Joshua Cohen - Witz

As for Joysey, it’s irretrievable, fogged in smoke. We’re talking banks of the stuff, a run on them, craziness in a last hurried looting of the air for air. Flames consume even the silent bushes, the few remaining shrubs along the Garden’s waterfront. Here still in pajamas under his gown, Die with a cap atop his bald shaped like the moon slouching back toward black — who could take orders from one so appareled — how he suddenly realizes, with the fall of wax on his hand, that this entire time he’s been holding a candle, clutched from his nightstand as he rose into flight: a separate lone flame, having served to illuminate his escape until now; it still hasn’t gone out, but rather’s been melted to his forefinger, and what’s troubling is that he can’t feel its burn. He sits on the icy earth rocking, shrouded in bedsheets Mada’s draped over his shoulders. Chattering, the bite of frost. Soon, and in gross violation of standard ops, he’s surrounded by the faithful surviving: Hamm, and Gelt (an expanse of singleply sucked from the jut of the latter’s weak heel, the whitened sick tongue of his slippers — he’d been disturbed on the toilet), along with a smattering of Kush daughters in only their sequined bedclothes blown suggestively tight in the wind that’s helping the fire along…suddenly turning around in the opposite direction at the sound of another explosion, wondering where Wall Street’s gone, whether Mitteltown’s made off along with it: Manhattan’s skyline nothing but a dark horizon, a burnt finger poked through the smoke it’s accusing; and so already, the assignation of blame, and this with the flames still the rage. Firemenschs having been finally admitted on order of Mada who’s taken initiative when no one else can, they’re inventing a chain of command and with it, attempting to strangle: they’re massing around their trucks schmoozing, kibitzniks, they’re arguing with one another over where their water, which as it’s little is precious, is to go next, and who, for that matter, gets to determine the flow: they trip over their own hoses, they’re flung into the air with variable pressures of spray, their nozzles spouting what water in chains binding whether misered or — as the fire melts the ice, and the melt is tapped — wastefully massive: dousing Israel’s books burnbound, Hanna’s albums of photographs lain open to surge, the kitchen wretched apart in slivers of tile, a gasleak, a rupture in everything’s main, the livingroom a soaked inferno of sofas, charred furniture antique as of yesterday hacked apart with, oyf kapores — axes; hidden under the seared doormat of His house, a scalding key that unlocks no secret…all of it gray on the way to white, in this return to purity, to void: a burntoffering to be refused by God, returned to us on earth as half ash, half watery carcass.

As the sun rises a slight clearing, again the blur of Manhattan’s very south, a wisped glimpse of Joysey beach, crabgrass and the hummocked dune beyond of industry’s smote sprawl…the Great Hall’s revealed, lost, the ghost of its guests, completely cinderdestroyed, utterly unutterably tinder: to go the way of the lives it once hosted, whisked up vaultways through smokestacks of smoke with smoke pouring through them ever exalted; its remains fall apart in the hands, fall through the sifting of fingers and stain, memory, until washed away through a melt in the ice, a hole — a polynya, a negative island. Spotfires rumble at perimeter, pockets smoldering, fume. Stray doorknobs tumble hotly across the square fronting foundational ruin. Tanks go out then the melt reserves, exhausted; eyes and mouths hold the only water and are losing it quickly; through a thinrimmed, dangerous opening whether melted or smashed with axes or trucks what with the weight of their tires, they’re soon pumping the lower Hudson directly, bailing the bay, it’s too late…reinforcements have been slow to arrive, thanks in part to a few guards at the Joysey approach still screening: orders are orders, always just following the order of orders, the protocol of detritus, procedure sunk deep in pondy pits, dug out by hoses by their steady focus and pressure, to be followed only by a directive to preserve — the Administration to take over the Island, to oversee it personally, Shaded protected, an army of agents safeguarding schlub and rub, keeping the remains from any element that hasn’t yet savaged: lengths of flute, revetments fallen, crumbs of column lining the edge of ashen decline to ice melting, melt melting…the door to His house, goldenyellow — Hanna had chosen the color, Israel’d hated it, a landmark argument (she’d called the Koenigsburg’s crying, the shoulder that was Edy’s phone, cradled between the ear and the shoulder with both multitasking), let’s not get into it, not the right time — it’s being carried by two firemenschs one on each side, carrying it to salvage: they heave it to a hulking sledge, to totter atop a mound of similar relics; still in its frame, not yet unhinged, it’s just hanging and so opening nowhere, without an up or down or an in or out or anything, melted from its wall of morning: it’s the same shade as the dawn, the color of fire, a bruised fruit sunrisefire, morning’s purge, the shake of dead branch, from its bark a page blank, aged to brittle — and an island, an Island is the only darkened thing, and darkening still, as if its own shadow, its blackburn a castdown remnant of the night; it lies in the bay becoming ocean as a wound, an openly weeping wound, floating always at the edge of this hemisphere, turning, only to teeter upon, then fall from, the very edge, right off this flattening world — never to heal.

Offshore, Liberty stands untouched, and untouchable, if already tarnished, and as such modest in her grief: arrayed in mourning robes, this metallic sackcloth, her torch a memorycandle snuffed in bronze for safety. As for her book — even if burnt, it’s still open. And as for that other monument, the tree, their Baum outlasting if only by a moment, a mere speck in the Island’s eye, all those other baums, and bergs, too, these krantzs and zweigs dead themselves, stumped graveless — once standing flagless, rude and proud in the midst of the Registry of the Great Hall halfextinguished, it’s a nothing now of choking, clawlike roots, to be upended for the mulch. Understand, this is assimilation: the transference of one element to another, one state as to its voided other, fire to smoke, tree to ashing away on the wind that seeds, and sorrows…O if only that smoke, that ash, it all, could be reassembled into the lost, but how, made manifest again and whole through some, any, allied alchemical effort…to be made then remade in perpetual recreation, what would that cost, what would that be worth — what’s a resurrected life, especially when you have to buy new possessions, when you have to chase after new desires by which to become possessed all over again? Air hovers, impacted, tight — heavy, as if the sky’s one spanless angel’s wing beating its hot thick breath against the faces assembled, too near, the holiness, it stifles. Guests standing outside loitering an uncertain future amid the certain morning, in diverse prodigalities of undress, they stare themselves into a mindful wakefulness, they have to, force themselves already to a newer purpose, inevitable and yet clutching anything they can: souvenirs, mementos mori, one mensch’s treasure another’s pagan trash, it’s said, jewelry, complimentary towels, bars and bottles of shampoo and soap emblazoned with the Garden’s seal — a tree’s star lonelier only than the Island upon which it stands, or stood, its logos the illiterate wind…grouphugging especially one another, themselves in their distress and shock as the monkeys now, the apes great and not so much, those forefathering creationary chimps, escaped from their subterranean vault, the Garden’s until presently secret Scriptorium in which they’d been enslaved and set to parchment copying, churning out their soferwork, the scrolls that are the Torah’s law: they’re flinging palmed wells of ink at everyone, hollering they’re hooting, swinging up from foundations revealed, grasping at beams and columns both falling and fallen to swing themselves, each other, with linked hands and arms from rafter to gird, antenna onto aerial then struts, with their quills as if daring letteropeners held between teeth, the Nachmachen alone in their midst and unhooded trying in vain to bribe them down and calm with the promise of a single banana he’s managed to save, just a peel, he’s sorry, from the Commissaries’ compost still flaming. Then, up from the deepest remains of underground life, as if the very unconscious of the structure destroyed, here comes the canine: dogs redeemed from the Kieferöde wildly spoiled by primal nature and yet retrained to work for their keep, hauling the sleds and the dead, with a pack following of the firemenschs’ dalmatians converted during the very siege of this catastrophe to the collarless cult of madness and so, to an impure, slobbering mate, they’re on fire and yelping and tearing through the assembled froth how they won’t tame down.