Joshua Cohen - Witz

One Thousand , the slogan goes, bannered across the fence upon the rare Open House, then on the bunting: A Grand Place to Live.

Oy, wasn’t his idea.

With a swig of dietetic soda he gulps the last of his medications, a host of attention deficit pills (last prescribed by a Doctor Klockenmeyer at 82 Oak); he’s waiting — a lay member must not be caught lying down; unto the midnight shifts, with static up on the screen and the ominous crackling crush of the dogwalkers, insomniac, tromping puppies through snow and ice, through to the morning shifts, newspaper funnies fixed featureless to forehead — all those passes and identifications to understand and transmit, Developmentwide. Isn’t easy. Vigilance is key. There among the switches, his sustenance; he lives on snackfood, the carbohydrate bounty of the vending machine Management had installed in his Lodge for them to make return on their investment in him: pretzels low salt and no, these sugarless candy bars and saccharine sodas, now empty receptacles for the sorting of his meds. His screens show the lack of activity around the perimeter, the news, a situation comedy set in a Development much like this one, and Misses Herring’s private bathroom: this latter a measure of personal surveillance, undertaken on his own initiative; though more a hobby than an issue of security, it’s lonely, it works.

He’s the Master of Allowances, of favors granted (though only occasionally, in weaker moments) — he’s the Arbiter of Recognizance, this squat older goy with a gun at his hip for which they’ve never given him ammo, him with a twinkle in his eye and teeth plasticized in infinite, highrising floors to flash at passersby. For her, though, a smile more genuine, unforced, becoming sheer grin: he knows her, of course, this woman, the one with the light hair and dark eyes, the other half of the package — not the Koenigsburg’s, this is H and Is’ woman; knows her not in the sense of Scripture, not that he would’ve refused, not at all, you’re misunderstanding, it’s up to her; no, he knows her more intimately, knows her schedules, arrivals and departures, her weekly forages in the Greater Outside, which is where he’d like to live with her if ever she’d quit her dying Inside. And me here, he thinks, how me, too — in a sort of purgatory, between the two worlds, a barrier, at the edge of two middles. Not quite a coworker, far from the boss. He leans across his desk as she walks up and onto the sidewalk in a slink particular to the refugee or oppressed, keeping his eyes lusting on her until she takes her turn onto Apple. As for her, she never looks over her shoulder, rather faces down, like she’d never turn toward him, no matter what, even if he was barking her name and for her to stop and had his gun loaded and aimed at her head; you’re born knowing to walk like that, and under those conditions, he thinks, if you were born where she was and when, which was he doesn’t know where, neither when, but can imagine — even with the monitoring, that’s what he does.

Wanda walks quickly, her small head knotted into a kerchief to the slight rain, then snow, disappears from his eyes only to reappear up on his screen, heading west on Apple to the house at its loop; she’d gone out to reconnoiter Masses, their hours, for tonight and tomorrow, for herself and Adela.

He’d taken the wreathe out of its storage under the desk, had hung it on his door just last week.

A moment, though, slow up and shtum…he’d thought now might’ve been the time to spring the question: What are you doing tonight, and tomorrow, and with your life after that? Wanda, a Wonda, why the name, and from what?

As our rabbis explain — it’s because when they were building these houses, they cut down one thousand cedars that’d grown upon the face of this earth since the beginning of time.

And where did those cedars end up?

In the houses, on their roofs, as shingles, as siding.

Satisfied?

No.

How Is This House Different From All Other Houses?According to our sages, it’s because this house is the Koenigsburg’s house and all the other houses are not, with the exception, it’s been raised, of the Koenigsburg’s mountainhouse, or retreat, which is located in New York, Upstate, a house she’d wanted and not he, let’s not get into that just now (like every single one of their houses, it’d been too expensive, the mortgage and the upkeep, too, and the property taxes, and yadda). As Rabbi Bill has said in the name of Reb Bob of Normal, IL, the Koenigsburg mountainhouse is different from the Koenigsburg househouse in innumerable ways. And we all say, too long a story. According to the scholars, their househouse is different from all other houses, as well: inside, the arrangement of the furnishings, the disposition of important investment papers, the hides of their wills, passports, forks, knives, and twisted white metal hangers are divinely unique. It’s been said, other households might have some of the same possessions, however no other household has the exact same amalgamation and arrangement of the exact same possessions. And Rabbi Lao Zhang-Zhao goes on to explain — this house has an attic. And in the attic is a steamertrunk, which her grandmother had hauled all the way across the ocean. No other house has the trunk of her grandmother, and, anyway, not in its attic, though to be sure other houses have their own attics and their own grandmother’s trunks, and maybe even grandmothers’ trunks up in attics, though, he expounds, probably none have attics inside the trunks of their grandmothers. Though Rav Martinez does not rule it out. According to Rav Nuncio, it’s its inhabitants that make this house unique. And then there’s the Koenigsburg’s shorehouse…

How Is This House NOT Different From All Other Houses?Across the looping from the Koenigsburg’s, then, Hanna and Israel’s: they’re both immodest houses of outwardly similar size, multiply floored and with finished or partially unfinished attics and basements, and similar shape, a central box or trunk, from which emerge their two wings each, one from either end north to south as if they’re prepared to fly away any moment, each wing with porch extensions of their own (later additions, once they’d made nice with Zoning), wings of wings, out the sides, and in the front and back, too; they have the same number of interior stairs, which is fortyfour, and the same number of rooms, which is twentyeight; they were reroofed the same month a year ago now, and the same thieves, recommended by Management, May Their Debts Grow Higher Than Sinai, did the reroofings; they’re both filled with loving, active, and involved parents of loved, acted upon, and involved with offspring, though the Koenigsburgs have only two kinder and the Israelien’s have twelve, now thirteen.

Another difference is their color, though it’s only an opposite, a reversal: the Koenigsburg’s house’s siding is the color of H and Is’ house’s shutters, and the Koenigburg’s house’s shutters are the color H and Is’ house’s siding.

Both houses have hedges front and back, both kept immaculately trimmed for uniform width and height by the exact same workforce, who work for the houses on alternating Wednesdays as last scheduled at last January’s annual meeting of the One Thousand Cedars Hass or Homeowner’s Association, hosted by the Koenigsburgs; this coming year would’ve been the Israeliens’ turn.

Though H and Is’ house has a basement partially unfinished; the repository of all difference, the sanctum of all secrets however domestic: soggy, micenibbled cardboard boxes, spiderspun hollows of cinderblock, these bulk crates of paper product (toilet tissue, towels), twin battered and chipped foldingtables — those and a host of other accoutrements reserved only for the use of guests both wanted and not: guestlinens, guesttowels, guestshoes and guestmittens and hats, provisions for every possible guestneed and guest-want, guestdesire, demand; toward the back, more boxes, these of moldering books, stacks of old photographs, paintings, and records, too, autographed Zimmerman LPs, an incomplete set of the Brandenburg Concerti, desiccated mounds of jazz sides most of them just sleeves, opera recordings probably worth something, someone should investigate, get them appraised; and even at the decaying bent bottom of the heap a trove of cantorial 35s that’d belonged to their parents, their grandparents, maybe, walled in by a dustbound encyclopedia set featuring the latest maps of the Ottoman Empire, volumes bookmarked with the corpses of worms.