestic thumb, also I might remember the one who arose from the midst of her sisters to Meet and Greet me upon my arrival at the laddertop shoestore — arose to escort me right out of the Jerusalem Above and its valleys, the sand beyond the sands beyond the city limits to a Fountain because my questions had seemed to her, as they must have to them, quite physically thirst and the water to be obtained there and there only — have I mentioned that most of this heaven is quite obviously a desert? — would answer all for me, questioned. Please I said as the Queen would have had me say Thanks. Would quench or so it’s said and it was. But as this feminine thumbtoe escorted me up and down dunes, around and around dunes then in and out of the valleys sanding between them, as she with we walked farther and farther away from the remainder of the Queen that is Houri — she unshod, me in shoes so as not to lay skin upon foreign sand — she grew more and more naked, more and more whisperweight and transparent and, after a time I could not ever hope to translate to you even if I had half of my decade back in which to do it, I turned around at the very top of a dune, saw the previous dune through her, then saw her no more.

With her disappearance I could not hope to find the Fountain but shade.

Up ahead, after walking longingly, was shade but a curious shade of it: a shade with nothing in evidence to produce the shade, with no shading entity discernible between the shade, which was the darkness delineated upon the sand of one indisseverable grain, and the immaculate golden plate above that served up nothing at all. Save light and warmth unfulfilling.

I stood in this shade shaded by nothing then I lay and then I slept, I must have slept and when I awoke there was no shade but I was under the wide longribbed leaves of another tree. However its leaves, which were generous fronds of palm, provided none of the shade I had so enjoyed previously: the setting of the golden plate proceeded on its natural strength unabated, and it was as if the shards of the plate now smashed on the knife of the horizon had stuck through the palms, had pierced them through and so pierced me too, stigmatic under this element of shade that provided none, having no purpose for any incarnation but its own. An unimpeding impediment. A stumble without snare.

After the golden plate smashed then ashed away to the white darkness of smoke I slept again and did not dream of the Queen, neither of Houri, but instead of an unmanned caravan of approximately let n equal x thousand pregnant camels that was approaching me from afar (the direction from which it was arriving I’d titled Fast, the other I would name Fleet), the humps as dunes dispossessing themselves of earth and moving on always, a sandscape perpetually in motion so as to appear only the same again and again — repetition as ritual, wandering the only, which is favored, method of stasis, the Latinate nunc as Aba always said Whether permanens or stans . What it was was just camel after camel after camel bobbing up and down as if lifejackets made exclusively for the rescue of hunchbacked Ukrainian cleaningwomen down and up on the driest landed sea imaginable — such was my dream of the camels always approaching as if when they’d ultimately approach, finally arrive, then and only then would I finally awake, knowing this to be the Truth of the True as it’s said though it seemed as if they’d never approach, until they actually had approached , arrived and lay down in darkness in no shade just in front of me, in a semicircle around this tree providing nothing for no one, folded into squats atop their spindles, nosing at each other and nuzzling flanks as I struggled, fought against this dream, into waking at the image — not the mirage — at this the image to be found reflected down deep in the deepest well of the mind the recognizance of which should have signified the end of my dreaming, must have and must still, but my struggling, all my fight, was in vain: because I would never wake up, because I wasn’t dreaming, it was never a dream and still isn’t.

The camel caravan had arrived and I was awake all the while for all.

I am the ass

they whoever they ever are

would pack with explosives

would burden with explosionary material

fertilizer bombs, nail-

packed explosives until

the guards

the security

the patrolling police and the

ordinary everyday citizen

they began beginning and so

they whoever they ever are

instead of packing the explosives atop

me or at my sides in beastlike

breastlike bags

they whoever they ever are

began instead

stuffing

the explosives up inside of me

into my ass and so

stuffing

me full

there is no why

I am relating this

I just am

It would seem simple, it would. You go toward the Two Mountains and the Two Mountains come toward you. As they come, you become. You come toward the man and the man goes toward you. As he becomes he, I become me. Ingathering, he’d honk at the doorway. Aba would make the sound of the horn with his tongue thrust dumbly out of its mouth like a camel’s or bird. Shoes I’d say, I can’t find my shoes. I can’t find, then I’d find them. He’s coming was what Aba would say to the Queen who had Heard it all before. Me too, I’m going, Me three. I was always late for school, I was always the first one home. Then dinner. You eat your beets and the Queen lets you watch cartoons is how it went. Or the Queen lets you watch cartoons and you’ve eaten your beets is how it should go. Should have gone, bath, lastly bed. But I never kept that half of the haggle.