Joshua Cohen - Witz

Ringing the valley, pulsing, on the hilltop, are obscurant forms, establishing, establishment shadows — businesstypes, respectables, former congress-menschs they look or talk like, MD-PhD’s, editor/esquires…people in waiting. Mandated to remain outside the Refuge, they wait to exercise their right to exact punishment from the refugee should he, she, or it ever take leave of the city and so, its protection, should they ever quit the company of their sins: ever prepared, dysnfunctionally vigilant and yet patient to win such vengeance with axes, splinterhandled, incomplete sets of kitchen knives, with swords of elaborate letteropeners, factorysecond nailfiles, cactiburrs made maces, found hunks of masonry, unfinished railroad spurs, ties, rocks, meltsharpened icicles, wormlengths of scrapwood. Passing the time, dust from sand they sieve with their mouths, hanging open, panting, not shocked at the valley but impatient for its opportunity, when — for a future not to be occupied so wastefully; their ties slung heroically over their shoulders, the sleeves of their suitjackets rolled up as if for heavy lifting, for toil.

After rimming the valley thrice, circumambulations conducting him down and up hills, a goy rare to these parts arrives at the hill further to wait amongst these revengers revenant in their eminent labcoats and lawrobes, others legitimizing in the uniforms of the police, fire, and military, finally takes a seat on an outcrop, down next to a mensch who’s palming a pipe.

Waiting for anyone special?

The schmuck who knocked up my daughter, that’s who, the mensch says, and the moment he gets smart, takes one step out from the group…

And what’s your spiel? asks a mensch sharpening a butcher’s cleaver with the thick of his thumb.

I’m out for a mensch who, Gelt’s thinking…He killed my father — let’s leave it at that.

Gelt’s arrived. That, ear to the ground, is the word: having heard about these Refuges lately cropping up, not as much blossoming as rotting away from a wither, an invocation of Scripture, its manifestation on the map, organic but foreign — he’s flown in from Mormondom via Wyoming to investigate. How exactly he found out Ben here’s a mite misty, unscholared: intuition smokesignaled, or arrived upon the wings of an eagle, following the sand, the trample of shrubs. Whatever the source, the intelligence that is hope indicates his quarry’s below, must be, and so every rise of the sun he rims the valley again to the opposite hill, the mound topped with that large leaning oak, to ensconce himself at its summit in privacy from his fellows waiting, sitting, standing, more often than not up in the tree, hidden amid the dense naked wood. It’s Scripturally illegal, not to mention otherwise inadvisable, insane, for him to venture into the Refuge: officially, there’s no admittance; he’s not running from any rap, hasn’t left a passionately unsanctioned assassination deep in his past — and while he can attempt to pass himself off, obfuscate you know the darkening drill with all the militant prowess he mightn’t possess, they’ll know, they’ll beat it out of him, he’s sure as the night. Also, the Garden’s issued orders to respect the new Law of the land, derech eretz: wait it out’s the idea, and we’ll have Him; it’s inevitable, intended…like how am I expected to work, Gelt thinks, for an organization so goddamned mystical, when times get troubled by facts. Ask the birds, most of which are flown or dead, icy wings. How, he’s patient is how, full of schemes to subvert, pass the time, the gestatory pneumonia if it’s not already onelunged to pleurisy: flying any pigeons he succeeds in branchcapturing, netting in leaf, claycolored ill squabblers sent out high over the wallpeople, carrying his notes folded then tied with the midribs of leaves to the tips of their talons; the vein of the texts offering lavish rewards for turning Him over, Gelt makes the sums up out of thin air, windy figures. Then, when they palm and pawn the pigeons on the inside for food or eat them, Gelt still without sin throws over rocks, again with his notices attached just with sloppier scrawl: stars shot without heed across night as if to effect an impertinent sky; he tosses in strained arching lobs.

Gelt standing out on the westernmost rise of the arrhythmic atrium of the heartland it is, the beating bursting organ of the valley below, hurling his finds over walls of shrieking freakpeople, shirkers and droppers, back-sliders knocked out cold on the freeze, sinners and even, if rare, the goodly Godless, too, beatitudinally crazy they are, wild with love, even if only of themselves — stones strung with scraps of shirt unwound he writes on in blood, which is his, too, then sitting to wait, lying in wait, up in a bare bough and peering over the encampment, stretching his arms out to hurl as if in a benediction or blessing foretold: the stones he throws hit people, people with memories, egos and aches, knock out more eyes and teeth to be traded for favors inside; the notes attached are brought to Ben to read but He can’t really make them out, the smudge or His incapacity to believe the worst, His inability to take a hint, or perceive a threat, and most of the others except the elders here have forgotten how to make sense of words at all, have allowed themselves to go rusty.

WANTED ALIVE

A Refugee Among Refugees

Purse Offered Weight of Suspect in Gold

Significant

Description Fat Glasses Robe Unpleasant Odor

Answers to Name of Israelien

Top of Western Slope

You Know the One I’m Talking

With the Tree

Reward Upon Receipt of Above

Purse Includes Purchase of Apprehenders Silence

[Signed] F Gelt

Unethical, declares an elder, the never made good son of a patent attorney who’d done, the son, two years in juvie before hitting the road as a trucker, and a singer in search of a band or a song…illegal, is how another of them whose mother still writes, sends cards and carepackages never received she just retired six months out of the judicature, weighs in: while not in violation of the letter of the Law per se, apparently, an action like this most definitely violates its spirit, and as such any persons or information obtained in this manner would not be acceptable to, nor admissible in…this is going too far, says yet another of them just tuning in (male, female, both, any gender’s lost in its hair nappy down to the knees); even my ex’s father never resorted to this — says the son of a mayor and medic, inlaw to a certifiably cruel public accountant — and that goy, he’s a schmuck-and-a-half.

Sensing the futility of his enterprises both flying and lobbing, Gelt ties himself off to the trunk of the oak, waisted with woolen rope he purposes in unwinding his trousers; with its ripping assurance, giving him slack every footing, he sidles slow down the hill down its slope to just outside the grasp of the wall, passing his message to outsiders in gestural hoots, people passing the word to each other in shouts, in screams amongst, whispering in a massing roar the information onto the interior, related from the periphery deep into the pulsating middle, toward the flaring thorn in the heart of its heart that is Him: some try to grab Gelt despite his caution, their care not to be pulled themselves out, to become exposed, to pass him on in, warming flesh; others push their ways inside to find Ben, to prod Him hot to the edge, to betray, and connive, to give Him over to the wilderness, the season of open territory left for dead and in recompense, Gelt — attempting to arrange His handingover and in doing so further deserving their settlement herein…but thank a God not many here in this Refuge believe — in that the elders, Fathers, selfappointed, the oldest being the most religiously averse, don’t approve: such specific action would violate the ideal of Refuge, the entire concept of a city such as this, its rules interpreting regulations anciently set out in the book of Numbers, within the sunstilling book of Joshua, too, providing for these cities laidout as sanctuaries, sites of Refuge once delineated upon the plains of Moab, at the Jordan at Jericho transplanted, relocated to this desert these lesser, designated asylums for the menschlayer, the unintentional murderer, you’re killing your mother — the beady lustcrazed, trippydip outcast, the misfit, the degenerate gone to dreck then sent away; a halfway house halfway home, in which to sit in, to lie in, to protest by presence alone their own guilt…to stay until their deaths, in one interpretation, or, in another, until the death of the reigning High Priest, whoever he is nowadays; a voluntary prison this valley, a penitentiary metropolis of the unrepentant, and willfull — refugees from retributive death who’ll probably never leave, who’ll probably die here, fleeing angry fathers-inlaw, brothers-inlaw, and the like overacheiving, both the pursued and pursuing arriving to live together in the harmony that is the knowledge of their mortality impending, of everyone’s end: salvation, like if hell was truly heaven, and no one could tell the difference between.