Joshua Cohen - Witz

Bone voyage, the scowl of the wind. Blind Wiedersehn. It’s terminus, officially at least, and everybody off…for Him, though, there’s never a last stop, no final destination. Ben takes a breath around: the environs of this humpy dump of a depot littered with stakes — a grimed glimmer of gold, and silver, these railroaded claims delineating the hope had for clearing: these stakes pounded then left forlorn to mark nothing but their own abandonment, plots forsaken, the demarcation of a dream abused. Its true appellation, this junction jubilating a former wateringstop the locals that remain have taken to calling Bad Chan: there’s a mensch, the only mensch around, maybe the only mensch left, this letzing marshalik up on the forbidden rung of a stepladder painting in a bluff of choleric red a new name atop an old name and its beaten bandage of sign: Chelm, Hotzeplotz, anyone, Kasrilevke, Shnippishok…though isn’t that Maine, Neue England — tongue out, he hasn’t made up his mind. Open for suggestions. Closed Shabbos. Ben walks up and asks him what there is to do around here and the mensch scuts his way down without deciding on a designation, then disentangles from a tincan tub of signs on the porch of the sloughed slouchy depot one in the shape of an arrow he spikes into the stairside ice at a lean.

It says, Spa .

Why not, He thinks, revivifying, just the thing! To take the waters — where…the purest, repristinating air!

Ben transfers to His feet, following the directions intuited, maybe, mapped on His palms in dirt, in mud and the spew of the axles, shvitzing almost away in giddy excitement. He sets off for the colonnades, the rivering waters, rived, earthily heated and healing, medicinal, hundred percent hydroxygen for whatever might ail. To prescribe Himself a rest, His entire flee given purpose by the sudden prospect of pilgrimage, though the waters would probably be frozen, and the hotels might all be long booked. He walks the arrow, perhaps pointing wrongly or just down and out of light but finds no more signs, no higher, faster track, whether by way of faring or handoff, by night or because they’ve never existed — an indication of how elite this spa actually is — only overgrowth, dense wood without trail: hidden, recessed, a jewel set in a greengolden, lunesilvered valley always beyond; down gulches up gullies, 1 Mile’s what He remembers the sign having said, hymn, that or ten at the most, one for each toe, deep into the forest of petrified palm among which are scattered, protective in passage, a huddling minyan of redwood, displaced sequoias sufficiently withered — to pass through them, their arched hollowed trunks, dragging with Him a piece of baggage claimed at random, Lost & Founded through thickets through thorns, tearing straps and imitation hide, Injun luggage seamed, scraped, zipped with tears to obscure its multihued beaded monogram, CHAI (standing for Chief Had An Idea, though unfortunately for his people the Chief ’s was to pack up the prairie then move out to Palestein, abandoning his wife and nine kinder). Ben comes upon a river soon, a hot burbling brook slicing its way through nature giving way to the kemptness of grounds, winding a valley around, then cleaving a clearing — revealed, beneath the palms’ icicled fronds and shaded by their hang from nothing but the freeze unremitting, we’re talking nestled: the insanitorium, a fallenrates paradise, starting at threehundred shekels a night.

To soak it all in: all the promenading people in retreatmode, retired even from vacation, chazerai of chazerai they’re lolling around in the mud, penned like pigs but ostensibly for their own health, can you believe, the young, kick-shaking spirochetal, the suspected syphilitic, paying homage and offseasonal doubleoccupany, too, to a gerontocracy of the hypochondriac with their own ibberbuttled elders to deal with, with enough of their own about which to kvetch kishkas’ deep: chemodialysis victims, we’re condolencing, poor diverticulitis schmucks become prisoner to their own waste impounded in bags hung heavily from bushes and the branches of trees; munificent municipal parks trailed through with every nature labeled, thoroughly marked, pasture stretches adorned with lifelong, ornately armed benches, inhabited by monuments, defaced these monumental menschs and their womenfolk sitting arteryhardened, encased for plaque’s posterity within the dreck of just visiting pigeons and gulls, waddling off their early feed only flakes of skin and nail peckedup, then passed through and out. And in the distance, on the opposite embankment, those grand colonnades, their columnal pitch and canopies grave and imposing, but ornamentally fragile, delicate in filigree as if of frozen winds, gleaming purely; to reach them, He has to cross the river thiniced over a slippery slip of bridge down a slated, turnedover leaf path littered, too, with souvenir sippingvessels, to shatter them underfoot.

Ben goes and books Himself into what just has to be the most expensive hotel on the boulevard, a wonder they have the room, though they assure anything for Him under the name of one Doctor Karl Young, with a tipped hand in thanks to Herr Portier and a promise to pay when He can — from the proceeds, hopedfor, of what’s to be His dissimulative hocking, schlocking, and petty steals: the claimed unclaimed dummy drummering luggage of a traveling salesmensch He finds here in the hall and wheels away to the hold of a service elevator, lost sprung open to be found stuffed with barters, that and the oddsending wampum of reliquary junk: shrunken skulls, baculumbones of coonschlong preserved in what dipped finger smells and tastes like snake-oil; the black currency of blond scalps; then the Hopi dolls and rattles He’d fingered from his Sabbath Injun host, to sell to an elderly spagoer as charms against death — and to sell, too, His parkingticket debts, He hopes, He’s trying, to the eventual spagoner’s gogetting son for either half or double, He’ll forget which, of what they would have cost Him if He’d pay. To live is to stay open, all weekday, all weeknight, to make the business. Checkout’s at noon. He scribes His name into the register an Xlike halfstar.

The hotel, it’s an enormous collapse of grandeur called the Grand, none other now that all’s kashered under new management, the only Grand they say, halfprice of thievery after the summer rush, two pools, one heated and with brunch included, the whole complex: mention this ad and get up to 10 % off at our over 100 restaurants & shops. The lobby’s gorgeous, you should look it up one of these nevers: everything gilded and what’s not is vaulted if it’s not gilded and vaulted both, redwood and brass and steel, brushed just like the hair of virgins, marble veined like the legs of the old, and glass as fragile as their bones. After showering and toweling, which ministrations are hygienically overturned by Ben’s dressing as all He has for later’s the robe He’s been shrugging forever, He makes downstairs again to scare up a meal, wanders from the Grand lobby into one of the just ask them how many ball or conference rooms hallwayed off, a highly windowed, sequoiafloored, plastered paradise of ornately fruity moldings as the valances for bafflings hung, which serve to both dampen any happenings reverberous within, as well as they’re regional maps sponsored by the local Better Business Bureau — in which room, now, a handful of marks having been existentially Cained only to be soon enough enabled are being sermonized to regarding the seven or so but who’s counting highly effective prophecies of highly effective something or other’s, as will shortly be not quite forthcomingly revealed to such an uniformly out of work, out of time audience of this prepaid seminar in what’s promised to be high histrionic style by this schmuck of a mensch who needs no introduction, doesn’t want one either he doesn’t himself either script or vet, this mucky motivational speaker standing up front in postulant posture, embalmed in a suit on loan from the director of the least prominent area funeralhome his brother-inlaw; him a healer of faith for those who really have none to have become so sick with doubt that its sufferers they’re finding themselves here and in the pudged midsection of a workweek, to be preached down to with pitch amid the sideshow of slideshow ( have you ever thought about the amazing opportunities to be found in — click — real-estate, such as — click — second homes — click — ski chalets — click — mountain retreats and — click — Island timeshares; what would you say if I told you that I knew a secret — click — a thousand shekel incentive up front, which is yours to keep — click — all your money down, we’ll halve your investment— ), all coming complete with a regimen, a system, act now and receive as our free gift to you a stock of glossy portrait photographs as well as an autographed book he’ll let go for nothing wholesale — squint closely, he’s standing on its copies stacked — vanitypublished by an inexistent imprint of the Texas State Genizah, of which he’s not just a client but also the founder; Ben peeks His head in just as the mensch’s beginning, spitting shvitz into the antiquated mic exhumed from the air’s grave of local radio.