Joshua Cohen - Witz

Enough silence, Ben thinks, enough thinking, turn on the radio, turn it up, the one station tonight not playing, not replaying Him: this noname, no-lettered signal up on numbers exiled way off the dial then around it again, sixsixsix point six probably broadcast out of the basement of a longsuffering mother; jackalcrackle, croupy static, and — Shalom Shalom — we’re givingout a sermon by the new Rabbi of Albuquerque, the Albuquerquer Rebbe is what they’re calling him nowadays, alternating his remarks, which what with late and its liquor tend to stray incoherently (the tone that of Father Coughlin with a bad cough, only the hatred’s reversed), then station identification, you’re listening to the time and the weather, life fiddling away in a frail style, coming to you live from the Circle-K Ranch.

Frank Gelt’s tuned to this station himself — the immaterial waves that, like the horizons, bind through spacetime, but in invisible, insensible gusts— Summertime , it sings and it’s airy, and the living’s queasy , from the album Dolly “Tziporah Ruth” Parton Sings The Liturgy Of The Sabbath & Other Holiday & Western Favorites For Your Listening Pleasure , RCA 47-9928; Gelt driving an oldfashionably crisis convertible, leading Heber in the limo with Der ensconced in the back, belted, boloed, countried in a hat, ten gallons obstructing rearview. Hamm, Mada, and Johannine sit opposite him in a hush. A station identification, again, then, for the Fourth, sort of a responsibility to do something here, anything: wipers squeaking in time to a medley of patriotic parodies, sung by a woman by the name of Mahalia “No Relation To” Jackson; it warbles in the cabs of a thousand trucks abandoned along with their trailers’ pork product, in the wombs of a million cars shouldered as peddlers’ sacks upon Fridays’ dusks for a walk amid the grain, a night’s greeting of the fruited plains, beggared, burdened with only the wares of the soul. But just look outside, will you, what you’re passing, what’re you talking… oy vey, can you see, nothing at all. Snow, radioweather with the signal gone down. Heber kvetching, I can’t see a goddamned thing…out of range. They’re a motorcade in search of a valuable lost, as if of Egypt’s cup, Ben to the brim: famined, their meal ticket, their retirement package — pantsed, then draped with a tallis. Not to wait for a Messiah, a Moshiach salvific, understand, but to go out and proactively search. You want we should head out to Angels, or down south Mexico way? With President Shade and his daughter due in sooner than later as Hanna’d say, does Der have any answers? A fatherly surrogate, an Israeldirection…north south east or lost he says, I don’t know what to tell you, Sam, um, er, Mister President. Maybe you should sit down for this, get comfortable, be prepared. To hop on one foot that’s the tongue. Lillian sobbing her eyes into bloodshot, cracked knuckles, or that’s just the inarticulate planenoise, imagined — an image of the First Lady prostrate in the aisle, headrest’s pillow bunched for a priedieu, upon which she prays pets to her daughter’s indulgence — there, there; there, there…

Understand, lastminute preparations, removed to a secure location, an alarm, bad intelligence, we identified a credible threat; undisclosed, nu, even to you, it’s no use…we’ve lost Him, sir, hymn — but Der keeps his promises like grudges, fistheld: don’t worry, we’ll have Him back in one piece…thinking, even if it’s a bodybag, a loonysuit or tux — bright and early for the ceremony, tomorrow…or, we might have to postpone, take the Temple public without Him — I’ll have to get back to you on that, I’ll check in on the fives. Der with sleeve wipes the receiver, wipes his sleeve on his chaps on his chinos, turns the phone over to Johannine just getting over a hangover, to talk crazy with Shade’s special advisor on conversion: identify eventualities, address the particulars…a call made from a payphone lonely though it’s also a toilet, urinefloored, dreckwalled, boothed in scratch and acidulous pit (scorpions nesting in the neutered slot for coinreturn, and thin, silvertongued snakes winding around the cord of the receiver, subsisting on metal and glass), way out here on the flatland, the unofficially even if Chamber of Commerced Mittel of Nowhere, a Utopia not proverbial but actual, really No Place At All, to be found if ever halfway along the stretch of highway mating Siegeles and Angels in either direction, any of them but south into Mexico, whose border they’ll eventually head to in pursuit: Naco, Nogales, or Sasabe to which they assume He’d flee, one unrepentant of hundreds of thousands seeking asylum from their government and its unelect God at the great Garita, Tijuana to Mexico City to make a plane down to Panama, deeper into the freak, ever further the jungle, anywhere a million nosings and scrapings and outstretched arm reaches away from any horroring signs of the wondrously civil, making lately like barbaric decay — truly nowhere, that’s the only where for Him if He’s to survive: open and free and air and spanse, a land resigned to its nowhereness, accustomed to any element, accommodating any threat of the sky. Nimbi fried deep in whorl, then frozen. The glow of a prevoyant moon. And then, not a rising but another descent: a stodgy spaceship, sausageshaped, an unidentified unsteadily flying object, falling, that’s only later identified as a Descending Object, Plopping Every Second (a Dopes, in the Mamaloshen of your mutter-inlaw), plodding, dropping air over the hump of each dune; then, on a flat flush with giving, sifting, sinking though impenetrable sand how it hovers, wobbly, as if too exhausted to give a flying futz about being blippedout on radar. Underneath, around, everything’s still: the dunes stay in their ergs, the cacti unbent, dreamt unbowed. Slowly, precariously, the ship begins its settle, lands to dig itself vertically into a small sucking valley indented upon the face of the desert by gravity attendant on girth; from this womby depression it towers up rudely, then opens itself, blooms like a flower foreign to sandscape, multivalent petals dusky, verdigrised, and then blossoms, too, wider at base into a beardy mess of exposed, burntout wiring and patchy, pocked atmospheric shielding it seems, a gratuitous shedding of panels grayedover with exhaust — a wreck, not only has it fallen, it’s falling apart; and finally, with a mechanized groan it converts itself into its consummate form, which is an indecent triangulation of rusted strut: two bulging pods surrounding one large shaft that pierces the air with antenna, as if to conduct the spurt of its weather.

Farblondzhet’s the technical term, which is lost, and yet Ben drives this route unmarked in the dark at a speed excessive, totally reckless. And sure as the desert, sure as the Law, He’s stopped, and He’s ticketed. A state trooper, mirrored aviator sunglasses studded in pyrite, prefab arrowhead pierced to hang on a horsehide thong around his thick, sunburnt, windchapped neck — brother-inlaw up for State Dayen, he’s telling everyone lately, who could contest? He puts the ticket under a wiper for luck, from which it flaps as if the overworked tongue of the hood, drives on the pickup truck panting, only to be stopped maybe fivehundred feet or so later to be ticketed again, now by the trooper’s partner, his brother-inlaw-inlaw, who he’s so far gone on moonshine and mycohallucinogens he thinks he’s a dybbuk’s dybbuk (worryingly, with the sidearm to prove). Ben starts the ailing truck up again and — nu, alright already, so you tell it: how He actually hits this trooper, cuts him off passing to nowhere or is hit by, or else just clips Him changing lanes to keep it interesting, Himself awake; anyway, all this stopping and starting, it can’t be good for the engine — before He releases the clutch, He’s ticketed yet again, a preventive measure, this by the trooper’s partner’s partner, yadda. To swerve on slick enforcement, skid into fine. Who has a lawyer. Who could afford. Goldenberg, I’ll pay you with money you made for my father.