Joshua Cohen - Witz

After the meal, which had been abundant in courses (and too expensive, too, as completely treyf), and then after the caroling, the wassailing then the caroling again are finished, done as ham, the guests retire to their rooms: donors from interests both strange and stubborn, not just eccentric and racist, let’s say, or bigoted and big with ideas but altogether insane — they’re equipped with sketchy maps to their accommodations’ shadows, having been overnighted for their own safety: too risky to venture a return to the city from such a celebration and so late, the ornaments they’d hung would show in the shine of their eyes, marking them for yet another detention, for a punishment that just has to be worse; they find their long, slow, tortuous ways some flashlit, others candled, they’re sluggish they’re sluggishly drunk: their forms full of shepherd’s pie, their arms and legs heavy stumps of yulelogs, stuffed with turkey their brains a mess of oldetimey puddings and chutneys, sweetbreads for stomachs churned with intoxicant nogs how they’re bumping and knocking, they’re disrupting all — or else, maybe it’s one of the birds, another creature stolen away on the tree imported, eluding Customs, to infest the Garden and breed here, to be fruitful and multiply then subdue with destruction…maybe it’s that first flake that all had been waiting for, are still waiting for now, that first perfect flake, earthfallen, perhaps it’d gone missed, as it kissed the ground, or the highest spire of the Great Hall, it’d melted into flame; or it’s that at around midnight that night, a candle’s upset, on a sill, our scholars say one perched at the portico window directly behind the tree, its ornamental drop of fire wicked to catch on tissue, some have said, while others hold by a ribbon or a bow — all agree, though, that soon the Baum itself catches…secreting sap as the tinsel brings the flame roaring up to the tapered top from the trunk below: within a moment, there’s a burgeoning fire, forecausting, smoke billowing to gather its night’s night sky amid the Registry’s vault…

Warmed under his bed’s burlap canopy — army surplus from a former campaign, he’d served but found no action — Die’s woken…it’s hot, much too hot and he’s angry already, you know how much heating runs him, he rises, to have a word with Maintenance, puts down his teddy and tucks it in then stomps from his room still in his pajamas. The air’s thick with the scent of singed pine, which is so pleasant and seasonal, then heavier, too heavy, too weighty and black, it’s choking with smoke, and so he hurries from the hallway of his quarters to the balcony and then down the grand staircase, its fasteners coming loose under his run, a carpet of stairs gathering around his fuzzy slippers slipping, bunching, unfurling into rolls of red as if a scroll of the Law soaked in fiery blood underfoot and him falling, then recovering on allfours before righting himself amid a mess of alarum: the Registry, an ocean of smoke…the Baum burning like a mast lightningstruck, its ship sunk out in the ice, being circled by shrieking birds their wings flaming. A pillar. The signal for help, or for helplessness. He escapes alone, rousing no one, not every mensch for himself but every mensch for me, and goys, too, who not: stumbling out the doors, a handle scalding his palms to modest him with mark, a flail to hide his face, scratching at his eyes then sucking at his fingers. He makes it out, under the overhang of the Great Hall then across the lawned square and through the makeshift manger, trampling the poultry spooked and squawking, eweing lambs and that lifesized clayfaced babe swaddled in their white and then, beyond, rims the docks and coffined barges toward then around the flagpole barren, fingering with scorched sucked fingertips the lone purplehearted medal he sleeps with dangling from him hotly and without sound, while with his other hand fingering the moustache applied somatically, as if swiped from the deepest pit of prior knowledge: a thin wisp of dreck foraged from his rear.

Halt! a young, lanky, redeyed buzzbald guard yells…who goes there? as he’d been trained: which is heartening, especially when you’re the boss inspecting; except when you’re fleeing, that is, and you realize that everyone you hired the military refused — how they can’t even tell there’s a fire.

It’s me…Die says, you know me, soldier; he holds up his hands, halfsalute and halfsurrender, then waves them toward the smoke.

You? What a dreck disguise! the guard says very funny, tell me another, and he lunges at Die who dashes away in the return of his arrival, the guard following in pursuit his sidearm drawn but don’t worry, there’s been no money for ammunition in a week.

In his quarters, at the far southern wing of the Great Hall, Mada hadn’t slept, had smelled smoke, tasted it, breathed in suspecting the worst then tripped an alarm; the detectors have never been inspected: no rain from the roof, no sprinklers shpritzing; nothing’s up to code. He’d telephoned the firedepartment, ordered Gelt and Hamm quartering down the hall to rouse everyone, a room to room sweep for guests, to triage them out to the lawn and the ice of the square’s the plan as laid and sleeping; he’d go for the boss, personally, then with him underground, to meet up in the Temple as per protocol exigent. But Die stands outside already, shocked immobilized at this, the image of his panicked form — gazing at himself in a vast window falling whole from its mullions then shattering from the face of the portico wall, his own face burning, lit with shards of flame raging, his guard overtaking him to jump directly into the fire, its Hall, hoping O God to save himself from his reflection, too. Firetrucks are delayed, due, at least in the findings of one inquiry posthumous, executed with a holy indifference, ritually pococurante, to disagreement over emergency jurisdiction, whether Joysey should respond to this disaster or Manhattan, New York State (that it’s Xmas just isn’t a reasonable excuse anymore, is what, we’re tired); the ice, it’s a problem unto itself, it’s not only slippery but too thin and the trucks too heavy, many suspect they’d fall right through, the frazil, the nilas…how the firemenschs would have to hook & ladder themselves on out. For the record, though, a few trucks do arrive, but the Garden’s guards end up slowing them well in advance of the perimeter, pull them over, push for inspection, interrogation, in doing so just following orders, standard practice in the event of siege, compound infiltration, contingent upon what’s contingent, a tactic of delay long reserved for this capacity — until the Army or National Guard would arrive on Shade’s orders, whenever, never: guards roadblock all emergency response at the edge of the ice and go about demanding, examining papers, keeping them waiting, stripsearching, taking bribes, baksheesh, bar them despite, impede every entrance with their guns loaded if only with a wasting list of questions, tonguetipped bulletpoints; the Main Guardhouse down toward Island South surrounded by a squadron of firemenschs uniformed in payos and yarmulkes, making all the lewd gestures you’d expect with their hoses in response to subjected measures, as the flagrancy spreads past them, with an explosion from the western wing of the Great Hall that whirlwinds a host of debris high into the night, even out over the ice to threaten their vehicles, up also toward a low gated fence and its scar of lawn, then up its slate path, wickpulsing, melting the protective plastic slipcovering ice, up to the stoop to His door, yellowgold if on its way to tarnish: His house, His sisters’, too, which Israel and Hanna had paid off long after lawschool, partnerships junior, senior, after all those loans, those payments, the mortgage made month in moon out, it’s going up, too — nothing will be spared; insurance — it’s only a dream.