Joshua Cohen - Witz

Yes, He admits, recovering, I’d probably be disappointed, usually am.

But don’t disappoint us!

One more thing, though. It’s what’s this? Ben’s asking to move the session along from groping to fate, so as not to run this session overtime and on reserve power at that, the emergency beamblinking, winking, lowlight supply or who would’ve thought engines down — and so, owing additional money He doesn’t have to an alien who probably doesn’t have need for it…if I have no say in the matter, I’m thinking, what’s with this abduction?

Only a reminder, a noodge or a nudge. It’s to say hurry up and expire, enough with this already: get your life together and live out your span, your eternity, or only what you perceive as your eternity, and then, we’ll be back…we’ll return for you on our next pass through this quadrant, you should be honored — you’ll be our only stop in the galaxy. Now, and I mean no disrespect, you’re not the only acquisition on our agenda this time.

What, He wants to know who, who’s more important than me?

If I must, and Doktor Froid strokes its moist staches, its beardy clammed thought. Discretion, divulge. It’s the last of the last, this One. Though we would’ve retrieved Him on our last trip, the logistics wouldn’t work — just didn’t make sense to Accounting, wasn’t they said costeffective, even we have to deal with budgets, deadlines, and crunch: we would’ve been backtracking, would’ve spent half an infinity on inventory and restock alone; this One’s at the end reaches; He doesn’t live where He works, doesn’t bring the office home with Him, no mixing business with pleasure. We need Him before you — but you’ll get to meet Him, don’t worry, and you might even like Him. A wonderful addition to our collection. It’s big, I’m talking a raise, might be in for a promotion, Management’s impressed. What I’m saying is that though for your world He’s the last of the last, it’s not that He’s a nothing to us.

Last what? who?

Though there’s a slight problem: it’s that we can’t quite figure out what He eats, if He eats, if He drinks, sleeps or wakes or whatever, we’re not sure, how could we be and Him, it’s not like He’s telling, keeps a lowprofile lately, silent, and hidden; it’s as if, it’s been said — it’s whispering slurpily — He doesn’t even exist, is maybe already dead, or perhaps never did exist…more like He just seems that way, wants to seem that way, out to prove, make a point: at least appears if imageless, resistant, apprehensive about the whole process, I’m sure, irked, jealous, and vengeful…relatively normal response under the circumstances, can’t say I blame Him, don’t hold it against. He’s not used to being bullied, coopted, told what to do. Not Him, not the last of the Gods — and, would you believe it, the Doktor says brightening, and rising from behind it as if they’ve all along padded its sit atop the decline of the armchair a handful of tentacles each banded around with a hundred fancy schmancy watches clocking their times differently though equally and expensively regular — it’s fifty minutes past an hour of yours; my how sessions fly, and how we should, too. It’s been a pleasure; truly, I’m honored, it’s deep. Don’t worry, we’ll deduct the fee for this session from your first week’s allowance. My office won’t be in touch until it’s too late; we don’t call or send cards. Speaking professionally, you’ll forget all about us. But you might want to get a second opinion. Rest assured, Ben — we’ll meet again soon.

A ray of light or shaft, with Him beneath, the disposition terrible. One leg of a ladder missing another leg and then, too, their rungs altogether, with Him beneath and passedout. A pole, and not that of the moustachioed, sausage-tongued nationality, those who once had been known as Poles, and so to be fatter and even taller and immensely hairier and more violent than that of the present species — but a pole like a totem, as in a lamppost, a telephonepole, above Ben, passedout about to cometo.

The mood, horrendous, don’t ask.

A pole just poling out there alone in the middle of the desert — O the West Pole, standing blown to bow in the cold wind of dawn, its shadow so long it reaches all the way to the easterly pole and right back around again, equatorial and such, gone global. As for the loose rag atop, that flappity schmatte: it’s flying the standard of a nation Ben’s never heard of before, a flag for a land He’s never even seen on the maps, a country maybe unconscious.

18, it says, where’s that?

Ask Aba — golf was his thing.

It’s freezing, and His robe’s no help, it’s wet, not fabricate but filth. It’d snowed, then icedover, and all the while the grounds’ sprinklers have been on, shooting their water to harden, to still, their sprays frozen insectlike, or into seacreature tentacles — coldhanging cages of flow, as if capturing air, imprisoning cold.

Ben on a golfcourse, His form a divot of earth.

The shadow is the pole and its shading flutter the poletop flag for the eighteenth hole He’s sprawledout atop, or below: comingto, goingout, Him coming and going again to where He doesn’t know which, nauseous, perplexed — an incalculable time dialed, teed upon the posts of His lie. On the head and the arms, there are wounds, there are scars, and then the shadow’s in a different lie from where He’d last left it, dimming across a hazard with the westerly swing of the sun. The light, His eyes…the kopf of His head. Ben’d been knocked-out: a prick of blood encircled by the red of unconscious scratch on an arm up near the hock of the shoulder…a doctor, it said it was, then there’d been a needle unnursed, its sharp tipped widely and as dark as the night. He’s hit that head, too — on a rung fallen from, knocked a dream. He tosses, numbed, though His numb also aching, and His putz slipping from its shorts, then pajamapants and mothering robe to writhe within the hole lubricious with ice melting from the friction: Ben rubbing up and down against the astroturf, and upon spurting He goes out again and when He comes to He’s shed a skin and soft again and there’s greengrass that’s strangely not God’s Third Day of the beginning creationary grass and the green, it’s a strange bitterherb in His mouth, between His teeth a tongue that’s jealous of wet. He spits to the wind, turf and leaves fallen, flails under the eyes of vultures perched on powerlines neighboring the fairway, aged and blistered buzzards out for fleisch, His or any. It seems, with the long, sharply tipped tufts His hands weed from the course, that the astroturf, regularly watered by weather, has begun growing on it own; it hasn’t been manicured for moons.

To His left, a golfbag lies empty at the verge of what had been a sandtrap. To His right, an iron numbered nine as if in designation of the shadow of its future hour — and then a driver, which is crossed over the iron to form an X, marking what geary spot, amid the dot dot dotting of balls. Ben rubs Himself, rubbing to itching, He has to, to scratching again, to raw. He sits up, stares. The links’ve gone to dreck, which is pretty much par for the course: wind’s up coarsened from the hoard of the traps, whiting out the arroyos, bunkers, and cañons menschmade and those that are merely the obstructions of nature; easterly as far as the wedge of horizon, these pyres of clubs and bags, leisure dolmens, puttered obelisks, jutting up from the snow littered as if in offering with gloves quickly stripped, shed headcovers, upended stands; golfcarts overturned as if abandoned at the score settled on total disaster, imminent threat disrupting all shadows, their teetime; and then, furthest to the west, a forever spanse of evergreen snows, moneyshaded from astroturf leak — the leachate tainting of the real by the fake.