Joshua Cohen - Witz

On the door there is a house and in the house there is a name and as one passes through the door then past the house one must kiss there at the house, whose walls kiss the name — a mezuzah, Edy’d once explained, that this is done to remind people that houses are to be reverenced as homes, and that the very idea of owning or even renting a heaven on earth, itself mortgaged, is a miracle to be recognized upon every pass. As to pass through a doorway is to experience a revelation, especially when over this threshold lies your dead. Adela never kisses, though. As this isn’t her house or home as much as she is the house’s, like a wall when she’s left alone, when working more like a floor. Door shut, there have been no bodies found yet, only basement, paneled in cedar: outside lamplight eking through windows at earth, illuminating fingers of dust, then a pinball machine they’ve never plugged in, and a screen, embarrassingly huge, an entire wall, a world in and of itself. Another passage. Images live on this screen. Images like people, like gods, some appropriate, others not so. Discretion’s advised. Images to Show the Kids to Shut Them Up on a Rainy Day, images Never to be Screened by Anyone Else Save Edy & Alan on Penalty of Grounding, the ratings. Loss of Innocence, labeled. And if screened then alone amid the dead of night, with no one home and the doors and the windows locked and the alarm armed with you know the basement’s code, when that little light thing goes red. An image imagining itself. As for the code, it’s the same used by all these houses, all in secret. Numbers breathe no word or letters even. Eighteen, thirtysix, sums or permutations of the numerals of life.

Little light thing goes red between the two couches, above a recliner across from the narrow hallway to the door to the laundryroom, the name of the room in which laundry’s done, though it could also be named Rachel or Leah, or Adela. Then, her door. Jambed at an odd recline. As if pasted on the wall, a stamp. As if a patch sewn onto the flag of a stranger. Imageless. Alan Koenigsburg — senior partner in Koenigsburg & McQueen, which was how he’d come to own this house, Israel’d recommended for opposing counsel, testified responsibility to the tribunal — having obtained the necessary permits, had hired the brother of a client to sledge his hammer to a wall; the room, and the washroom, too, adjoining, and through another door, to the right, Storage — all was redeemed from nothingness. Potentiality until. It would always have that, impermanence. He’d never enter the Underground through the wardrobe of his Domestic, as did the other husbands through the wardrobes of theirs, preferring instead the access of an Apple Street sewergrate, having a subterranean fear, the contracting mistakes, the problems with his foundation as Alan’d say, too close to home. To remove your hard soles, at the threshold, then to replace them with soft, with the slippers, is another way to sanctify home, a room of her own. Adela’d been here for maybe a year, and her drawers still as empty as life: no movie career or master of business degree, no husband dumbly rich with portfolio — her inexpensive imitation denim still in its suitcase, whose own home is the floor. Twinbed with bedding themed by dinosaurs, Oriental partition of ricepaper. On sale at a steal, $69.99 for a limited time only at Wiltinghills, not the Siburban location but the Upper East Side & Lex. In the bathroom adjoining, a bath slash shower and toilet, alongside a stack of magazines wetted then dried into each other into a tablet, half off the Law. Inside the room proper, atop a table, her own framed images, these limited to frontispieces of various samizdat editions smuggled autographed by their authors either in prison or exile, then those family photographs of her mother and which sister or her posing waterside, Lake Balaton, the Danube, Vltava, which is the Moldau, the Irtysh or Ob, the same; a strip of photos she’d taken with Wanda amid an airtight steel trap sunk a million miles deep, Port Authority, maybe, or below Grand Central Station; and then on that table’s only low shelf, a dictionary, which she’d memorize on the weekends when she had off if the Koenigsburgs weren’t entertaining, they had to give notice. Hall: a connecting passage, charitably the lowermost room in a house set with doors leading to other rooms, empty, forgotten, a crawlspace it’s called; from there, a door slamming shut onto Storage, a room half the space of hers in which she keeps the clothes she bought here as opposed to those she brought with (wardobed): the new underwear and stockings she never wore, three sweaters and a skirt pressed and folded, tzedakah, the skirt Alan and Edy’s and the sweaters Hanna and Israel’s presents, last Xmas; Adela’s to get another skirt this year, this one longer at Edy’s insistence, more demure than the mistake of last year, if tomorrow.

Adela had walked to the train, to the aeroport, its plane, to yet another aeroport and plane to take the train to then walk again to the agency an entire ocean away, and all in the span of two days. A fish out of water, it’s said, she’s more perfectly a carp displaced, this season’s fish, which in her hometown village would’ve already been harvested from its pond, would’ve been hauled to the ramshackle, once drearily dissident Seasonal Market, to be netted from a tub enormously filled with the melting of snow, then weighed before all on a dishonest scale for the approval of the womenfolk, liningup as old as the earth and as patient in their revolve; women at the beginning of the line the oldest and the last no more than a little girl the granddaughter of the forgetting first just sent out with coin on an errand. Each remembered to her as her mother. How their carp would be netted, then bagged and hauled home to their bathroom, there in their own iron tub to swim itself dizzy in lazying loops, awaiting only the wrath of a mother — though progress happens, traditions evolve: now, how the fish would flipflop in the hands of the monger, then the thunk down on the cyclopean head with the brute, senseless mallet, the Angel of Death; Its knife would slice from out of the sky, then the head of the fish, with which to make stock for their soup, would tumble into the wrapping of its own newspaper, they’ve only printed one copy, headlined Today Is A New Day , black on black; the body of the carp dropped into an honest bag, which is bottomed, to be carried home dripping dead, leaving its entrails in a trail, the blood of the street crucified in holiday traffic. It’s this anonymous Advent, which had been only yesterday for her mother, if she’d be unlucky enough to still live, that her daughter remembers as she reaches through the dark to retrieve an item of frill, lucrative lingerie, a satiny blue flyaway with white trimming in lace, from the thirsty lip of the sink across from the units of washer and dryer. And, as she opens the door — as doors are for nothing but opening, unless a door is already opened, in which case all we can do is stand around at the threshold and refuse ourselves entrance: a shut door is a welcome to death — the door to the laundryroom here, the laundryroom downstairs-downstairs, which is the room of white on some days, the room of colors on others…what she lets fall from her lipstuck lips is nothing but the carping silence of that decapitated bottommost feeder.

Edy leans over the sink with a jar in her hand, polish for silver, rag in the other and fumes.

Adela heads upstairs, past those portraits whose features are no longer visible because the lights have long been slept, upstairs-upstairs to the room of their son Kyle, just made a son of the commandments last month, a barmitzvah, congrats a bounty of mazel, Hanna and Israel and their twelve daughters in attendance in matching dresses you should have — dead in his room, bent at the edge of his bed, expired in the middle of, we’ll leave him at that…then to the room adjacent, a suite even, almost a house in its amenities, and nothing, then to its bathroom tiled and toweled and Kylie, the older sister dead in the shower, her hair in the drain deep in water, a curtain undisturbed…and then, to the open Master Bedroom, and there nothing either, but beyond its fluelessly artificial fireplace that cleaves the expanse, never been lit and into the study, Alan’s head a bald egg nested amid transcripts of depositions, his neck loosely noosed with the telephonecord…