Joshua Cohen - A Heaven of Others

He walked long and unshod to the Two Mountains to their Valley and so to the man named Mohammed. As he had nothing left of the supplies packed for him by Queen Houri (scavenged willowpills, gnawable hides, scraps of bark, dried beetles and a small sackling of orificial lint), he was again hungry, thirsty and exhausted now too, despite passing wonderments on his way that he had never once before wondered, and that (and the hunger and thirst) (and the exhaustion as well) might have been why they did him nothing at all: For one, the calves that dwelt in the abandoned enormously abaloneous shells of extinct snails enriched him to nihil. For another, neither the rams trumptrumpeting his arrival (rams that to communicate blow and intake through their own horns as their sole means of respiring, horns that in this heaven are attached to these rams, which are so breathing and so communicating understandably endangered, in the reverse of their terrestrial disposition). Nor the fallen brigade of just pubescent boys with wicks set into their nipples, waxen wicks dribbling a sexual sebum from the dead middles of their intumesced areolæ, the wicks fuselike, first pubes first braided then lit — or else the ancient people desiccated to the ostensibly leprous, stuffed with earth (heaven’s provision being the opposite of terra’s: instead of burying a person in the ground heaven burying the ground inside of a person), their arms out legs spread, leaking earth and spitting worms through green mucous reddening membranes while shouting to him screaming at once in a vomitus of that fishbowl gravel and routedirt, Salaam Salaaam Salaaaam — all this rendering him no whys, maybe also because his eyes were fixed as ahead as ahead can ever hope to become fixed in a desert: he had sought and he had found the Valley of Nails.

This was the Valley between the Two Mountains that had been going to him as he had been coming to it.

Dwellingplace of Mohammed, who would right wrong, who would left right. Place of Mohammed who would map the nonexistent. Ruled by Allah the inextant, who would teach the dead.

But was heaven, was the true heaven if it even existed, worth this descent, such a fall through the Valley of Nails, of rusty, bent battered nails, of all these old oxidized, dead senseless, headhammered to wilting nails bloodcaked, dripping remnants, the remains of all flesh, their iron lengths tapering violently to the dullest point possible that still would pierce skin if with the most martyring of pain, points dappled with manifold shards of rust, strands of sinew, hunks of tendon smeared with yellowish and oily fat, spiraled serpentine in intricate nearly King Solomonaic ornaments of hair in many hues: a lightly spread carpet hovering just above the slumberous bed, a netting of heads’ hair and toupees’ and wigs’ meshing in a rumor of transparency, in the sheerest shades of black, lightest gold, gingy red and gray to smoke’s white floating just atop these nails pointing every which way as if in the shock of total accusation, the sting of absolute blame?

He stood at the lip of the Valley of Nails and said his Salaam then was quiet. We are all the saying of Allah in the voice of the man named Mohammed and so when I say my Salaam to the man named Mohammed I am saying it in his voice and It is Allah that is saying It, through me, for me and as me as well. However I must say it too. My mouth must submit. And so then he said his name on his own. And his address. His Aba’s telephone number, his Queen’s maiden name, which had been Federman, and that of his Queen’s mother, his Queen’s Queen’s (Smilowitz), the half he remembered of the many digited identification number of the MERKAVA Mk. 4 V-12 diesel 48 round he remembered, for such was the tank that his Uncle Alex known as Sasha to everyone but him had half driven through the streets of Gaza at night (before he’d been fully desked) and around its fences around and around them all over again, his tank itself a fence, a fence of one plank in the morning merging into a fence of all tanks and again, Salaam Salaam Salaam Salaam and Salaam to which there was no answer but wind.

A stirring in the Valley, a living presence that then incredibly without disturbing the nails, their disposition and without, either, the warning of a rattle, the dull clinkclank of slimy chains — enormously a serpent slithers out of the Valley its naildark tail’s forever length scraped and sliced both by the nails it lived among and by the nail it was, rendering its skin always in a state of shed, always in many states of many sheds no longer. The snake hisses me in, intimates I would say that it would guide me in and through, would lead me to the Valley’s other lip and so to my salvation. I say Yes I say and as the serpent hurls itself at me (as if it’s a great effort to strangle me in), as it lunges directly at me on its one good hind leg — upon its vertiginous volutinous treetrunk that also resembled the corkscrewily coiled pod of a carob wilted — I jump away, I turn and run as if it’s not heaven but the weekend and I’m still in sneakers not schoolshoes or those shoplifted and naked now, turning again to face the snake from atop a promontory of salt excommunicated from heaven’s face where I’m standing, panting, only to behold it fallen limply to the ground, its tongue hanging out in a vicious fork fading from pigpink to darkness distended from the lip of the Valley, as dead as I stand.

I am of rabbis

a scholar to Torah and other

words, noted in my day

(which was long ago now)

and still in this day

by some who pray at

my grave because they

can’t pray to me as I

am dead in this heaven where,

when soon after my

death a student of mine my

greatest student died and visited

me, found me on a beach-

chair on an approximation of the

beach with its ocean (Netanya)

alongside a film star or starlet I

never know which her name is, was Elizabeth

Taylor and though

she’s dead to look at she looks pretty

good in a light whitish thong and blindingly

bleached sunglasses as my student,

my greatest student he approached, sat

down on a just-then-materializing beach-

chair and said:

Rav, Rabbi, it’s so good to meet you again and

here, but I don’t understand he said

throwing his tricolor beard and their chins in

the cardinal direction of Miss Taylor, Elizabeth

emerging from the wavelets, foam on her nipples

and

all soaked to the bush but I don’t understand he

said, how heaven could be like…this,

how this could be…heaven,

and so I said as I would always say as I stood

up in the shul in Witz but here I was at the

beach (Netanya) I said his name was Nathan,

Natan I said you must trust, but also think because it

might not be my heaven, I threw off my black

unshrouding the bronze of my chest,

it’s her hell

Limitation is what I now understand to be the sole attribute of God, at least the sole attribute of God or of a god we are able to apprehend, at least I am.

Allah says through the man named Mohammed through us and so through me. For Allah to say To us is to render us dead from the dead.

If we were to experience anything above and beyond the limitation of God we would be destroyed above and beyond any afterlife’s salvation or Savior. Above and beyond the succor of any appeal unheard. Above and beyond the Above beyond. And unspoken. No paradise can assuage the experience of the illimitability of God. Just as no Eden exists for those who know it as Eden.

As I am translating these thoughts from the air and from the wind of the air that speaks in no language, please excuse my attempts. Atone, repent. Repent for atonement. (And atone for you know.) All like the instructions given upon a box of frozen foods my Aba often bought for dinner when the Queen was away visiting her sister in Arad. Like gel for the last Wash your hands. Rinse and repeat. As we say when we’re live, don’t adjust your TV.