Joshua Cohen - Witz

The valet leaves Him honored, happy to be of help and with a wish of good mazel, no thanks he’s pleased only a thumb held up in front of a wink (and so, obscuring his recently hirsute face from surveillance). Proudly, the goy struts back to his stand engrossed in Ben’s outermost robe, hotelcomplimentary, and daubed in His blood, its left pocket hanging fully low past its purfle, heavy with the skin of His shed. Once unobserved, how it’s humiliating, though: Ben gets the hulk out of park, takes a moment to realize the emergency’s on, releases it, stiff footwork on the pedals, starts and spurts, stalls, starts and stalls on — trying to remember Heber’s lightly natural routine, that mechanical ritual as unconsciously observed too many mornings in transit, if most of them dreamed halfway to sleep (an inheritance, this techincal debility: like everyone else in their Development, His parents only ever drove automatics: the vans and the minivans, too, the rovers and even Israel’s promotional sportscar that he’d had out on lease for all of a month before being rearended by a towtruck out on the GWB, then trading it in on Hanna’s insistence for a practical coupe with no soul, prone to every complaint ever insured by the responsible, to be handeddown to Rubina, Simone, and Liv in their turns right and left — a fray amid the wires of veins, it must be, this disconnect deep in the blood); He manages how to have it going, to keep it going, soon gone…to turn it around the drive’s short learningcurve; then eventually — heading out.

Ben without chauffeur, though it can’t be too hard, just follow the nose of the road, hound it out. On the wing of a prayer: check mirrors, burn maps. He’s got a ways to go nowhere, both pursued and pursuing…Him to be forktrailed, coattailed by drones, Bens not created by God but recreated by the science of fame: His replica becoming their replican’t, willingly, with each of them lapsed, failed failures, messes and wouldaBes, Messiahs-in-training untamed without name. Wandering throughout the whole of the desert, New Mexico, Arizona, south by southwest, until — ultimately, a landmark’s required: the West Pole, a totemic redwood, a giant sequoia flagged with a flag; having been driven out from the buffet, denied the breaking of the fast the evening next (says the Law, the groom must go without on the day He’s to be married), which reminds: driven, too, from Lillian Shade, almost, not quite, Israelien, which would’ve been real Schade, who tomorrow early would’ve made her arrival on Aeroforce Aleph, its descent better classified, into the semaphored lights: their message, stay away, go back from whence you came, but then the glide to a stop, the gangway would be hauled up and who’s going to be there to greet her and her First Family once this gets out, makes wire and with it, stifles, strangles — an understudy public, a lesser name fallen from the agenda’s marquee? Off the strip, they’re waiting with new letters to hang. Meaning, runawayed. The wind, blowing colder than ever, winds its way into the loosest slots in town, as they’re sold — all proceeds going to the charity of a blind eye, the moon’s. The syncope, the tone: a howl with the windows darked down. Finger a shekel — call your mother goodbye one of these nevers. Tell her you’re not coming home.

To set out through tunnels, over the underpasses, loop around then turn without signal. To drive through the night — no, not to drive but to truck…that’s what the goyim say, what they once said and fast, virilely hard and long, Unaffiliated with the caution required: due westward ho, and once nowhere then deeper, ever further into its myth, its fantastical lore — sandshifts…Sabra prickly pears, Mesozoic lizards, cacti, and the threat of wily coyotes, existential roadrunning past repeating scenery repeating and repeating again, deanimate and so no longer funny but wasting — O the barren Midbar, the gulag that borders Siburbia; the whole contiguous country out there, how it’s one enormous golfcourse…neglected, defiled, destroyed — one hole let’s say three par of a course that breadths the universe entire, it might; or, our earth’s the ball, and it lays foul, from where it must be hit, again…a west to which the sun’s set to putter around in darkness, to waste its waning years paying bills by memory to waking, making increasingly conservative investments in day. Here, where everyone retires — Ben trucks, and Ben lives.

At the outskirts, the ramshackle gird of the grid, of failures and fallings, car carapaces, dungbeetlelike burnt like scarabs, swaying palms trunked in plaster, splintered rust…Ben pulls into the lot of a roadhouse being converted into a synagogue to turn Himself around after He misses a turn, and prays, if just for a moment. May my memory in this town be for a whammy, for any who might so deserve It — unto a double, what’s to lose by being so generous, no jackpots, no wins shalt ye merit. Then, behind Him, once pulled back onto the road prominently marked to give itself unto the altar of highway, as if a secular offering to the earth: there’s the call and the echo of fire…lighting up the desert in the rearview mirror and reflected, the same, in the windshield in front and there in His face, it’s a fireworks show; the night before the night, but still, a display almost divine in how violable, without distance. Huge trinities dazzling, they’re banging, they’re bursting, such warming, nostalgic salute — not ending but beginning again, not a covenant new or liturgical levin but a reminder that rainbows can be made by us, too, here and now. Not the engine backfiring, Ben — it’s the rocket’s reddening glary that’s sparkling blue, which once fired to fizzle is white, the ash of their promises made: another whiz, yet another big bang…halos exploding, a sundering of air and a coming together again, both at once: dumped clumps of gunpowder lit hissily to pop, poking holes in even the most spacious of skies, holes that are the skies in the sky — heavens, Heaven, that most blessed of the firmaments known, and the only. O’er amber wanes of grave.

An apparition above, a starry conjunction, a convergence of smokes: the lights fade into darkness, total, leaving only tracework, a serpentine sigh…a gray wispiness, a winding sinuousness, then — space, the emptiness ensuing punctuated only by the twinkle of a planet. Mars, if He had to war with guess, a mote of lava in the eye. In its entirety, though, this smoke’s a known form: half of infinity, a feminine slither — it’s a questionmark that’s up there, and who are we not to oblige? Who’s He not to make manifest any portent above? And so, what’s Ben doing, where’s He headed and why? Hazy, still, hidden in wind…you don’t think you’ll get away that easy, do you? simply disappear into ranks, the hierarchy, no? any route, which way high or free, which interstate of hundreds, of thousands? what about the symbolizing signs, the thisway thataway arrows, ten miles always to the next, ask directions, shun pride. You don’t think you’re your own keeper now, do you? Haven’t you perused at any length the books they’re called Exodus, Leviticus? Numbers, when your own is up, cataloged under As good as …check the topmost drawer of the nightstand at any schlumpy motel. Don’t you know from the desert, the boiltongued, locustlidded suffering before the Law — though that’s all a moon ago, and the suffering, it goes on, forget unabated, we’re talking redoubled the stronger. He has sand in His mouth, rolls up the windows and the windshield is fogged. More importantly, is He headed for a mountain? Paramount as Sinai. If so, then why and for what? Where’d all those years go just like that and a whole generation dead in demerit? Anyway, what Law is there left to receive, and who are you to receive it? No offense. None taken. The smoky tail of the snake that’s only tail puffs, anguiform purls away, but the planet that gave period to its mark still remains. Punctuates void.