Joshua Cohen - Witz

And the mensch, up for either Freeholder or Freeloader your choice with two sides potato and greens he ashes his cigar on the wall-to-wall, answers the tourist fanged through the tines of his fork that Miami, that’s just old Injun talk, means only Miami, thank you, it’s appreciated, forget it, don’t mention and returns to his brisket they call it secretrecipe, really choppedsteak marketprice-gouged. Jacob-san tucks his napkin under the straps of his photo and video equipment just as, a miracle, his order arrives, miraculous, too, that the kitchen’s made no mistake: it’s the house specialty, a heaping portion as prepared in the spirit of the old Gospel of Lukewarm, an oftrecommended, incomparably of the moment, most artistic and between you and me delectably profitable selection of savory: the Garnish Plate, which is a dish of horseradish, roots only, each of which’s gotten sliced into the face of a panoply of public figures lately vilified (and accompanied by an indifferent dipping sauce, pareve), as featured, in order alephbetical, on the last page of the menu above the reddened white of the winelist discontinued. Jacob-san forks into their version of the Pope, Pius Zeppelini da Foist newly displaced, become an encyclic salesmensch some joke and it is, a lifeguard to the canals of the ghetto at Venice others might laugh, whatever the giggly rumor no longer in favor despite his conversion, which was only lipservice, most think, suspected reversion, a cryptogoy (according to sources formerly of the dissolved Washington nunciature, Shade had offered a deal, either accept a God without a son or face, or face that son disinherited’s death); he foists the root onto his tongue, keeps his mouth shut about it, masticates thoughtfully.

In New York, where Jacob-san’s due next week if the itinerary’s subject to no change or lastminute holiday cancellation let’s hope to take in the lower eastern remnants of all’s usurped birthright, they’re only a step ahead of the (expected, please) throngs, out erecting Affiliated Monuments out of almost any tenemental, slumlordabove wreck: dedicating plaques, plinths, and statues (replica souvenir statuettes to be made available posthaste, bobbleheaded, skinchangeable, they’re just waiting for the shipments to arrive from the overseas shvitzshops this Jacob-san’s brother helps to manage back home), just a moment before any line should begin to form east from Broadway: an experience in the finding of unfounded memory, an only knocks once opportunity this, to be ingathered again, to become disembarked upon whatever passes for diaspora nowadays, onto this Island offIsland, as were their now again assimilated forefathers way back when, here to wander map in hand and foot in mouth the Heritage Trail, its serpentine ways, alleys and streets, avenues and drives — snakeskin cobblestoned, coldblooded paved, then graved over in an asphalt currently being torn up all over town — of a heritage just about everyone claims nowadays on penalty of, like how not to…to follow the trail of the crumbling bread even the crows won’t peck at, or whatever else that intermittently winding substance our most observant of streetschleppers and sweepers’ve been noticing lately, it’s worrying — though just short of them filing an official report, those dashes and dots of drip dropped up and Downtown this lonesome stretch of barrengardened, coldflat Orchard Street: a secret message of what, encrypted for whom. Anyway, is it even Orchard Street…isn’t it maybe Grand, or Delancey I’m crossing, Division dividing Essex or Essen, hesternal Hester heading western to where, I don’t know, no street numbers I’m seeing, O show me the signs — Second Avenue I know at least, I see they’ve renamed it Avenue Bet, First Avenue, Aleph, I get it, nu, I can count, but this is easier than ever, and southward unceased…who’s been down here before who’s native, who knew, who could ever hope to? Not Him from Siburbia, not used to such mess made of grid, such rank dissolution of order. He retraces steps, trails His own trail, how to get out and where to, wandering amid His own waste, wallowing amidst His own slime, the prints of His shoes swirling His progress He loops up then around, lost again, looks around. He’s lost sight of the skyscrapers Uptown — landmarks, occidental enough, when what He requires is an orientation. Where was that knishery my Aba had loved, that place he’d mentioned once to Ima how he’d go entire blocks out of his way just for their shtikel a pickle? Their bagels, bialys? Anyone who wants to find Him has only to follow His loss, the drop of His drip. Mine. That’s how I find myself, here.

B’s begun trailing this slime behind Him — it might’ve been something He ate, some’ve suggested, a schmear gone wrong: just the last day or so, a viscous and humiliate secretion. He hasn’t yet been to the doctor about it, why, too many conditions to consult, who would treat Him and live, after all, who can trust them, and who’ll pay the bill — this perhaps the relapse of a familiar syndrome, yet again returning familiarly, Tweiss shy: with etiology merely another waitingroom for those with more time than pain, them and the already eulogized, too, in short, the headshrunk, it’s a latent fear of diagnosis He’s suffering from, a fear of treatment, if you want, the generic idiopathic, and sticky, stinging on its way trickling out; this slime, His trail, the solution He’s marking out from the swell of His rear. Once it leaves Him, slowly gloats down His legs then out their pants to meet the pant of the air, it tints a Radzyn royal blue, with a fading hint of Tyrian purple, reflected in the rear of the clouds below the tush of the sun: it’s the shade of techeles, that’s the term in the new language old, apparently a substance the rabbis once lived to leech, a dye obtainable only, it’d been thought, from the hypobranchial gland of the ancient Murex trunculus , dug from that highspired, whorled shell of the snail He appears to have turned into; Him mated with some seep of truculent slug a moon matured from estivation, the dwelled shell atop His back as if a worried hump, a hidden house of burden, with which to wander in search of home, in homing seek of search, all the while His true home just behind Him, if only He could turn; or maybe, as others have said, mystics and their interpreters as argaman in the face in argument as the substance He’s secreting, it’s that upon His return He’s gone the faller, and tumbled hard, into the possession of an angry purple dybbuk, a previously unclassified yet malevolent species of porphira: trailing His wander to stain the pavement in indigo at dusk, dibromoindigo lightening as dusk later turns to light, at dawn. Don’t misrepresent with misheberach, B seems to be seething a substance so supernatural that it’s only later identified, by many amateurs since experted, as that invaluable mediating enzyme known to us as purpurase, the active ingredient of that regal shade so valued by the Romans, and long sought after by our rabbis and us their students, too, scavenging at seaside for any shell washed up from the hoarding of the Flood, and further, less secret: by innumerbably unregenerate generations of the postdiluvian inilluminated, who would use the dark to dye the knotted fringes on what many would have known as a scapular, a lesser lighter shell to be borne by the body, over the skin, with an aperture here, too, but now cut through its very center, to accommodate the swell of a reverent head whose lips would kiss the fringing knots throughout the balming bind of prayer. To today’s observance, however, they’re known as tzitzit — the thin skin a grandfather would keep hidden under the black of his caftan.

Wholly psychosomatic, thinking it’ll go away on its own, just as its onset manifested, that He’ll survive this, too, as down Orchard Street He slips on His own looping, from Uptown, backtracked and without bearings as if to break His back here — slimed on His own slip of street on barren, citified Orchard slipping itself from gutter to sewer — shelled unsteadily and so goes groping for any hydrant, a lamppost or parkingmeter not yet uprooted, them or the root of a passerby, the tap of a cane topped in jade. Anything to stay balanced, the stayed course of the upright, not this wavering and wobbly, but there’s none, and so falls again, atop what He’s stood for, facefirst and onto the sidewalk outside this last open franchise, an Oriental restaurant that’s wondrously still lit. This the last late encroaching of those other eastern emigrants and open late, their sweet restaurant on this side of the street, the sour until last week had been serving on the other, the west: this storefront pagoda shooting stilled like a firework frozen in an ascent into air, the space a hexagonal vault of bells, carved flowers, and honeycombed shrines, fired tiers high from the mediating serenity of a garden of rock. The sidewalk B falls on has been starred, shined through with what seems like the least of the firmament; on the way down, He recognizes no names…apparently, this whole block has yet to be graven over, is handprinted still and signed by the ostensibly famous: older names, PopPop if anyone would’ve known; their autographs lasting longer in cement underfoot than the memory of their signatories in the world. Only a block north the concrete’s pouring wet from recent renovation: since Affiliation, Mayor Meyer’s been obsessed with bringing the old neighborhood up to code. And famous or not, what’s remained proves welcoming to such an accident of talent, since His prints are now pressed there alongside those of handfuls of others, His life palmedoff on posterity, hardening: a hand thrown in front of Him, His face, to still the hurt of His fall, extending a finger, too, and with an outgrown nail attempting to sign guess which of His initials, an ideogram, a sigil…and just then, one slash before that letter can be completed, a to share portion of cummerbunded waiters, some from column A, their bowties tied, others from His own column B, theirs loosened like lips, scuttle out to help, gesticulating placidly that for them is wild, excusing themselves hoarse in a mothering of all tongues.