Joshua Cohen - Witz

A ding, the elevator doors open with Him about to step inside but instead He’s crowded back and out by more Bens piling out, too many, too much even for Him who’s been Himself all His life — what little of life there’s been, both personally with regard to fulfillment and, also, speaking of time. Huffpuff Ben goes to find the door to a stairwell in case of divinely intercessory fire and there in the hall tries at the handles and finds one unlocked and so opens it, He’s sorry: inside the room and sitting on a twinbed’s a mensch, a nearmensch, an almost there, close but not quite, who he looks though — superficially, the suspicion’s only a feeling — just like what His twin would’ve been in reflection, in a mirror hutched on the opposite desk; he’s naked from a hotwaterwasting, fogmirrored shower now drying and draping himself for modesty’s sake with a pair of tzitzit that barely hides the wound of a circumcision that just has to be recent. To this particular Benjaminite’s credit, even his squeal retails real — Him fleeing from the sound of His own voice, through the hall down to its end trying all the doors along the way, locked jimmies locked, then tries the last, the one whose name is Stairs lettered in the holy tongue, too, across its window in red, shoulders into its give to tumble down a flight to a landing whose door opens back into the lobby. But it’s an emergency exit, rigged, wired, and so above there’s an alarm ringing like slots ping in zeros of sound, an openmouthed, untongued everymensch for Himself, no one gets out of the desert alive — people flinging aside even panic, fleeing themselves as one self that is Himself, too, to lobby exits lit and conspicuous, blatant and yet too narrow to accommodate such padded passage as if the very openings, the needle’s eye gateway, to Heaven Itself, which is bright and cold and pavedover with tar…Ben approaches the desk and without really asking Himself what He’s doing asks for a vehicle, demands as if with all the credit in the world behind Him anything with wheels and like now.

And what’s your name, sir? the ancient, fisticfaced hop wants to know.

And the mensch laughs a scar until Ben gives up Jacobson, Esq., with what room I forget…no, #108, the number of the room from which He’d just been evicted by ululant force. The hop sobers professional as the sprinklers rain down on his head and the water gathers in the cistern bowled between his prognathic lower lip and his gums. He nods Him out with a you’ll have to speak with the valet through the revolving doors through which He spins planetarily, revolting around and around, then finally outside and dizzied, lit and alarmed into night, its vastness human and waged: starryvested valets at their stands, amid intricately stranding constellations of velvet, webs suspended fine and strong between tarnished poles. Police arrive as wolves, with the tails of scorpions and the disgruntled foreheads of fathers at the siren of fivetrumpet alarm. He rips His nametag from His robes, throws it to the sidewalk, stands out unacknowledged. Then, bends His knee to pick up that nametag, walks over to the trashcan aside the entrance, throws it properly away — Hanna would be proud, would’ve been.

Ben outside and alone takes in the Strip, the hotels with the velouring plush of their high, brightchandeliered halls; their checkeredpast gaming-floors, their chipped pools, sexually voluble fountains; the honeymoon suites up above, where Moloch beds down with Mammon, their minted offspring incubated in vaults, coins awaiting their sacrifice within dimly fluoresced lairs underground. He mingles amid this jingle and jang, tourists the spume and the flash and the flicker. We Buy Your Old Currency , a lit billboard speculates then squelches to urrency , urgent. Gold accepted, in lieu of jewels. Whores solicit the favors of unpatrolled corners and curbs halfextorted; who knows what sex they are or might think to be, they’re heaped in His clothes and hijacked tablecloths over what’s hoped are shapelier bodies. Firemenschs loiter among them getting paid by the hour, standing around like hoses stopped up, with their tainted dalmatians like swollen hydrants to be tapped for their foam. Despite the panic, impersonators fleeing, others are still just arriving, Bens perpetually coming and going — from their sad vans and paneled sedans, station wagons lonely with only the driver’s seat ever occupied; they’re uniformly falling apart, upholstered in delusion, but mufflered in dream — if not evacuating or hauling the wrinkles of their luggage to and from porters no longer waiting around for their tips, they’re honkskronking a nap on their horns on their ways waiting to pull in and out of the horseshoe blocked, too, by tethered and poorly shod horses and donkeys and mules with their bales of haphazard hay, their sirens of whinnies and brays. Ben whispers to a slot attendant who just now lucky for one of them happens to be on break who whispers Him, then, to a cage cashier with illegibly tattooed knuckles just punching in with a particular valet, caped and capped, who whispers Him to negotiate: two shekels large in His own denomination a no go, three shekels, I can’t hear you, what else, you drive a hard — nu, I’ll see what I can do…how much they’re talking for a pickup, what’s spare at the moment, a dumb, lumbering truck, a paleotechnic Henry Ford model the only vehicle he can part with at this hour, tonight with its alarm and for any price (part of which he has to kick up to the goy he’d punched in), deal or no steal; last week its owner had run up a tab, having jumped bail after being euphemistically too energetic in the way he’d talked to the officer; then, skipped out on his bill with a creditline you couldn’t use to pick up your mother, without a kidney, short sperm, and two pints of blood; he used to be a priest or a preacher’s the word, they have it tough nowadays, you know how it is…

And so to begin in with the handling, kicking the tires of a transient deal: they ding around birthrights, fling wrongs, sly lentils, a large bowl of His lot taken with doubly dipped doses of salt. The valet doesn’t believe who Ben is and so He tells him He doesn’t either, then backs the goy into a corner and opens His robe. A circumcision convinces — especially of the one actually doing the severance. Touch it, He tells him, tug it, shift it and tear: it doesn’t hurt, the emes, no fooling — it’s just skin, it flakes off, yours to keep.

Through glint and glit, Heber’s swerving the limo around and He realizes upon dodging its hood then the sweep of its lights that Hamm’s probably even now up in the pentpyramid, attempting to evacuate His person downstairs. Bombsquad shows up only to fill out their insurance paperwork on the dash of their truck; anyone got a pen, we’ll take turns. And so Ben hides as much of Himself as possible behind the hollow of an ivylocked column, which is maybe unnecessary and what’s more thirty bits of silver neurotic what with the other Bens betraying around — how hiding’ll just make Him all the more findable, found…emerging only when the valet’s gotten the truck out of hock to the headwaiter and lot then waves Him from the cab over to the edge of the sidewalk, the further curb where they idle at the head of a motorcade of who gets to be first response. A vehicle not usually recommended for the Affiliated, furthest thing from, but it works; one maladroit emission on wheels, mobile death. Ben gets up into the cab, the truck sags, belches exhaust on its chassis. It’s cancerously blueblack, with a filthy, fatty white interior, lipoid pleather that’s not quite fake as it’s not quite trying for real. A custom job, coming to ruin: the eagle once fossilized upon the face of its hood has flown, its nest left to the weather, peeling piscine finish in rusty scales, even the scabrous metal itself flaking away, gloss to dross; the rims churning chromed: lick my mudflaps, they say in flashy roman — without honor. At least there’s a full tank of gas.