Joshua Cohen - Witz

Hier entlang, bitte, what has to be a nurse says, a voice identical to that that came through the intercom at door. It leads Ben down a hall whose ceiling’s lined with projections of galactic phenomena, framed images in still then in motion, too, as if screened stuff, skydark and starrily twinkling; their entire effect, though, rather cheap, chintzy, until He realizes they’re portals outside, and this is the launch: a sustained rattling, a shaking then a total uprooting, a snowing of sand, and then a tentative hover. As the nurse it must be, like them all: shellfishy, treyf, sucks and spits forward in odd jets and spurts it’s hard to keep up with, scuttling cuttle how it siphons itself propelled down the hall, she leaves behind her if any sex’s hers this black clammy discharge that slowly, though imperceptibly (He’s staring as the ship evens out in its spin), becomes absorbed, or assimilated, into an ether that soon, without gravity, in all weightlessness, will become hung with little droplets of this ink heavy at bottom but floating, as if an interior of negative night — to avoid them, to duck and dodge as the thrusts do what they do. With a massive exertion the ship rises again, this time warpsped to smash through the atmosphere and into the void, and He’s tumbled by the force of the rumble, its lift down the hall to smack against another solid wood door, which opens to fall Him in welcome.

Ich bin Doktor Froid, also sprachs the apparition meeting Ben over the threshold holding open the door by a muscular and hairy hydrostatic tentacle suckling knob; and either this is the language aliens speak, or the good Doktor’s just flown down from atop Mount Sinaius, affecting the sentimental out one nostril, the nostalgic out the other — two tablets to assuage the adenoidal, with an additional heil from tonsils deep in the glottal to this indescribably guttural Europan language, spoken today in no Europa known; a tongue ethnically tentacular itself as it’s reaching, always louder and damning, both velar and palatal but always emphatic, whatever it is, and from where besides the mouth opened wide in His very own head. Und your acquaintance, it says, or he, ist very gut to finally macht…waddles up from the armchair on four of his or its seasidereal, iridescent appendages, to greet Ben with two suctorial kisses, one for each cheek, which Ben’s then compelled to return unfairly, with four kisses, one for each of the cheeks of the Doktor, or for what He perceives as cheeks, which are really four faces, each slickly bearded and with two cheeks each of their own, sopping with respiration’s expectoration or shvitz.

Mein Akzent, it’s just asking (your what, Ben wants to ask, only in order to say, O your accent!?), do you mind it? Mein research informs me zat you would find it distinguished, oder intelligent, ja…und zat anything sprached in this way would be listened to mit — Achtung, attention. In mein findings, am Ich — ach, how you say…accurate, Herr Israelien?

But instead, He begins to ask that whole what are you going to do with me shtick.

Like, why am I here?

I come in peace. I go to pieces. Be gentle, be kind.

Enough already, says Doktor Froid in a tone it’s now modulating to just east of placeless, here’s the deal…I’ll go ahead and drop the Kraut, if you stop sounding like we’re in a Spielgrob production.

Agreed?

Let’s dispense with the formalities, then…I am, I’m translating myself here, Doktor Froid, extraterrestrial.

From outer space, assigned to Earth.

To you, verstehen?

And where are we? We’re in my ship, presently hovering just above a stateline, what your nation would have referred to as the Arizona/New Mexico border — prior to the chaos to be expected of mass conversion, that is, and its regression attendant into a past that never really existed. Reactionary, actually. Fanaticism as an antidote to the modern, if you want the whole, what’s the word…spiel.

No thanks.

Where are my manners, it begins again — or are they provided for under another program?

It shifts in its seat, then asks, would you like a Schwanz? I’m quite partial to them myself…then waddles chitinous cephalopod across the office to a humidor hovering on a puff of purply pneuma as if the emanation of the very product within and once lit, produces from its perfumed innards four uniformly short and fat penises, gnaws away the leaved foreskins with a set of sharp, horny teeth, spits them with a radula’s huff to the floor, shoves three of them into any faces spare, proceeds to light their glandes with a match struck on the underfaced head from which it’s talking, then does the same for Ben as it drags, exhales slowly, savoring through every siphon.

Now then, it says, exhaling rings of smoke opening into the oblivious obviousness of the vaginal, let’s get down to business, shall we? We are collectors. Preservers. That is our nature. You with me? Ben lips His Schwanz, inhales to the corona, eliciting a fit of hack, wracks. We amass people and objects, Doktor Froid goes on, there’s no stopping it (anyway, it’s all too veiled, alluded to, tenatcularly gestured at, misted away amid the gathering smoke) — we amass things, objects, and people regarded as practically useless, worthless, superannuated, I mean obsolete; we hoard them, they’re our treasures. On our planet, which, so it’s not really a planet…but you don’t want to hear about that, more like an idea, or its orbits — we have the last locomotive, the last slice of ryebread, its last crust and caraway seed, the last sip of wine, which is dregs; the lasts even of things that haven’t yet been invented, we have: the Tushomantic Analysizer, for instance, which predicts futures according to posterior size and topography, you understand, but you wouldn’t, that’s still a long way off, give it time. As I’ve said, not just objects, though, but life as well, bioform, bio-mass, buy it up: plants and animals, endangerment, extinction, how they’re just the beginning; we have the last dodo, the last unicorn, dinosaur, dragon, the Leviathan, too, you name it, it’s ours…Ben considers the offer, then realizes this alien just likes to hear itself talk. Me me me, mine — we have the last postage stamp, the last telephone and the last television, the last atomic weapon, the last drop of oil…the final, the ultimate desinent, eschatological-wise, the caudal conterminous never.

On our planet, just follow me here, and there on permanent display — having been made available for inspection subject of course to a nominal charge, are the last novelty items: glo-in-the-dark vomit and poop, the lapel squirting-flower, the buzzer, the cushion that makes you make whoopee. We have Misses Stahl’s last knish, the last car of the last Q train that once lined from the bottom of the Park down all the way to Coney Island, Seventh Avenue to Stillwell, then the last seltzer nozzle from Canarsie found rusted, its bottle shattered down at the end of the L. What else. The last pocketwatch. The last threepiecesuit, though, admittedly, there are holes in the vest. We don’t do restoration. We don’t do replica. Nor facsimile, neither reproduction. Come to think of it, the list of what we don’t do wouldn’t fit in your universe. Number the stars. Kiss the sand. Ours is the last temptation. An enshrining of kitsch. An ennobling of the fleet, and forgotten. To begin again at the end, the ideal. Doesn’t matter, you don’t want that either. We have most of the last things, and only from your planet’s what. Other planets, other peoples, have other collectors, aggregators of their own, private interests with private capital, their own personal private manias; obsessional, it’s like a madness with them. We have you. It’s our shared fate, as they say. Symbiotic, yadda. And we would have this last of everything, not just to have it, no, but to hold it, preserve — to keep it in its decline, maybe, outside of your destruction, outside of your time.