Joshua Cohen - Witz

Where they become the exhibits…and how no one knows, no one understands: they just proceed with their mingling, they talk themselves on, jaw and thrust tongues, as bottles pour out into glasses that clink; ladies in the powder room, which is a lavishly appointed facility, staffed with dour, whispery immigrant attendants hired away from area hotels especially for this evening and now everafter, they offer hot and moist towelettes, perfumes and mints…they the women all pause their ministrations a moment at the sudden silence — then resume, din, mingling mingle, while their husbands they wait outside, glance at their watches, wait, talk talk, get dragged away, by associates, by acquaintances, business partners, brothers-inlaw, and by strangers, there’s a mensch I’d like you to meet…into discussions, discursions, digressions importuned upon deviant involutions of tangents. Eden’s gates have shut, have locked, keeping them here, fallen within, frozen in time, frozen as time. To live here, to become exhibits themselves, as they’re already exhibits of themselves, and then for themselves, too, exhibited exhibitionists, say: mulling the mulledover forever, ruminating until the food and drink run dry, they’re examining, framing, and posing, appraising the pagelike walls with thumb and with tongue…scratching with questionmarked fingers their heads, then at others’ detailoriented they’re scrutinizing to ever, patronizing patrons, both viewers, the viewed, the subject and its object all talked, compared, contrasted, parsed a rolled tongue into one, and then swallowed: eventually finding their ways out into the far halls, Tonguesearching at first, Tongueforgetting too soon, deep into the shadowy spaces, the attic’s dim ducts and then the underground stairwells of emergency access…the furthest recesses of memory’s muse; the evening running forever late, the world, too, damned, without exit.

And as everything is nested in everything, and That, too, in everything, unto when or wherever you just get tired, decide to call it a day and it was and it was good…or, maybe Gnosticwise, that heresy older than heresy, older even than the One True God against which or Whom one would rail — holding that the ruler of this world is only the ruled of a greater world, then that the ruler of that world is in turn only the ruled of an even greater world, and then yaddaing blah imploding on down through the core of the cosmos, if you’re interested, threehundred and sixtyfive times, which, FYI, was how many days they’d had in their old years, way back when: O to have lived before the Sixthousands…a dayschool group yawning, fidgeting amid a handful of misanthropic sketchers in ash, in ashes and uniformed sackcloth themselves (as thinly sketched as they are here, it’s nothing compared to how blank their own pages), annoyed and trying to appear as such, mourning recess, feeling sorry — then, there’s also a Museum of Museums, the mensch says, gasping for air, and here there’s all of one exhibit, one piece…this spindly docent he folds himself up in his map of the premises, distractedly forces it around himself, over his eyes, around his ears, nose, and mouth until the urge obligingly rips a hole for his voice, high and yet groucho, at the southernmost tongue of the southernmost state, which is this one.

It’s named where it is, he says, what it is, holding the torn shreds in his old, unsure hands — it’s the world!

Unimpressed, the group from the dayschool leans up against the walls, futzes with the peel of the plaster.

But you’ve come for the Inhibition, no?

Follow me, he says with a tremor, singlefile, this way…

This here is PopPop’s unit towered down where the sun don’t shine, and this particular docent (an ancient stoop of a Miami native, a retiree, slippered, rippedarmchair historian who wouldn’t be made assistant to the least curator despite his appeals and the expertise of his simper), he guided on Mondays & Thursdays, then mensched the Information Desk on Fridays until sundown, at which position he’d give out only information about the desk: this is wood, he’d say, rap his knuckles atop, about two centuries old by the best guesstimate, mine…the tree, it was sawed down, wood planed, legs nailed into place, then all of it varnished; it was owned by a resident of this tower who died with the Rest, shipped Over Here from the Old World, Over There roundabout last millennium, midcentury or so before, though who knows for sure…one can’t accurately tell the extent of its use due to frequent restaining: a light red, I’d say, at least it once was or should be, a pity that now all colors come hard to me; it’s the old eyes, and the weather — but seriously (refers to his notes): handbrushed cherry almost oxblood’s its name with a nice fluted edge, two drawers and two leaves for extension, seats eight, I’m telling you, you couldn’t do better…

Here at PopPop’s, he shoes polish, a volunteer when no one else would, he’d often joke around to groups that he lived here, as if underwater, down in the foyer’s fountain, with a ram’s horn for a snorkel how he’d subsist on spare shekels, drinking his dwell, accepting donations and wishes in kind…

Restored some time ago thanks to funding Federal matched by the State from the taxdeductible Other, various recently reprivatized sectors guilted into writing it all off on the wind, this tower’s lately sealprotected, signedover as landmark, thing even has a plaque on its face that they earmarked for it to be polished by hand once a moon; and lately, its penthouse condo unit’s become a place of pilgrimage for dayschools, and for yeshivas, too, when their kinder do the work, put in the hours, seem to merit six goldstarred and four quarters straightA’d a vacation from the Law, their studies thereof — a firsthand field-trip to sacrilege: Isaac Israelien , is what the plaque says, Zeyde (Grandfather) To Benjamin Israelien, Inhabited The Top Floor Unit Of This Condominium Tower, 5735–5760, Hosting His Grandson Here Between 17–23 Tevet Of That Last Tragic Year, The Latter Date Also The Day Of Isaac Israelien’s Death.

This would be Arschstrong’s room, the mensch relates to the group, who remembers their history? Come on, don’t be shy, Arschstrong was the special poo poo friend of whom, anyone, anyone?

Nothing.

Of PopPop Israelien, right!

Wow, you boychicks sure do know your history!

Pity him, he never gives up.

And whose PopPop was PopPop Israelien? zeyde to whom? do you know? It just happens to be a young boy named Benjamin Israelien!

Not much younger than you are.

Isn’t that wild?

But there’s no response, nothing registering, payos twirled around pale fingers, poked into sockets staring, vacant: who wants to rent them, get in on the groundfloor?

Benjamin Israelien, anyone know who that was?

That familiar to anyone?

Anyone?

How he always stops visitors as they leave, detains them (only a moment) to show them a photograph, found in Polandland or thereabouts, ca. 5761 it’s been dated, asking them to identify the subject — and surely, it’s Him.

Inquisitioned, they’re given the following options.

Is it, he asks—

A.) Baruch Spinoza, you know him?

B.) Your Zeyde you never knew, so sad how he died before you were born?

C.) Your Onkel, I mean, but when he was young and with his beard black as night?

D.) All of the above, as we’re all of us just manifestations of let’s say infinite Substance?

E.) None of the above.

F.) No one special.

Thus far they still must be thinking, still weighing their choice though already chosen — the scale of their eyes & ears tipping the scales of the heart…the choice already chosen for them by their own ignorance, or by curiosity’s failure; if you think you know so much then just tell me, the docent’s waiting to hear, don’t keep us in the dark, it’s a sin…as no one’s yet identified Him, Him as He was or is still (though to be fair, the horns B’s usually depicted with, when He’s depicted, throw most off), in this passport photograph represented as one Jacobson, Esq., ripped, creased, corners bent, found down the well of a village sunk so far to the east, the Ost it was called that it might be all the way around the world west again, lost.