Joshua Cohen - Witz

0800: left sock, held damp in His mouth,

0848: right sock, a different pair and still in bed,

1102: left sock, again, but this once turned insideout,

1333: on the Registry’s wall, half upon a portrait of Himself unframed,

1400: in the Registry again, all over the tiled floor, over the railing of the balcony to sully the remainder of His image,

1407: into His scapular, known as tzitzit, whose quartered fringes will become bound together, drying hard, into one knot who could worry free,

1454: and then smeared with thumb into His mother’s robe’s low hem — fisted quickly, but ruminantingly rubbed — which will cleave to His tzitzit still worn below and wet,

And what did these socks look like? asks Doctor Tweiss, though he’s staring at them preserved for exhibit in plastic.

One was black, the other blue; I’d slip them over my…myself; then stroke the sock proper, like so.

As if a second foreskin, the other doctor says, an auxilary prepuce, if you will…

Though only a suggestion, He feels He’s contractually bound to nod — the gesture of His hand.

1502: now…begun in a waitingroom, then continued in the next, finished here in this office, underneath the gowned covers atop the analysand’s couch, with His feet up in stirrups and a blush choking at His neck.

To sprout from these seeds: all a question of interpretion, a matter of blemish, a blot on the mind…a whole host of Hims in motile miniature: hurtling spermatozoa, with their own yarmulkes, grown spiraling payos already and curly beards that snare them into stains.

What seems to be the problem? asks which doctor, is the problem. Adolescence. Anything I can do about it?

I can pay today in cash.

1628: in the front seat of the limousine,

1748: and then again in the limo’s rear as He’s returning,

1856: in the widest hallway of the Great Hall on the way to do this in the toilet,

2035: then, while breaking bread in the Commissary enormous and alone, Him indulging singlehandedly,

2205: and then again between the pages of His only evening prayerbook, Arvit it’s called while faking its devotion,

2337: into His own yarmulke, finally it’s late, and thankfully white, which He replaces atop His head then, to sleep another day…

And for all these sins and for many more, O so many more of them unto sheer unaccountability — for these sins unto even the omissions therein, and then for all of their sins obtaining, too, You should forgive Him, Thou shalt, O so pleased with yourself, do us all a favor, will you, please…forgive.

Forgive Him for His

Apathy.

Forgive Him for His

B .

Forgive Him His

C .

Forgive Him His

D .

Forgive Him for His

E .

Forgive Him His

F .

Forgive Him for His

G .

Forgive Him for His

H .

Forgive Him His

I .

Forgive Him His

J .

His Jealousies , say… as petty as they are —as he had excellent shower-slippers, which won’t fit, and then neither will his hat: Steinstein’s personals stacked to the side, under the desk made a tiny pile, cinched with a snippet of his belt…

And TEN (10)is the number of the toes on His feet. And NINEis the number of the pimples on His knees. And EIGHTis the number of the wens on His thighs.

Forgive Him His

Ken, kenosis, keptstatus…

Forgive Him for His

Laxity, laziness… lists .

Forgive Him for His

Machinations…

And SEVENis the number of the foreskins He’s shed today alone. And SIXis the number of the hairs encircling His navel. And FIVEis the number of the hairs encircling each one of His nipples.

Forgive him O Lord of Hosts,

Thou Horde of Losts our forgiver forever…

Forgive Him for His Necrophilia, though latent — practiced exclusively with incarnations of His sisters, and His mother, which only occasionally, when and if He asks them to, fool Him.

Forgive Him His

Onanism.

Forgive Him His

Persnicketyness…as to which

pleasure’s which.

And FOURis the number of the whiteheads on His neck. And THREEis the number of the blackheads on His nose. And TWOis the number of the ulcers in His eyes.

Forgive Him His

Q.

Forgive Him His

R.

Forgive Him for His

S.

silence…

Forgive Him for His

T.

Forgive Him His

U.

Forgive Him for His

V.

Forgive Him His

W.

Forgive Him His

X.

xenophobia,

what else in the X’s?

Forgive Him for His

Y.

Forgive Him for the sake of His

Zion.

And ONE…

O forgive Him our Horde of Hosts,

Thou Lord of Losts,

Who art in Leaven—

O let us be risen, too!

And let us say,

AMEN!

2

A miasma of gray puff and cloud congestion, an exhaustion overhanging the water, which is ice…everything that’s not burning has already burnt. Ash has fled the air under the headcovering of night.

It’s earliest morning, and through its darkness waning an apparition comes forward, anomalous because it’s dark itself amid dawn; it comes starkly, with unrelenting drive, with pitiless force, as if the blackest god in the sky; it pierces the cloudbank, a ray of negative light, then screeches sideways, hisses, honks, comes to rest at Ben’s feet. It’s a limousine, a new one or the Joysey old repaired. Frank Gelt emerges from the gloom, holding open its door. Hamm lumbers from behind, bows for Ben His head and stumbles Him inside, choking, barely breathing from the fume. He’s veiled, still; He can’t use His eyes, His lids give only black. Again with the veil, it’s precautionary, not that it doesn’t also make for laudable mystery, suspenseful. A thing. Doors shut, lock. And then the limo, a refitted chariot charred with sunrise’s flame gone out, wheels around, heads to return in the direction of its arrival: straight ahead, star-bound, fading at a falling skid out over the ice without yield, hurtling offIsland, unstoppably fast, deathbringing, leadenfooted out over the sand over the ice then over the slick skin of tar.

Ben presses His veil up against the window tinted with weather, which passes for air thickly viscid, the limo passing through clouds, muscled intestines giving way to the cranial gray, bloodied iron, lifecold steel, metal limbs this rusted meat…the city once dead just now being reborn, hulking in the effort of its breaths ever higher above the grossest of streets: glaring heights of lipidic marrow, vertical artery, glassy and gelatinous organs peeking through insatiable tumult; fogflecked the digestive din, pulsing penetralia oozing light…the neon clot of billboard and sign; the mucilaginous asphalt, the strut, truss, and trestle; millions of links to the chain around Manhattan, binding this island of the Island in coils of burbling, gurgling cloud the limo bursts into air, as mere puffery, nothing.

Welcome, Ben. New York, it’s about time. This is what you’ve been missing, what you’re missing still, blind to all this, witless. The city of the windows of the house, the city of dreams and day, the world He’s been waiting for through glass and air for days and nights, and still denied Him, the city incarnated previously only through glimpsed Garden views and bunkbedded gossip, the memories of surviving FBs then dying, now dead; this city the repository of all dreams, and of dream itself, a holy of holies, a blessed covenantal ark of two of every kind and more, too many — each, though, an unknowable island unto itself, floating purl in the air on the sea on the earth itself floating within an emptiness, an Island alone in the universe as cause of its own belief, belied, its wisdom shrouded in distance, remove, exile, cloudbank, smoke and ice: each one of us is an Island, nothing too original about that, but each of one us is an Island with a city atop, building a city atop; a mensch building his city ever higher and forever, a huge high world of a city in the head of every one of us, shored in with skin and wharved with bone. All the lanes and towers and scrapers and panes, their scale’s been known, has been registered, at least suspected, of nights and days immemorial and insomniac through the windows of the bedroom of His parents — O but the people, Other people, their lives, that doing going life, that’s what’s worth it, that’s what would’ve riveted: people wanting and needing and loving and losing; it’s noble, this wanton heedless loss; it’s incredible, this loveless need. Though they seem not people but animals, hopeful beasts, hoofing and snouting out their crude existences, stuck in the mud of their own minds, their mindlessness, seeking only to satisfy the barest, the basest — survival: the awareness that they are, they recognize that, and that they must be — that, too; and then, that their purpose is that they must keep on being until, and in the face of it All, which is a thousandeyed, a millionmouthed, with too many ears to pierce into servitude, and too many feet to knowingly toe. It’s amazing to some, how humbling, debasing, destructive if one isn’t strong; others think it grand, life in this bestial city, that it’s exciting, ennobling, inspirational even. God bless them, God save them and keep them — they know not what they do; they know not who they are, only if. For them, for now, that’s enough.