Joshua Cohen - Witz

But not all Undergrounds are the same. There are differences, and not just of depth: the Main Tunnel here, longer than day and wider than fecund womanly hips, seemed in its enormity the work of an unholy, mythical earthworm that’d been burrowing ever since the crack of Creation, and not the hard-won product of thousands of hours of digging with the dulling spoons they’d scooped from the drawers of their Hosts’ fine silver. As far down in the world as Undergrounds go, this was domesticated, even luxury, exceptionally lit with equidistantly staggered fluorescents, its floors lavishly tiled in alternating hexagons of royal blue and the baring whites of their incredulous eyes, decadently furnished with oversized, overstuffed settees set on both sides of the Tunnel against walls slathered by Maintenance with vast murals tending toward the idyllically socialized realist, pastelly archetypal depictions of the happy domestic, overflowed with pillows fat with feather their covers kept immaculate through regular launderings conducted topside, the responsibility for which would lovingly revolve amongst all.

No Siburban legend, digging began on the Underground immediately following the passage, which has it been three years ago already, of the infamous Stay At Home Legislation (Stahl, named after its sponsor, first name Sandra, it’s said), a for your own safety ordinance applying to all aliens living and working within One Thousand limits. Apparently, in years past there had been a number of escapes, not a little scandal attendant. Lawyerhusbands advised not to mention it, lawyerwives invariably agreed. The Development only said we couldn’t go outside, Adela often remarked, after dark with a meal hot in her stomach and a drink in her hand, the smoke of a cigarette burning low, they never said nothing about not taking ourselves Underground.

Though only this past summer did Adela finally receive majority approval to commission an investigative committee tasked with exploring the possibility of an extension, for purposes of access both emergency and daily, her envisioning an eventual network of Undergrounds leading outside the planned community (to be known as OUTCOM — and even now they have a host of personal gardeners divided into Nippers and Tuckers, Landscape Engineers, Pool Scoopers, Odd Jobbers, and I’ve come to fix your cable Repairmen, as illegal here as anyone else, working hard on seven outlying passages when sober, inclined), by this past fall the entire InCommunity (INCOM) project had already been realized, all Domestics now connected, all husbands notified in writing then after thirty days duly billed. The last and largest of INCOM’s major modules was dedicated just the first of last month, in a glorious ceremony ruined only by its policy of compulsory attendance: the Underground Social Union set three floors into earth, deep amid the graves and the plumbing, an auditorium and meeting hall allpurpose, in which Domestics were free to socialize and organize, coordinate coverage, appointments and playdates for their kinder, or just relax, stress down over a tall glass of the house kvass and what would begin as a friendly game of clobyosh.

This Social Union’s situated directly under and could alternately be accessed through the first manhole upon northerly entrance to what’s now known as Synagogue Street, which had been named for the redbrick, steepsteepled church that once shadowed its southernmost terminus: impossible to believe, I know, that at one intersection of History & Joysey not all seven thousand plus residents of One Thousand Cedars had been Affiliated, weren’t almost required to be, that someone or other had once to pay full price for these units, not everyone had an uncle who had pull, or push, whatever weight how he or an aunt’d brought carried water to bear, someone who knew someone who’d execute the due diligence, and that without asking too many questions, or providing too many answers (requiring the recommendations, forms, why in triplicate my W2s?), pushing their applications through the planning tribunal, pulling their relatives, friends, and associates through both loophole and lapse…nu, maybe not an uncle in the sense of relation, though he’s a good friend of the family, now with the auntie wife asleep three floors up aboveground then three floors more up above that at the top gable of their house in its bedroom in bed dreaming of dreams without the interpretation of pills he’s taking his pride with him hard and pulsing below the arches of his immaculately maintained eyebrows on a tour, a surprise inspection of the Underground premises: wrapped in a terrycloth towel provided for patrons with any deposit of valid creditcard, his license, or passport he’s making his way out of the Social Union then through the Hall of Domestic Workers, an expanse forbidding in its sudden and darkening narrowness, lined on both sides with these uniformly small, metalframed photographs of the maids and other sundry employees of Development families who had fallen in the line of duty, become martyred to the profession, each portrait’s frame equipped with the jut of a spike on which a candle’s been impaled and kept burning at all times of Underground day and night in memory of the victim represented on the plaque below both dated and named, though with the smoke from the flames blackening over those plaques and even the portraits, too, eventually all that could be seen of most of these tragic Domestics — fallen upon a broomhandle, slipped to death on a mop — is the staring silver of their memorious eyes, which penetrate through any accretion of soot then into the souls of those like our uncle who must through design pass this way on the ways to their pleasure; the Hall then opening into an impressively spacious anteroom rowed on two of its faces with individual shower stalls walled and floored in tile and glassed, towels also blue, white, and of every fade bruised between hang from gilded hooks, soap dispensers installed on the fundament wall on both sides of its door.

Our uncle, he of the promiscuous towel he hangs on any hook vacant, enters a stall to scrub the wrinkling work of day from the coppery skin and copious hair of his limbs, in preparation for the luxurious adultery of the next scheduled rotation, ignoring in his nude a husband voluntarily repurposed down here for hard labor S & M: there’s a rag hanging from a pants pocket, a niggun on his lips; misting up an enclosure with three quick shpritzes from a pump of noxious solution: Mist Mist Mist , he’s singing, Dadadadadoo, Mist Mist Miss a Spot, Lose a Yacht, Then get mad and sue …through the showering facility now, through its further door, its threshold heaped with mats filched from the trash of houses topside, then into a more spacious expanse this walled with yawning wooden doors as cedar as anything rooted. This room, too, heaped in a decorative disassociative state, schizophrenic, half class half crass, with its variegated pillows and rugs and pelts of fur below the valanced false windows (as we’re now what’s the equivalent of six floors Underground), shaded anyway, possibly for what’s thought of as relaxing effect, with strung nautiluses and conch shells schlepped home from houses timeshared down the Shore, counties Atlantic and Cape May, that fronted the most endangered of dunes. It’s neurotic here, almost insane, as if these Domestics didn’t know what to do with their new country’s bounty, have been irremediably confused by the power of purchase lately acquired; elegance mismatched with pretension jumbled, arranged haphazardly, ungepatched in every imitation of the ideationally venerable, the misguided antique, the fauxworn, the anything-went, anythingworks: plush with loveseats, and with fleshy settees and divans, leatherette taborets, tuffets and tufted ottomans, canapés, flutelegged couches and highbacked gossipbenches, a host of instantaneous heirloom, an inheritance made new on the cheap — thanks to a participating husband, if you have to ask, who’d portfolioed a rash of warehouses stuffed with like kitsch out on the Hudson and was so far free with his inventory and love: this the room to which our uncle will come, and come again and again, the room where the Development’s female Domestic Workers — FEMDOMs, in the know — would whore themselves out at prices reasonable enough to be renegotiated every year to the lusts of their male professional employers (MALPROs), and their firstborn male kinder (FIRMA) as well, many of whom actually brought here by their fathers for their very First Time, an experience in bonding or just light bondage, the virginal both, a sacred rite of the wellventilated, dimly lit passage: sometimes they shared, doubled up, and at other times they took the same Domestic in turns, the fathers always first (respecting at least one half of the Fifth Commandment — Thou Shalt Honor thy Father whether he be timid, or Pharaoh, or God), often the two or more — and whether they’re business associates, carpool friends, synagogue acquaintances or only neighbors not necessarily social or on talking terms — all taking on the very Domestic or Domestics they employed, the maid who’d fix them brunch just an hour later aboveground, with the yolk of the sun just beginning its shine and her asking those who’d bask in it, how do you like your eggs? whether farm fresh, free range, Grade A or doubleyolked, purchased from a facility situated far on the opposite side of the Social Union’s expanse: a supermarket grounding an excellent mall in which, both of them, even the most discerning Domestic would find anything ever itemized on any list whether it be that of grocery, or To Do; special diets no problem, diabetic and sugarfree, sure, lactose, we know, with a kosher section the largest in the state; clothing and cosmetics, too, flowers and jewelry and movies and literature made in native languages for their own pleasure and more — all without the hassle of lines and unseasonal markups, the terror that is public shopping.