Joshua Cohen - Witz

And you’re Him, aren’t you? asks an elder, a Refuge father, meaning one of us and also, not quite.

Explain yourself — why here?

Summering in refuge, Ben says, same as anyone else.

As if to say, don’t think I think I’m better than any of you — it’s just my glasses, they do that to people.

You don’t understand, another elder says, you’re Him, you have to be, the High Priest, that’s who, you can’t deny it…and when you die, we’re all finally out of here. Free at last, praise whatever provision almighty. Can’t wait. Yet another adds, we’ll admit failure, give up and go home. We’ll relent and assimilate, try out a new life — get haircuts and shoeshines, jive straight & narrow, the briefcase that comes with the bedroom set, that sort of thing.

A bummer, let’s book, we’ve had enough!

But I’m no Priest, Ben’s saying, not a Levite, and not even an Israel, just an Israelien…a ghost haunting boo, a bargain dybbuk, or basement beheymah — probably no one at all.

Forget me, forgive…I had a veil, but it got lost in the shuffle.

But even if all that’s for real, you’re still the one after the Priest, the only next-in-line — the nearest thing we’ll ever have’s what I’m saying; we don’t get much priestly material in these here parts, can you dig?

He means what, my own grave.

Here’s how it’s going to happen…this a palepocked, needlelimbed mensch who’d asserted himself as a leader, an oldtimer with the scars and scarlike tattoos to prove, he’s hollering hoarse and wavery. Quiet already, everyone howling sh and hush up, farout like spaced winds their whisper, here’s how it’s going to work. You pardon us, all of us, and in return we’ll get you out, too: we’ll smuggle you out, as one of our regular nightly dead (there are a handful of these, how should we put it — the first elder adds, the one with the burly beard and the halflensed sunglasses and the whites at every knuckle of his last left pinkiefinger that once rung the insides of his rings that were gold — disease prevention measures, we’re allowed…though the Law’s damnably vague on it all); an offer you’d be at a loss to refuse: we’ll pall you out on the night of the new moon, you with me, pitch dark, right under that Gelt’s little sniveling schnozz.

What? I should pardon you, that’s what you want, that’s ridiculous.

That’s the deal, what’s that the kids are saying…tateleh: absolve us of everything, all sins and omissions, everything ever acted upon, ever willed, dreamt up, and even the thought. Are we doing business or what? I’d shake on it except I’ve lost fingers that way — what are you waiting for, a miracle, the hand of whose God? I could smack you, I should. Futz that, what’s yours is mine…why shouldn’t we kill you? I’d like to know. Best get yourself up and pardon away.

You mean you want me to pardon you now? Ben asks like who ever heard.

And they answer him you busy, schmuck, got something better to do, a prior engagement?

And so, standing in any proximate center of this loose and ever loosening circle, Ben’s awkward, with exasperation in the roll of His eyes, them with their own valleys to worry — who could take any of this seriously? — the burning sky, the weather of His head cynical, sarcastic with regard to the ironic, opposing fronts meeting only to flower the winter, to bloom it swollen with blood. He goes and waves His hands wildly, much like Hanna would do before guttering from between the flames of her lips the blessing over the candles for Friday; moans a snatch of glossolalia, a bit of showbiz shtick, stuff He’d pickedup on the circuit, crowdpleasers from the earliest days of the Tour. There in the middle of the throng, in the center fast becoming its clearing, the core of this disparate sphere, He kicks with His foot in the sand as if toeing a word, heeling out whichever line of His hastily effaced, kickedover, recovered with dust unto dust to mud, frozen mud — and soon this ritual, whatever it is, whatever He thinks He’s doing ridiculous, disperses a hole in the whole: people shrink from Him, they cower, step back, and huddle, braid, become knotted — then, they all flee. His gestures, giving and gravidly stupid, part their ways; dirtied limbs fly in every direction…it’s crowded even for a melee, maleficently black and hissing — as they refugee again, this once all at once, through the desert without passage, this desert of every passage, every option of open, through the air’s massed exit exploding their sphere, this seethingly tangling, beardbrambly tumble with Ben deep in the middle sent through it, through this shuffling, scrambling of feet shod, unshod, and spidery blue clumsy cold without nails; this wet web of flesh stepping, tripping, then falling and trampling, leaving the dead behind saprogenically still; a massively tumultuous pushpulling up slip up the icelick opposite the oak (in that surge no way Gelt can spot Him, draw a bead, take Him out), up that other hill then over, overtaking the surly waiters patient for vengeance, overwhelming them in a furious, animal tide…a stampede of shoeless feet then legs without feet, tromping stumps, up and over the hill then down down and down further, as they tip into the valley next, its fall, the buffalo cliff.

Amid this late exodus, Ben’s glasses are flung from His face. The overtimes reinforced strap that grannied them held snaps in the jostle, the specs go flying out into the departing crowd, are lost amid the flux of beads, bandanas, suedefringing strangle…Him falling hands and knees to find them, how He can’t by touch alone, more attempt less determination what with this gush of hair, heat, the blur of His disbelief ’s blinking, is trodden on and then, if not a grace granted, then don’t ask how: He manages to find of them a single lens, one round lens from His righteye, His left. He rises shocked, lost in His find to hold it aloft to the sun, the glass — is then as a concave wave pulled back into the momentum of escape, is pushed into pushing, again into a spectacular pulling, His effort at keepingup spurting sparks from His thighs one’s chapped the other’s chaffing to immolate what obstacles ahead, the people, the shrubs and trees that smoke and will, just as well, be consumed. The gauntletrun, deathmarched weak left for dead, how they manage even in their last breaths to laugh at Him now, on the ground, doubledover fetally in their last fleeing life, holding the ache of their sides, which have been split then the blood binding spilled. What’s so funny, doesn’t know, maybe it’s a fat mensch in a rush, like the majority (leaders, followers, stragglers and taggersalong) heading east, if vaguely…about to lunge up and over the far hill, the modest mountain of the latter Law, and there to its summit, murdering underfoot — and maybe only in order to latterly deserve His dwell amid the Refuge He’s just exploded. Ben crests the hill, and beholds in the valley below a drastic emptiness, the hollow given hole between the fallings, constant, as if the earth’s gone agape to swallow them down — these refugees He’s stepping down on from the summit as lightly as possible, which isn’t very, though as if apologetic, nimblynamby leaving in their faces a slippery wisp, heeled dimples, a shoeprint’s dolloped swirl. Him to avert the earth’s gorge and its endless depth only by making His way over the bodies of those crashing down, shrieking, then unheard, unseen, His weight to crack their bones that skein the surface as if winding trails of limb, the chattering teeth of boulders, and a glimpse of rivered tongue, lain flat below and cold; using such casualties as human bridges, collapsing them on His way to mount the summit next, the cliffward hill distant, that mounding one over larger and greater, a mountain even, then beyond the rage of its peak — the westernmost rise of the Rockies. With one lens held to one eye, the other arm thrust out for upright, to fumblingly use dumb heads downed as steppingstones, paths of skull across air to spring from as the bodies under His stride — open mouths that snag, silence — slip their deep and slow sink through the sky, deathrolls entwined, goners givingout their last scattered breaths that storm through the night into clouds.