Joshua Cohen - Witz

O Israel, where art thou, hast thou forsaken me and why, what was your price, verily might we splitteth the difference? Was I to become you, if only to becalm you — your soul? Israel, he told me stories at night then sang to me, he would have danced at my wedding, offered a toast, napkined my bride, lipstick from her cheeks, the cake topped with the marzipan coupled, how I loved him, so very much…just answer the question — I loved him. Then why do I still have such guilt? A statement’s given — only to be itself deposed, disposed of; everything we have forsaken has been preliminarily notarized, its memory duly filed. It’s not Israel here, though, not now, not anymore: nu, it’s another lawyer, a mockey just begging to be disbarred for the work he’s doing, about to do and the way he’s billing them for it, a clock’s hand futzed up the tush; it’s a Goldenberg who’s survived, a most senior partner of Israel’s, maybe, who must’ve just been passing for him to still be breathing, walking, talking dictation, briefing and billing, charging to the fullest extent of whichever law might govern both personal comfort and his mortgage. Most of our sages agree…hymn, thanks so much, he’s just thoughtful enough to drop in on Ben, pay a visit paid; I was just in the neigh or no, it’s that there’re still a few matters to deal with, he says with face blurred bright from out of his opened mouth, a goldtoothed aureole, issues outstanding, you understand, little things for Him to sign, a handful…O nothing too important, certainly bubkissoff, nothing much to get worked up about or over, remain calm I’ll collect, it’s just standard stuff, these disclaimers of disclaimer, waiver forms in duplicate, powers of don’t want to hassle you with the details, the small mint unread he’s making uninitialed…Article 136, for example, the riders, the fine party of the first print, the penultimate clause, sanity, with fire and water he sticks it to me, acts of Gee-O-Dee, better not to think, best about it or anything at all, shouldn’t really in your condition, doctors’ orders, no double buts or jeopardize your second chances; like put your faith in ad hock, and just sign here here and here, an X and it’s terminal, the black blip, a flatline dotted: a sheaf of soggy papers rained out of a puffy scuffed pleather valise otherwise empty, save for an apple, halfeaten allrotten. Goldenberg’s borrowed a pen from a guard, he’ll forget to give it back.

Once he’s guided his client’s hand over those lines flatly dotted and straight, crooked and contiguous and both, made limp passes at blanks and bubbles and fields, this Goldenberg takes a seat, makes himself comfortable as if to prove his concern: a heavy groaning settle of unpressed pants and rumpled sportsjacket, in for the long haul on crows’ feet winged with balding elbowpads, his wet fedora hunched down low over his eyes, a black borsalino its brim just a nervous tic too bent, its bow of headband torn to flap in the smudge of gust through the windows; all as if to say however long it takes, I’m here for you, Ben, hineni, chaver, another allnighter, a week, a month; how you’re not just the client, Mister — you’re the boss in charge; he falls asleep, is soon snoring fungus off the walls, the mold and mottled hoar, is woken up only upon termination of visiting hours, never official save that beyond their interruption he begins to make time and a half.

Goldenberg snorts, goes to straighten his tie, then remembers he isn’t wearing one, that his collar’s soiled with the blood of yesterday’s shave. A sleep and its assuring visit interrupted by the disturbance of Ben’s nurse, the livein Mary arrived, costumed in crisp clean whites like a sanitary skin, her stockings in candy stripes an alarming red, with a stethoscope nestled snakelike between the fruit of her breasts juiced forbiddingly within a thin peel of laundry’s starch — though He never catches on, won’t, refuses to, why should He, even when she brings Him a smoky bowl of soup ostensibly medicinal (pale chicken, with halved matzahballs not sinking but bobbing), which tastes to His tongue numbed with narc exactly like Hanna’s, though He’d only had that once, too hot. She’d realized the recipe, thanks, about time, how…His mother His nurse, then — after Goldenberg’s slap to her bended knee, prayered to diaper Him at bedside — to leave with him, His lawyer, arm-in-arm the two of them kissing up to each other, abandoning Him to His soup without bread, not even a slice, without even the crust called an endearment left behind to mark; the sun sets, the clock clocks.

Finally, it’s the morning of the first day of the month known as Iyar, which in Babylonian says blossom and means bloom, don’t ask — used to be May, once named for the Greek goddess Maia, the eldest daughter of the seven Pleiades, protectoress of few remember now and no one cares, believes: a season and its star without worship, made subordinate to a maiden moon. Enough to know that today, feeling strong enough, Ben rises, and stands skyward, throws from His face His veil, throws open the shutters to the windows, too, four of them, one to each direction of the earth. He’s shaky, aching; He feels like Adam, mud-wrought and missing rib. To overlook His newest inheritance, God’s contract become flesh and geographic wild, notarized by Goldenberg or by dream…the cold bay with its skaters, lutzbundled into layers of fur and down, with their flippant taps and twirls, slicing into the ice passages of the Law amid intricate glosses, tripleaxles of responsa ending with a flourish in wondrously interpretive figureseight; cutahole fishers perched atop soapboxes, their wives baiting their hooks, kinder baiting their mothers with fishy words and leers and augers; the remains of swans halffrozen, stilled in a momentary flee; a motorcade of sleighs their runners greased with the fat of premium lambs; frozen hard scows and skiffs upended into igloos, beached upon the driftless ice amid barges stuck to hump the freeze as mountains, abandoned tows peaking high and white over tugs as hills overgrown in frost; a glimpse from the other window of industrial Joysey in rigs and joints and scaffold struts, its warehouses propbridged, their elevators imprisoned by the skeletal char of fireescapes, unhinged; fallen powerlines strangling cranes collapsed atop the light rail spurs, across the transit tracks, the Northeast Corridor and the Gladstone Branch, their signs unlooted symbolic of only rust, and the hissing wind, prophetically monaural: this is a local train, this is not the Long Branch train, forget Hackettstown damn it we’re bound for Trenton …past lots of lost freight, graveyards of boxcar giving way to a forest’s wisps, the far scrub pine; and then, another window, the madness that Manhattans the skyline: the assjawbone’s teethview, the keyedge view, the serrated knifehorizon, hugely brute and crude, and then — occulted within its midst, jutting up from between the rises of scrapers left abandoned, to reap a whirlwind tenanted only by the sky, with their lights off, their sleek sides wounded with panes shattered or just missing…there’s a glint of dome as if a head risen from the depths, unbowed, unbroken, vaulting as gold as a sun is said to be gold, as silver as the moon can be said to be silver, and iced in fulgent light — the highest hunch of the Temple topped with its rude spire, finished with a star left unfinished with three points only to shine themselves above the Park and the island that spills from its winter.

The House of His Father just north of Israel’s old office stooped in its shadow, along with His house, too, in its mirroring — and Ben, He’s enraptured: by it, and by Himself…His first unveiled glimpse of the dwelling within which He’s been fathered to history and now, to air; leaning out over the sill to the Temple’s great reflecting eye, to behold Himself captured in that dome’s lone sloping facet that is the dome, its reflection of an unguarded face…a moment of silence passing for peace, only of Him made relation to the city beyond, married, mated, Him as Himself the city beyond, and then — the door’s knocked into a flood, watery light like gauze, a rippling welter. A front of journalists with cold cameras porting tripods, pens and pads, microphones and lights, fresnels and pars: they’re here for their publicity shots the less posed the more they’ll appeal to the growing ranks of the righteous, it’s supposed; here, too, for His comments, for any, the hurried documentation of a life lived on the record — then, for analysis and observation, scrutinized on slow; Ben an idol stood upon the Record Itself, or if not on it then altared by it, changed from burn to smoke to air; here for their quotes, their content and bracketfiller; for their whiplashed quips, their bytes off more than an earth would swallow down to molten chew. As if punishment for public living even the famous are given graves, and often those they dig themselves with the sharpness of their tongues. As shallow as the rest.