Joshua Cohen: A Heaven of Others

Are you coming? one virgin had said to another Is he going with us? all had said to each other even as I left them and so all of Queen Houri had said to me and even I’d said it too, which is to submit as I set out to seek with the help of a thumb.

Walking I left.

And submissively long.

The way they said it, it seemed so simple, it would. Any direction to one destination. Every cardinality to a capstone. Shoot an arrow then follow it long. Walk on your hands clad in the gloves of assassins. Go down and submit. But exodus is never that simple.

They were the camels. They had ridden me out to the Fountain at which I drank without quench. They had ridden me out to another Fountain, then a third. And still no. Water gushed out my jagged hole, a sprung with no spring. Again and again I explained to them and so to myself what I called just like the Queen called any thousand of hers My Predicament What’s his Problem? What Happened to my Pants? then one camel drew with its foot in the sand a map effaced quickly by wind. Cloven over. And so it drew it again, or attempted to, and then again, each time the map only one-ninth, or one-seventh, finished, then the erasure from wind. Complete. I’m talking utter. Then two camels worked on the map, each at an opposite end, and the map was then one-third-finished, or two two-sixths-whole, then the wind again and then nothing. And so three camels and then four, each from its own gusting quarter until again with the wind and so it took seven of the camels all hoofing it simultaneously to all together complete the map I had by then memorized in whole as I had had it in part. As for why the camels couldn’t ride me out there themselves, it wasn’t ever proposed. Into never, I left.

Having been directed to the Valley between the Two Mountains, I followed. I was to seek the man named Mohammed. There he would help me, It was said he would have to, said by Allah. Transfer me to the afterlife most appropriate to my previous Yes. No questions asked. Having answered none, I went. Having substantiated nothing, I submitted. This man named Mohammed would rectify this mistake — mine, his, or that of no one, none other’s. This mistake as unmistaken as all divine, but a rectification had been made necessary still. Not an apology. A mere reparation. Miser it a healing. A whole. Not on faith, to go on desperation.

How does he know a voice said.

It was a gust.

And know this too. He was scrutinized by the sun. Light and warmth despite day or night were denied him, then granted in showers, in snows the color of ash burnt in ovens. As it is said. And that the sand preserved his tracks as it preserved the trail of no other.

To be here as him is to be hated by even the wind. It is said. Listen to it. Hear it listening. It has been said that in this strangest land he is as much a stranger as It tells him he is.

Still as the Queen always said It helps to prepare. And so if ever he would find this man named Mohammed he was to say Salaam. And then he was to say his name. Not that the man named Mohammed didn’t know his name but that this ritual was to serve as both a Sign and a Wonder, respectfully speaking, a submission implying in no way the ultimate submission, which is forbidden to him though only by himself and his kind, and that only after this Salaam My Name Is the man named Mohammed would be obliged to rectify any unmistaken mistake all in a matter of immediacy and without further questions neither answers whether they be Of the Above or telluric (such as reincarnation, resurrection and terrestrially yadda) — how he rehearsed the voice saying through him Salaam my name is Jonathan son of Saul A. Schwarzstein he said into pools reflecting his mouth (thinking praise Allah how awesome it is that in heaven you don’t have to brush teeth), the words rippling out, bulls’eyes circling the swell of his Salaam he said my name is Jonathan son of Saul A. is for Aba Schwarzstein, Yoni to my Aba he said who’s As dead as the rocks that shine his mouth with macle as if the stones themselves were the very perspirant tears of an elemental hardness, the swirling water the very sweat of the words Salaam my name is Jonathan son of Saul Aba Schwarzstein and I live at 37 Tchernichovsky Street, apartment number (#) 3, Jerusalem, was how the Queen had taught him to get home when he didn’t know how he was getting there or from where and my Aba’s telephone number it’s # 717736 7-1-seventyseven-3-6 was how he dressrehearsed the undressedness of the audience like he did with his role as Pan Janusz Korczak the lead in last spring’s school play to the terraced tiers of scrubby crevices and crags, the stadiumed shrubbery that horizoned the All: the wrinkly knotted limbs of the putrescent trees topping the murderous cliffs with their sharply cleaved cavelike mouths echoing in return if not his voice then the voice of another he followed as if such horrible pain were his own — a man with a face hanged spreadeagled, nailed thrice to a severe flank of mountain not his.

Who are you? I asked the man and the man said Salaam.

And so I said to the man Alaikum to you and then the man asked me Who are you?

Jonathan son of Saul Schwarzstein and I live at 37 Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, but you can call me Yoni I said to the man Do you know where the Two Mountains are? Where are the Two Mountains? Do you know the man named Mohammed? Where would I find the man named Mohammed? as I answered him with my story and the millennia behind it.

And so you understand I am a stranger here in your heaven I said to the man. And so you understand a mistake has been made I said to the man. And so you understand I am walking to the Valley between the Two Mountains to make an appeal. That I am seeking rectification is what. Restitution to the Eden of my however inherited however believed belief. Why not. But mostly I just want my parents I said to the man whom I almost do not now remember as anyone other than me.

It is good I am still able to see you said the man.

And it is good you are able still to be seen.

I asked the man what he meant by that and the man said he had been hanging there thrice nailed to the flank forever and so I asked the man Why? and the man said as if in answer that one empty serving of the golden plate a raven he liked to think was Noah’s — though he said he knew no other — had descended from the knife’s edge of the horizon, had plucked out his right eyeball and then flew away. Beaked it up and out with it, so I asked the man Why? and the man said You have a pleasant face, then I asked the man what had he done to incur such a punishment (Alive I had tried to gaze into the future, he said), this Ravenous wrath and the man said Now I am waiting for the distant relative of the raven by whom I mean to accuse the dove to fly down and pluck out my other ball for an eye on the day on which I will see no longer. And then the man said to me nothing, merely opened toothlessness, revealed to me the moons of his tonsils as I left him in the direction of the golden plate, which was yet again serving up nothing at all.

In heaven, even — dusk, the arrival of night.

I walked. Thanking all the while I had thought to take a pair of new shoes with me upon my ascent, and thinking that if I had ascended up here wearing my old shoes — which, nonetheless, weren’t really that old — I would have been walking around unshod now or at least in destroyed shoes for a parent’s lifetime (have I neglected to mention I, nu, “redeemed” a new pair and just my size just prior to my ascension, my meeting and greeting of Houri? if so, I repent — if it makes any difference, I tried to grab the least expensive, grub those that would be the least missed). (Not that I needed shoes for this earth or rather it’s that the earth of this heaven is incredibly soft, tender, in feeling much like laying hands upon the stomach of a living human as fat as Uncle Alex in respiration and perhaps perspiring lightly after a full dinner of the Queen’s because the Queen always said he was Too fat to have a Queen of his own. Which was mean. She was his sister.)