Joshua Cohen - Witz

Oy, the back of my knees. Ben rises to survey the lay: as if a landfill in its wastefulness, almost otherworldly as uninhabitable, too cold to breathe…this terra terribilis gone incognito without the usual atmosphere of polyester admixed with plaid. As He rises, He’s scratching still. What is it, it’s horrible. A mold forming around Him, a bushy cloud or monstrous fur, the seeped whitening green of His sleep, staining the robe, sucked onto the skin. He itches, it feels, even unconsciously, in His unconscious, its recognizance in the waters hazarded over with ice: to let fly with nails at your reflection, the burn in your brain — it’s leprosy, Ben, this land lepromatous; you’re going to have to trust us on this, we’re all doctors here, at least we’ve all been to doctors; take off your robe, put on this gown, you’re on holied ground: sit down, let’s answer our questions.

What’s given Him this leprosy, assuming that’s what it is? Los Siegeles, babele, Los Siegeles, the last He remembers. What’s the line, what’re the real odds — on survival; how He’d wandered feverish, dazedly delirious, to here, this golf links, to the south, the west, between them and both, dreamlessly scratching itching and raw, unkempt to His fingernails gnawed, tearing a drip precious of vein? Had He been walking, what, two, three, four days due southwest, half through the iced desert, over freeways newly tolled but who has the nerve to pay, in doing so just denying an inheritance lately received: withhold your right over every head, not chutzpah and yet neither is it cheating per se, only it’s a sin not to bargain, to handle as well as the truck, abandoned and lost — over ticketed ways high and low, banditbound interstates, routes fined, polared to pot…was it a drink and its poison He’d been slipped, comped to conk out, the seizing of shikker — a bartender He’d paid to be serviced by, only to be taken for all and for nothing? Whatever image He might try to mock of Himself gets subsumed in the fame, sublimated, otherwise Affiliated, never at fault. What Ben last remembers: betting the bank on red 18, or, then nothingness: dropping some dry drink, something too ginned, or overly vermouthed, a drink altogether too expensive and refined to ever be indulged upon His own free will and separate check, there’s no way He’d ordered it for Himself, no way He even knew of its existence (Israel drank wine, Hanna had sipped Israel’s), attempting a splurge only to spill the dribble over His robe, soaking His socks, puddling slippers. Bookies to creditors. Dealers untipped. Bellboychicks and cocktailmaydels. Foxtailed waitresses. BunnyBens, and then what. Then abducted, but how, only to wake up here rawly rufescent, with this futzed fuzz on His skin. He holds at the pole for support, then with a sigh lets it go and stands upright alone and unsteady, wavers like the flag veiling His eyes, nearly falls a foot into the hole below, staggers then rights Himself again, tries to breathe deeply.

Fore! is said or only heard. A white shot shrieks through the sky: a whining whiz, this dimpled ionomer incoming, a golfball to hit Him on the head, lay Him out sprawled — His head on the green again, a rising welt to hazard the forehead, His feet chipped in the direction of the penultimate hole, arms strewn to fingers pointing to far groves withered around water frozen at the longest drives of horizon. Ben comes to, then, to hooting, scraping from the treestand that shades the neighboring rough; a riled noise coming closer, the strangling shake of bare boughs, white, and the swinging scurry of fur. Another weather begins, a hail of golfballs bearing down on Him as He stands yet again and staggers dazedly from the flag and its hole to where par three should be, should’ve been if ever landed and ended. He’s dodging this plague of balls like fallingstars or planets, dropped, getting hit in the face, breast, and crotch; stumbling midfairway toward a precipitous rise in the greened snow and there, the protrusion of a coontailed antenna, bent by the wind; to kneel atop that very hunch, prostrate upon the unlandscaped to dig out amid the pelt a golfcart buried, to turn it upright with all His strength, to kick at tires, knock icicles from hood, then rev — to head, is the thought lazy, tired, nauseous, necrotic but also fuzzily numbed in a personal hoar, this private ice of mucoid scaly fungus, across the countryclub restricted no longer, puttering quickly toward the 19th Hole Greenhouse He espies for the refreshment of safety.

Goddamnit no stalling, balls boinking, boinging, every cartoony sound from the roof of His ride. Ben putts ahead at fullspeed, whatever He’ll make if He floors it, He does as if His foot’s accelerating strata down through the ground, a deep dig into earth cleated with skulls still with their caps on. His skin’s on fire, despite a fervorless fear in His veins. All around Him, the astrotruf ’s peeling its planet: ailing, occupied with shedding itself, with shedding the sheds, in an affliction that’s merged a mess into a unified albescence upturned and shot through with green, an alien mold spored out from under the valleyed snow and the sand of the sandtraps and from around the perfectly elliptical extremes of the ponds, left for the disease that shatters ice in removes, their own sheered removals, both epigenous and dermal and further below, the course entire a fluctuant surge: mounds falling from mounds, rises and dips and verges pocked, sopping a sort of freeform verdural, in a scarification fungally frozen, tongued sick with a fever, blown hot and cold; the soured fairways say, Aahhh…despite being a golfcourse, can you believe, there’s not a single physician around.

And so any diagnosis must be a consultation made brief with belief, an experiment of the etiologically theological, what we’re talking is a matter of faith. If, as it’s been said, God is everything, both a maker and a ruler, a judge and a king, then He must be a dermatologist, too, accredited by His own infinite wisdom, insured by His own illimitable might — after all, Who can know the world and its skin and the creatures that infest it as us better than the One Who created them all, only to wrong us with sickness, punish with disease. Mycobacterium leprae might be the verdict, then, Ben’s suspicion confirmed: endemic to this desert, an ailment of the links sinned entire — but if so then leprosy of a divine diagnosis, a leprosy of a Scriptural strength. Metastasized, exteriorized, a blight out of body — retributively, the disease of Miriam, the sister to Moses, the illness that’d pillowed her outside the encampment, delirious under the sun, lately absent.

Ben reaches the Greenhouse if it still has enough walls and enough of a roof to be called or considered any kind of a house, though greener than ever from the slurry of turf: it’s fallen, a skeletal stress of twisted trophies and signage tangles, the remnant of banquet facilities with legless chairs up on splintered tables, locker modules ripped from the setting of their rooms then arranged in the showers, as if metallic megaliths and trilithons intended for the worship of pagans. Inside, which is now its outside, the same, everything’s in a feverish splotch, made lesion, numbly ashen, and flaky. Pusssoaked shammies. Pinkgray flesh flayed loose on clubs and barbarous spikes. Ben parks the cart and wades in in search of food and drink. And the more He stands gleaning through the rubble for any perishables that might’ve preserved, even the alcohol, a light Kiddush from the bar forever closed, the hackedup cherrywood with its bacillarylike rows of bottles not cellared — how He burns more and more, a skinpeel, it’s unbearable, maculamade, that and a flow of blood from the nose, epistaxis the name; inflammation from nodule to plaque, His nostrils impassable, the same with His sinuses, His throat a stack puffing, a blowsy chimney on fire itself.