Joshua Cohen - Witz

Or else, He’s — heresy — just like everyone else…is everyone else. A multitude of mensch, and their achievements: Joseph the dreamer dreaming Joseph the interpreter interpreting Joseph the prophet; the brother who hides the cup, Benjamin fated unconscious to steal it, prophesized together again, reunited forever in Him. Like the chance of that choice, how many lives you’re allotted, how many eyes and mouths and noses — O does He pick! The fraternity’s mascot, the tribal runt. Alone again alone. I sit on my bed and ask it, are you my bed? And because it doesn’t answer me I’ll never know and sleep. A pillow. And its whiter dream. One as in one. One meaning one. One one. It’s you, everyone’s telling me, it’s your life, so many options, and with so much support, what don’t you understand, your problem — I want to say, it’s me. One in the same, as in the emotions of Pain and Hope, as defined by Spinoza; as in the ideas of perfection and reality as Spinoza once set out. As I’ve been told, I’m telling. One as in God Himself. As in His son, but let’s not go there…He remains upstairs. No one does. Upstairs-upstairs. I sit on my floor, a mockery of mourning — its carpet of stains, hall’s wood bemoaning in trodden groans its scratches and the rug. A fundament of doubt. There’s a noise from below, a spirited banging of the ceiling with ladles and with brooms. They say, intensely private. Sequestered, they say. Appreciates His quiet. I say…Alone. An entire house at His disposal. And make no mistake, it is disposal. Unable to leave, He isn’t allowed to, and He doesn’t allow Himself, not even His possessions — to leave an intimacy just lying about. As the only permanent of this exorbitant house — as Mister & Misses Israel Israelien, Homemachers, Copresidents of the Board for life of this singularly shingled siding — this dwelling good for an immodest family of tens, and fine, too, to house at least a hundred others, certainly, in relative comfort, a thousandplus under refugee conditions; as the only survivor of this plot, He still feels like the youngest son and as such, infinitely old in His loneliness, banished to His room, containment policies pursued, to keep His dirt there, never to infiltrate or taint. Their expectations. And their painful hopes. His mess is His, roomed. I sit amid laundry and wrappers and cartons and cans, lightbulbs and hoarded spoons, foreskins shed, tight shoes. I wait until I am called, and when I am called I will call that call temptation, and live out the rest of my days against it, which is only waiting. Or so I say, unsaid. At the door, an official knock, a bell. Downstairs, demons surge. It’s time for Him to wash, to dress. Their whispers jar the window. Into the pockets of the pants He steps into go whatever’s around. Mementos. A pocket is the room of a room. And over that He shrugs on, against all advice, which are orders, a fond found shroud that’d been His mother’s, a blustery blouse, Hanna’s maternity let out in pleats.

At the end of Shiva prolonged twice the traditional span to accommodate the sitting of all these mourners, those who’d known a goy who’d known a goy who’d gotten them a foot in the mouthing door, Jonathans come lately and not come directly without pity wrought across their faces that isn’t merely makeup for the edification of the press over wardrobe, which is black as if the secretion of their nightly and mutual heart, with the Marys as hostesses, sisters and mother appealing, attending to the nervous network of guests, their needs of food, drink, and of memory providing, at the end of eating, drinking, talking, and the occasionally mispronounced prayer — davening — misery commiserated then calmed in that order again reborn, after the last guest leaves, forgets his coat then comes back and retrieves it from a Hanna disapproving with an amusedly severe if distracted glare for whoever at the threshold on the last night of official mourning sat out, it’s this knocking, then a ring on the bell, which sounds one tone long and loud and harsh. As if a final siren. Answered by himself with his own key, it’s Gelt, with a leavened chin and selfmade buzzcut, arrived only to whisk Ben away, in an open sleigh parked at the fence at the foot of the path since slated for preservation (the house registered a landmark, not just to His life or theirs, or as an excellent historical example of high exurbiated living — but to the Garden’s prophetic project, how well and thoroughly they’ve divined, recreated a past into a materiality that is both monument and future), bells a’jingle hollowly, wild dogs frothing a dash down the foamy, toothy spur, their tongues straining over the hillocks of drift and pile, whips of hitched and harnessed tails, up to the Great Hall and therein to Ben’s private wing, quarters established amid the remains of the Registry’s Seder. He shouldn’t be left alone any more than He already is, this on the recommendation of His employer/disciples, His meisterminders and mother. A chandelier weeping crystal. Floors marble, or marbled. Dust mounded against the walls, dereliction, the lapse that makes a Tel — and then the windows, which if undraped would give out onto the further scape of gloss and glass and metal: Manhattan; a coming world, beyond.

To leave His home is to leave a boy behind, what He once was in a house handmedowned. The shroud of rooms and the embalming windings of the halls to be borne now, forever, upon another body…the new baby in its blush and chub, the newest affection, at her age, Hanna’s, an affectation with fists the size of tears, never to come swiftly crawling toddling walking a raw knee felled down the stairs then straight into the hallwayed arms of its mother, who once was His, had been — love for Ben cooling like Saturday’s soup, which is cholent sopped with the crusts of stale bread still bagged, storebought, which, too, had been the challah of Friday, the errant second loaf. Promise only vouches you so far, so distant, until old, unemotional, and moldy with mind: to grow up awkward and isolated, pimpled and alone, made witness to the probable stuff of youth, the toy guns and knives and other playthings never had, never allowed as inappropriate, unsafe, the tricycles and bicycles coming around in cycles, balls and blocks of wood and plastic and of plastic like wood with alphabets, presumptive — revived in the life of another, the objects themselves scuffed and dulled to dead now newly shined, once given son and so suddenly appealing again, attractive, put to fresh uses, fun He’d never imagined could be had, they could’ve had together: Os of wholesome cereal strung on the strands of His mother’s hair bewigged and dyed above but below as dark as milk, across the room living, family, or den, stuffedanimals strangled in the ties of His father arranged around the brunch table, perched atop chairs to referendum on the issues of the day, the fate of the family, punishments for Rubina’s pubescent misery…miniature houses of leaves and twigs and moss and nests assembled in the driveway, to be brought to collapse when Israel pulls out the Merc the next morning so early it’s almost still night, for work; he’s always working — the Israelien house left vacant, abandoned to what could’ve been. To be made Present Resident of the last house on Easy Street, taking into Manhattan the gravied train, the commuter’s heartquick circulation. Ben never to darken His own doorway again, to be humiliated a fumble at its lock, with the day’s close its shadow drafting reductive, immature. Feed for Him the fish we flushed long ago; water the houseplants, the weeping ferns of Babylon-by-the-bay. Do me a favor, and silence. An intercom hiss, the fuzzed tongue of the stairs. To sleep atop the sheets of His conception, with sisters He calls His own…

Across the Island He sits in the Registry, on a suitcase His father had once bought in Miami at the aeroport as extra luggage for the souvenirs he’d bring them home, anything he’d buy on impulse come his boarding: the blizzards of snoglobe, postcards never to send, that poseable pink flamingo. Here mourning the hold defiled, laid to waste in the process of such heldover His head nightly grief — which is talking, dining, praying in necessity’s urgent order, the priorities of the overscheduled martyr: slipcovers as if they’re flayed scholar-skin hanging from the arms of the sofas set with recliner matching, stuffing-spilled pillows slipped irretrievably into cracks behind couches against the paperpeeling walls, the chairs upended, unseated, the upstairs beds and even Wanda’s tousled by guests too drunk and Amenfed to have made it home alone, their smokes smote atop the carpet and, also, as black clouds upon the ceiling, the arms of the overhead fan broken, the emptied glasses smashed, plates pooled in a bronze sea of oil crossed by Shiva’s knives — bloodblunted, gristly, twisted in hands shook poorer of their nerve; protective plasticwrap smoothed and saved for nothing, foiled, with the drawers hanging open; to what would’ve been Hanna’s horror, no one’s bothered to cleanup.