Joshua Cohen - Witz

It’s been decided, then: His decisions are theirs, are ours, His life all our lives to do with what we will — whatever we want Him to be, He is, we’re saying: we prick Him, He’s a prick; we bleed Him and He’s bled; we want Him hitched, and abra my aleph a star appears — out of nowhere. To become betrothed, Ben’s affianced, quite possibly refinanced into the bargain, reassured, reinsured, underwritten. A beautiful bride, the matchmaker’s saying while picking through her linner later that evening, off the clocking into a dunch with Doctor Abuya whose price plus tip will be deducted from her commission, in a manner professionally famished at the hottest Midtown couscouserie whose best silver’s been hidden in anticipation of her arrival: a Queen, she’d said, you should be so lucky, and a pianist, too, concert quality or was it the clarinet, and modest, how she’s so modest she no longer thinks her modesty’s a virtue, that and have I mentioned, how she knows from epic poetry and how to select the best cuts of meat and freshest produce, that that will be ripe tomorrow, whenever you want her breads baked presliced, crusts cut and drooly, O the head on her, looks she got and grace, musing graces, a real manner, with not a flaw on her or in her, until Him, maybe, that putz…the best I’ve had to deal with, ever — and I don’t have to tell you about her family.

You have to understand, the Nachmachen’s saying dark later from under the shadow of a modeled hood, the latest sent sample of the Temple’s onorder ecclesiastical robes, these for nominal Levites: talking to the Doctors Tweiss, asking them to get the idea, to delve with him and explore the depths, knowing they won’t but God in Heaven do they ever follow orders (it’s like those scissor-dashes on the flesh they cut by, the particular focus of the eyes, up or down, by which their pads and pens prescribe: happy, or sad, here or there, ready or not, now/then), I want you to make sure He never reproduces, that He’s unaware. And so, another a deceit, like ever, there’s nothing new under that slight of sun, the moon: changing, undressing to underwear, bare pale and sickly skinny in sockless feet and flagpole legs, the Nachmachen standing discourse in the doorway of one of their offices presently slipping into the priests’ holiday vestments to be custom chalked for the tailoring (the tailor, he’s already an hour late; his apologies, though, they’ll leave everyone in stitches), it’s just not a legacy we want to leave, he says…the priestly breatsplate thumped and clanking, urim and thumming, the oracle’s settings left unjeweled as if to keep down the overhead in humble; this interest’s not about posterity, about what we want to leave behind: all returns are in the present, the here and now, today…who knows how long this’ll last, how long we want it to last, you know. The Last One, the right real God’s honest Last One is what makes money, so we’ve heard, we’ve seen — people want what people want. If they know another One’s in the works, then is He still that special, I don’t think so (no one else will either). Doctor Abuya’s collapsed on the analysand’s couch, exhausted from his meeting, its negotiations, subsequent argumentation over an appropriate tip. Nurse de Presser enters with an accentuated bust that’s only a tray of mugs, but then never brings the tea or coffee. Plus, the Nachmachen asks himself or them or who, questions, questions, questions — what’re the ramifications of descendants? How long are we really going to be around? We’re not in this racket forever, especially not with all these recent Affiliations going on. Conversion, it’ll be the death of us. No, we make what we make, then we get out. No need to speculate on kin, they’re just more problems…and of problems they already have enough.

You want we should tie the tubes? the psychoanalyst Tweiss is dying to know.

Knot Him up before He knocks her up? adds Tweiss the mad plastician.

Wouldn’t want any mongrels or mutts running around, stray halfholies, those partichosen bastards…the Nachmachen removing the High Priest’s shading miknefet to bare his bald, gauntgraved face — the line would be muddled along with the Image, he says, the blood and the buck stop here, are we understood? Or, if not, like will you go ahead and blur the balking points, dust away the processes particular, the impetus impotent, and just do your job, what you’re paid and more than you’re worth to get us done: anesthetize, sanitize, sharpen what needs sharpening then slice right in. Make us the Messiah we so terribly deserve: a machermensch, an exilarch — a king who can issue no prince, a God That can manifest no son.

It takes a full lunation to recover from the procedure, from the subsequent infection, then from the infection of the infection, unto health again — which is, at heart diseased and failing, only the ideal of health, its hope and so consoling until the advent of what calamity dawns next — the wound yawning the distance between Ben and His body, its perfection, its willingness to go on; His mind or a mere tremulous semblance of recouped from the croup of medications, side effectual shvitzes and aches and languorous lolls, the lifting of the masked and measured fog, the recuperation of regret after this period of an occupation less fruitful, a surgical measure of selfpity recurring more virulently than ever through a moon of stay, inhome. For recovery, He’s housed in a northeasterly turret of the Great Hall, a towering growth from which you’d rescue a princess, clambering up the cascade of her hair, the platinum ash hung down as a shade from the sills of the windows of the height’s lone room, set with four small Oriental slits allowing incomparable views when the shutters aren’t on; a stay fully insured, it’s assured, Garden’s coverage complete to put His mind at what’ll have to pass with doping drug for ease, and then — once returned to the flush of youth, and it won’t be soon enough, once the ramifications of this operation have been explained, contextualized, psychologically massaged away as vital component of His therapy, then apologized for with sympathy and toys — license is His to shtup with impunity, they’ve promised, without much reservation: something to look forward to, they’ll tell Him something like that, another mutilation, sell Him a new life, just wait, sold, you’ll love what we’ve gone and done — the slice, the peel, the cut and its cauterization, the sutures, then the swelling, the numb dissipating from His waist on down, the extremity’s tingle, His feet, His toes, needling life in resistance to such ascetic anesthetic.

Though as for that heedlessly promissory promiscuity, that happiness is still weeks off, a moon away. An entire lunation spent in rolling moaning wake and dream and sleep, selenitically wasteful in flattened fit atop this luxurious bed commandeered from Long Island’s Hospital Under the Sign of Everything, last belief ’s Health Care Facility of the Year, lyingin state of the art this unit wired for comfort, programmed for calm, a multiadjustable slab, a posteurpedic grave. Demonically idle with the hands not allowed to stray below the navel’s hairy scar…Ben thinking just thinking like, what’s it all worth: with the branch bowed, its line ending with Him, familytree hacked to trunk; when He’ll rise weak in the knees and needs His testes hanging between His stumps like seedless fruit — He opens the shutters west and gazes out the window at the appletrees barren, chopped and stacked, the hollow knot, the cicatrix, barkveined cores, their wither a wrinkle past a sill…Stammbaum reduced to Stammsprout, hacked, hatcheted, axed, downsized to kneehigh and nothing after, uprooted, never to grow again; no, despite the dreaming, despite the time to dream, the opportunity to forget the day as night sleeps through the day only to reveal, if inspired by luck, an inner light, an intuit, a glimmer — He isn’t able to work up any image of a kid; any apparition of any offspring’s of Him, as His own immutable self, pure ego, an infantility incarnated as walking and talking already, fully formed as He was, is Him this taking after Him, showing Him the sand ropes, demonsrative, immersive; initiating Him the Other Him in the most deeply shushed rituals of Sloth, the most lazily hermetic initiatives of Waste, imparting the secret formulæ, the incantations and hidden practice: that Schlemielundshlimazelkeit (Ben’s Ben as an updated Faust, younger, impressionable, irreparably Semitic, handling poorly, making a fool’s trade: Himself for another, an even schlumpier heir of Schelumiel son of Simeon, Numbers II, loser of wars, mensch of schlimm Mazel), that whole brand of pathos, that copywrit inheritance of guilt — managerial, patriarchal, Godlike; after all, what else’s a father for…how would I know?