Joshua Cohen - Witz

What’s most disastrous, though, isn’t this lack of robing warmth, or of room & board, or companion, it’s the lack of a schedule — the affirmation of existence at the discretion of time. Know that in schedule is warmth, and that it is room and board and that it’s companionship, too, their hope. Ben searches for His in the sand, amid this dunedom chilblain and blown, howled and tossed and flungamong, a surface of shifting time and times, a confusion of stops and starts and both at once, at the mercy of unhoured weather. As if each sandgrain contained a number, a time number, a train number, a platform number and track number and the number of a stop, rownumbers and seatnumbers and letters, too, these letters and numbers engraved then effaced by the numb finger of a fiery gust. There are times of arrival and times of departure He sees, and sees prices, in what currencies and where to change to what, then transfers departing when for where, arriving who knows if at all, in a whirl, miragemotion, fluxed, mixed up with each other in the mingle of snows, packedoff, dispossessed, only to flake intercalated by the fix of the quarter, in precipitate wisps, drifted to nothing, the destruction of order, any system’s front passing through. Then, mindsick with dizziness to turn to the depot: thinking, where if you even wanted to would you pay, and who; He’ll be lucky if the thing arrives, the train, if once it arrives it ever leaves, if its cars are all hitched, if He’ll make His connection, where and to what. The sky doesn’t announce the stops anymore. No one is woken. Ben, His face, His nose, the only nail holding together the wood of the bench. A trainwreck, forgive.

The sound’s a hiss, undertongued shrill and then the smoky and fatty metal and meat smells seethed in a single stack, its vibrations opening the throat of the track into a quaking, mouthing fullvoiced, this wantonly gaping geshray. All aboard the morning, the desert. A locomotive comes into view, its single shining eye its headlight hulk and ever nearing as if the rising of the sun itself, illuminating the train of the engine: rusted loops and pulls and hauls soon slowing, now slowed, towing in the wake of its woke what brakes like an entire straightened equator, an endless end of the line, of coaches, passenger, cargo. A big old puffer, its 4-4-0 lead truck replete with snowplowing cowcatcher and towering inverse pyramidal smokestack to pulverize the sparks; Xmas Special classy, though izled aged, worked hard: its once neat forecab a memory of red trimmed in happy brass lately faded. It stops at Him as if for Him, sizzles. Ben tries to climb on and it snakes again, sisses, lurches a length, flings Him off. He gets up, tries again to clamber, another lurch, and again, He’s flung again — each time the stack’s smoke billows in regularly rolling puffs as if in mechanical laughter, tinged black. Making His footing, He finally swings on: rollingstock tumbling, without a ticket, to absquatulate paperless, without any documentation, official or not, neither destination. As for a passport, stamp this.

All pulls out, takes a turn, heads horizonways. Ahead of the train, its urge, far at the horizon — a tong of Orientals laying track out there, sloped amid the icy shimmer…they’re hammering in huff, laying track to the one track all the other tracks wind into, to pass through the tunnels of wind. Clad in silken skyshaded azure pajamas, sporting ponytails under dishpan strawhats don’t ask how they stay on they keep always, miraculously, a length enough ahead, a chug beyond then around the cliffed bend. They labor furiously, shvitzing to freeze a skin above their uniforms as thin as daybreak’s rashers, wielding hammers that might be their own arms distended, outgrown to smack the rails, the stakes and ties due west. All the wheels in a row, linedup on one of the infinitely interlocking, weaving tracks into one track, then past the horizon out again and in, disaster and its aversion, incidents of merging and splitting then merging again, until alone, finally, atop a lone slick track laid a length ahead of progress, laidout solitary through the forests then through the thinned forests and then the trees, who knows what trees, the grass and rubble, ruderal hope; the sadness inspired by trash that will outlive you, that must; to no purpose waste that can’t console…then, more grass in every shade of gray — and then trees again, all of them mere roots of His familytree, its fruit ripened to spoil, and then into the forest, its forests again and again: a landscape of repetition, an enumeration of repetitions enumerated, tradition’s ritual and its counting balm upon the heads of the fingers then kissed…folklore as an aid to sleep, the mythic soporific— the train kills the goyim, the goyim kill the goyim, the goyim kill the goy, the goy then kills the goat with his train, but they both die because the goy he also eats the goat, gevalt, which was ill, had terrible worms …and then, the odd stretch of fence, link or post, a trackfront house, a defunct yard whether for feed or lumber, the lot where better business practice comes to die; animal, that goat, cow, or chick, kinder and then again, emptiness; the iron, the steel, and the wood, the scorified energy, relentless and yet still it’s a miracle that everything works — all of it more dangerous and terrifying in its sheer haphazardness, its stubborn slowness, a technical exhaustion, a mystery mechanized of steam and of smoke.

The faster they go, Ben’s windows become ice and soon, halfsleeping, He has to pry His face away from the frozen. He has the compartment to Himself — the entire car’s His, it seems He’s alone in the train. To rouse, He goes out to the aisle — to explore, to forage for a diningcar, for food & drink, vendors, concessions He’ll compromise, if there is any diningcar, with waiters and a cook and a bartender, too, if there’s even a conductor, nu, if that’s not too much to ask, any official stoking the way and not just ghosts with the train itself a hobo between homeless worlds, condemned to the superstitious itinerant: a train that haunts the tracks desperate, enraged…all on its own, for Him and Him only. And so, to hope for an outside voice, whether it be live from the wilderness booming theology, or only temporally shrill and coming over a ceilinged speaker to tell Him what, where to stop, to get off for and just go. He makes way up the aisle, thrown from seat to empty seat, then enters the next car, one class upgraded from that of His board: it’s labeled on a sign as Levi and empty itself; the class of the car ahead He enters, it’s called Cohen, and is quiet, abandoned: this class the only class outfitted in plush, and there’s a tiny draft of heat, a lick up from the lowermost grill. And then the locomotive — but who knows how far the hierarchy extends in the other direction, eastward past the classless Israelien and further down the track again plunged into the unnamed, the unlabeled if not unmentionable rearcars, stretching to the intent or is it the purpose of forever — they’re packed, sardined to the gills: hymn, they’re the emes sardines there, herrings, also whitefish and sable, mamash salmon smoked and pastramitized, beluga sturgeon and its caviar, too, upward of ten kinds of roe, fish bound for the coast, preserved fresh in their unheated hold; they have to be in Holywood for tomorrow brunch; latterday lox flown in from parts east — the bris plate secreted deep in the dimly skinned hold.

Ben stays way up front in the Cohen car, that of the priestly class, despite His not being deemed worthy by whom: those who could, who would afford the price of such comfort, who are or at least were in a position to upgrade, produce the downpayment, submit to eternal scrutiny, entropic review…and even if He were so inclined, whose wheels would He grease, whose eyes would He have to oil to look other ways — nothing worse than being in a situation with no authority to bribe, you’re only alone if there’s no one to buy off…just those Orientals implacable, working their hammers of arm up down up down, through and past this scenery of movingpictures, Sunday matinee landscape panned over and around, again and yet animated again; enough to make Him nauseous…all this reek and dreck dripping from the train’s netherworkings, from between the cars, their toiletstalls, spraying to puddle with lubricants, those oils and greases underneath, fallen, goddamned the sign says it’s Occupied , as if He’s invading the opposite mirror — it’s Him inside squatting, shivering, hiding from no one save the shadows of His own inner fear, reflecting the outside world, its paranoid guilt how it both disrupts His gut then feels bad about it, apologizes with appetite, hunger, need; the toilet chugs, glugs, rumbles fouled bright blue like the water of the ocean further if ever, then overflows into the aisles, freezes slick to the floor. Around Him, passing overhead, through the poled wires both telegraph and phone, allpointsbulletins for Ben long put out, receiving little real response, only a titter of pranks, a smattering of honest tithepayers scared into visions. Hell, get them whoever they ever are nowadays, the Garden and the government and sum the world’s private capital, the international bountyset, the fortune and glory goys — get them desperate enough, they might even flag down a stretch of these trains, leash a few dogs down the aisles, shepherds sniffling under the seats, between the cars and then up on their roofs…but by that juncture, trackshift, lever pulled, flag up, routed on the wrong oneway past the last un-listed stop, He’ll be gone, hidden by a kindly bearded pointsmensch maybe, told to wait for the next train, for the one after that, in one of those tiny corrugated shacks that’s both the office and quarters, the desk astride the bed — then cradled tight amid the engine’s undercarriage, a shrunken shyly suckedup testis of the locomotive itself; to ride on, a splay of shadowed, perhaps only potential, stops later, further down the ghosted line, and then — another hiss, yet another lurch, a stop frail and still for here and now final, He leaps to the meager platform, makes on, oblivious of the absurdly narrow gauge of His escape, following only the map of that unsettled tum; and oblivious, too, to the workers — miracle migrants to the west’s newest expansion, the unlived but holyheld past — swinging back onto the train, which switches its orientation around to chug in the return direction, its locomotive downed, out of service, the train’s head and heart within towed now in reverse.