Joshua Cohen - Witz

All that — with the unexpected on top.

Ben loses Himself to memory found, rediscovered…the trike on the lawn, the umbrellad heap of patio furniture, denuded rhododendrons amid an ashen pyre of cedar split fallen — hollycroft groves the sharp of their leaves scarring the wind, remember, too, the poisoning balm of their berries in season…it helps to forget mind more immediate, that and the kidneys and the spleenstrangled stomach, His raw arms and legs and the spine between that’s bent and begging there on its vertebral knees for realignment, a shvitz, perhaps, followed by a dip at the Development pool, Israel’s Sunday hour or so at the Rec Center and then the crack of the chiropractor who’d once bought down the block for his daughter: reverie, idyll, distracts, diverts, it’s all coming back to Him now — until a mensch emerges from a unit showhousey spacious, if a model dilapidated, or as yet unredone, then hobbles over to face Him, and His load, the hefted heifer.

My, how he’s aged.

No animals allowed, says the Gatekeeper, it’s policy, sorry, and he fingers thought at his newly grown beard, infested with nitpickings and lice.

We already have enough of our own.

He heaves the heifer up to His shoulders to better steady His stand, and the thing — it begins a graze at His hair as if mocking.

Not in front of strangers, you schmuck.

What about me?

What about you? is what the Gatekeeper asks, having quit scratching his pocks, taking from his mouth the cigarette, exhaling his last then snuffing it out with his fingers.

Nu, who — you have any ID?

Ben spits to the ground, just trying to fit in here; as for the heifer, it lows — which serves as a memory of the sirens.

Then you don’t belong here neither, he picks brunch or a grub from his moustache. Sorry, rules are rules. Now stop shtepping me. Tenks.

Tell you what, He says, I’ll give you my ride if you let me in: ten minutes, five, one, all I ask.

Hymn…scratching under shirt at his underarms, hot, picking with smoke-dark nails the hatching eggs of his louse, flicking them a scurry to the ice and the asphalt — you might seem familiar…

Listen, it’s red, I’m talking real red, and it milks like there’s no tomorrow — it’ll go for its weight in gold.

You know, if gold’s your thing. If you’re into it. A heifer.

I can see it’s a heifer, he’s squinting through a face of all hair…I’m dumb, but not blind, not just yet, poo poo poo. You got any papers for it? Rabbinic certification? Aha, that old handl.

None, but it’s legit, trust me, echt, it’s kosher, glatt, a hundred percent, not a blemish, it never gave birth…reaches back, pries loose one of its hooves not to turn a left or right but a profit, holds it out for inspection and the Gatekeeper scrapes the nail of a forefinger down the thing’s leg, attempting to do away with the dye, but his finger emerges clean, at least as clean as it was before he’d inspected.

Amen, but you didn’t hear it from me…and I’ve never seen you before — you’ve got a deal…and he goes to the hut, raises the guardrail. Geschwind, whoever you are, hurry up. Welcome to One Thousand Cedars!

Ben with a groan unloads the heifer onto the sidewalk, where it sits, good boychick on its haunches as if to schnorr for littered scraps. Then, with a nod of thanking Shalom to the Keeper, He heads inside, scamperingly, and impatient, as if expecting what — for His life once within…His house to be known only through its other, with Him unsuspecting its grave, its cinderstood basementholed lot. Regard the Island’s, then, as His winterhouse — an investment in memory perhaps not worth the properties of its taxes: the burden, the fear of breakin, or fire; the Hill’s vacational double, its unseasonal reflection, an image of an image, resurrected because relocated, transported, only moved. He’s making for the house He remembers exactly — how else, if at all — from its stand upon a spur of rock at the edge of the Garden, overlooking the ocean and waste. Here, though, had been its hearth; here, His home itself was at home.

Ben walks unburdened blocks familiar, block after blocks. Up from under the freeze the sidewalk comes to kiss at His feet, to smack His soles with lips that are cracks. Brokenbacks. Obeisance, the denial of one self in the service of another. How habit, and this despite its particularity — even if grand and luxury and maximally moneyed — always seems humble, modest, and small as too known. This is because we can adapt, we must, get used to anything, get used. But still, we’re aware of this capacity, always, of our ability to change — and so the lure of origins, the tempt of what we have been. How being here, and especially alone, it’s like living again, for the first. Though it’s not so much that He’d loved it here (how could He have, how long had He been here), or that He’d lived for so long, not long enough, in its displaced dwelling, under its exiled roof; it’s not that He was born here either that makes this all, wasted, destroyed, so true, and so intimate, and this despite the lack of stroller or sisters’ share: what makes this Siburbia so comforting, so comfortable, isn’t the lapse of time, no, neither is it the impression of time lost upon the impressionable, the able and willing, the wistful or sentimental nostalgic, think again — it’s that Siburbia itself had been built familiar, that One Thousand Cedars was built to be familiar from the very beginning, welcoming, Shalom and stay a while, take off your shoes, take a seat then holy us with conversation over coffee or tea; how it’d been intended to be indistinguishable, immediately, from any other annex, extension, or subdivision of this Development we know of as earth, as America — the freest if most dangerous and perhaps damning of possible worlds: only the fundamentally uninteresting, the absolutely anti interesting, could be so familiar as to transcend its particular existence, its particular name, its geography, and specific time. In essence, without essence, nonexistent, no life: and how it’s this very nonexistence that allows us to encounter it as we want to encounter it, however — to make its meaning whatever we want, tophet or home, whether nowhere or the only.

Though who could tell from the ground, One Thousand Cedars had been laidout as a circle, as a concentric Abandon all hope centered around what had been the plot of the roomiest, the most spacious, house, the Israelien’s. From the eyes of birds, nested as if a target — the eye of a urus, an auroch, a sacrificial bull. Directly past the Gatekeeper’s, inside its perimeter fence, there are the poorest houses, or were: stubby ranchers set way the far back on these small stubbly lots, vinylsiding wrecks their roofs wanting for shingles, held up by the very fences they’re backed onto, wire strangling wood to splinter. And then a circular road, which separates one ring from its inset better: in this next, there’s a round of larger houses, twostories, the bedrooms up top, waking life down below, lawns respectable if still mowed by their owners. Development Maintenance had always been reserved for the homes of the three inner rings, that’s what help the prices here bought you: another road, then the rich threestory houses, colonials of ruddy brick and sparkling fieldstone; another road then the fourstory houses of better brick, never to spall, hand-made in shades mottled and faded, duskily suggestive of the old, of the made old and by hand, the venerable and the lasting; such houses a defiance of impermanence, an entitled dare to fire, privileged in their security when all’s wellinsured. And then, the largest and widest swath of fivestory houses: an inner, defensive wall of them almost, overprotective as they’re set on immense lawns lined with shrubbery of an immaculate levelheadedness, trim and fit and ready: houses with multiple drives, endless entrance porticos decked with flags in recent favor (change the regime, they’ll change the decoration), imperial façades clean and neatly marbled, their white the purest blank. Inground pools emptied or frozen, cement graves marked by the tombs of cabañas, a tiki memorial to gardenpartied wakes. And then another road, a curb, a sidewalk, an even, domepitched circular lawn — and here, set atop it, the Development’s jewel, purported to be its grandest, and most luxurious, the Israelien home. Or where it once had been, where it would have been still, if not for the Garden — where it’s since been converted into an imposing museum of Him, the Metropolitan Israelien, of late less and less visited, it’s unfortunate. Initially, it’s open only one day a week, for an hour…