Joshua Cohen - Witz

Abel, my brother, over here, come closer, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you no more…listen, I heard this voice just last night when I was out taking a piss on the lawn (I came home drunk again, I know, Kiddushshikkered, hahaha, right, couldn’t make it so I went all over the bush), anyway so listen, Abel, listen to me there’s this voice it slithers up my stream of piss, right up my putz and around my body, my chest and like all the way up to my head where it slips its tongue forked into each ear.

You listening, hymn?

S-strangling.

Cain, it says, lis-s-ten up bud, my name’s-s permiss-ss-ion — and I’m here to tell you a few things-s.

Good & Evil, nu, they’re jus-s-t what you make of them, the only absolutes-s are a whole lot more obvious-s than that.

Nudity’s-s okay, as-s long as-s s-she’s a real s-she (thes-s-e days-s, it’s saying, you never can tell).

Lis-s-ten, the snake hisses in one ear out the other, I heard (from a certain bird I s-shouldn’t name, the other night, I think Eve) that your putz of a father he’s-s throwing you out of the Garden, thinks-s it’s-s high time you two boys-s went out on your own. Here’s-s a tip. Head for America. There you’ll live as-s gaudy and as-s loud as-s you pleas-s-e. Des-s-troy s-stuff. Make mess-ss-es-s. No problem.

Open two shuls-s, never s-step a foot ins-s-ide one of them.

Futz, never find yours-s-elf ins-s-ide either.

Als-s-o, there’s-s no reas-s-on to live on top of one another anymore, you’ve got no excus-s-e.

A word to the wis-s-e? Go ghetto the des-s-ert. There’s-s a whole bunch of S-State outs-s-ide California.

Mos-s-t importantly, keep everything in pers-s-pective…then the snake slithers back down the way it’d arrived, though it disappears into a pucker, flicking up the hole in his tush — forty years-s wandering the wilderness-ss, a generation dead, and you think you’ve had it rough?

Try an eternity being me.

Hey Hierophanatics! History’s ready, willing, and parable, are you? parabolic, that eternal arc — perpetually relimned, always rainbowed realigned: surveillance aeroplanes ziz overhead, dive down; the zatzatzat of helicopters through cloudcover, their rotors hacking air through a smokebank. Postmortem reports conflict with the broadcasts, contradict our intelligence, which is preferred by nine out of ten, blow our hopes for a sustainable crisis all to futz, Kingdom Came. Contrary to information previously invented — there’s less rape, and even less torture; certainly lesser crimes than are reported, at least those perpetrated upon any humanity worthy of them — as for the rest of the beasts, no comment, next question. Suffice to say, there’s no mad Golgotha stand. No Hail Mary last ditch trenchmouthed teratological fight. Zoglandia rid of all the perfidifiers, it’s been easy and fast, too easy and too fast it’s simpler and quicker to state, which might imply to any dissent a specie of problem, a disconnect amid the chatter of wires, a true resistance still lying in wait, Underground. But rest assured, you — you in your new homes, tucked into your new beds, dreaming new dreams of even newer homes and even newer beds and ever newer kinder tucked within their own dreams, which are yours, too — that it doesn’t, that every once in a while we just get lucky, having barely begun just when victory’s ours, the world already ended on us. This is the first time in our history that we have had so much power, and yet there’s no one left to inflict it upon, which is strange. What hasn’t there been: none of those rumoredly huge hostile armies, welltrained and kept at the ready to outnumber even the most mystical permutations of hope; no ridges clouded with enemy stormtroops recruited from unworlds imagined or not, overcasting in their shadows the valleys we held; no strike force so elite that we can’t reveal even to you its designation, falling its heroes so deep up the river we’d have to deny their very existences, the rivers’, too — first response dead thousands on the uprooted fields outside Austerlitz only a myth, a legend merely useful, parabolic in the extreme, reinforced by a detachment from the 18th irregular regiment of the Very Idea, routed from Hell, the Middle Finger of the Hand of God — Whose lips presently wail the bugle call, sevenvalved echoes of Jericho off the tremulous walls, if any still stand, a sentinel if not for peace then for still.

Threestar General Ariel Support dips a schmeck tabak, an imported brand he plugs deep in his cheek; riding shotgun, he sneers spit to his underlings as they make their seventh and ultimate rotation around the perimeter. At Camp, action’s calming, becoming routine: the horizon’s a mass of hair, of blondhair, of yellowhair and goldilocked, flaxen, platinum, and towlike, ginger, and strawberry sunned, auburn and otherwise Caucasianally burnt: plaits of the stuff, reeds and weeds of it, tangles thicketed, brambles barbed wiry.

Fire from the sky and all that mishegas, the General’s yelling over the engine with the windows cranked down, then we’re hauled in to deal with the mess, that’s the infantry, son…he’s preaching to his driver, a recent enlistee just in from Monsey or Muncie (check his mailcall, a relation once shipped him a challah postmarked Walla-Walla) — you should’ve talked to a lawyer before you signed up. Visibility edging the rim of zero, the same nullity as that of the temp. General Support’s in field camos, his neck and ears warmed with the worn of a stolen chinchilla. Their vehicle’s a wonderful new feldgrau Mercedes, shanghaied just last week outside Marienbad and ingeniously refitted: a turretmounted machinegun, a handful of surface to airs. Support’s spitting orders for an end to what’s been a cursory search: interlocking circles of like Mercedes and caterpillaring tanks never to make butterfly rank, to converge treads and wingless tires at the apex of Zaol II, is what it’s known as — to ensure no one’s survived.

After this last and seventh panzerpass through, this Camp’s to be closed, Zaol officially decommissioned, demoted to the status of field. Then, to be reconstructed, though first, it has to be cleaned: that’s why this maternal embed’s been ordered, maids to be parachuted in later today. Millionthgeneration transplanted maybe they’re Romans pouring dead into northeastern morning, scorched in the freeze. After all, someone has to pick up after them, and their own mothers, they’re dead…someone has to tidy up, featherdust if fosterly at dawning’s remains: they’ll be dressed appropriately for the wetwork, babushkad in shifts, armed with brooms and mops, dustbusters and vacuums galore. Infantry’ll provide support from the ground, in contact with the cover Above. A winged formation suddenly swoops, everyone raises their heads and gasps deep. Call it the Last Crusade, Support’s saying, those used to be Abulafia bombers — Jerusalem fell in a day. This revamped Holocaust has forced them to reexamine their relationship to regression, technology as the way to best preserve the tradition — we got the best military in the world, Support’s saying, forget that it’s the only one now, all its hardware and more menschs than we know what to do with. Answer me, son — what’s the idea of a past when it’s not invoked against any hostile present? with only them making the history now, imposing the history, with only us left? That wasn’t a question — at ease. Have to rethink, rework, back to the modernly basics — rekindling advancement, the resurrection of progress in light of the exigencies of the pure. It’s inevitably fast, in the wink of an eye. We’ve radared Judea. Behold Samaria in all its missiled glory, which severs the earth from the heavens above. General Support straightens his yarmulke, which is fastened around his head on a leather thong tied with a bow under his chin. As for his driver whose name Support doesn’t remember, never knew — as they slow to a stop, he fingers his tzitzit for luck: they’ve been made to stop bullets; his tefillin are bandoliers, one boxed onto the arm he doesn’t shift with, the other piled atop his head, which is shaved and nodding along. All this is an assimilation. Don’t ask — it feels natural enough.