Joshua Cohen - Witz

But Benjamin. He’s still alive, pleadingly, isn’t He? Jesus, muttering Mary, we’ve received assurances, what about all those omens, those portents and signs (he’s stalling himself, trying to think what those were, might’ve been) — we’ve made all this food, two crates of wine; we haven’t even been paid.

Don’t get wise with me, says the Keeper, suddenly suspicious when the talk gets to money.

Weizmann begins to cry, too.

Enough, the Keeper resists an urge to hug, rams his hands into the pockets of his uniform pants.

If you want, I’ll let you in to talk to Security. Or the insurance people, the claims adjusters — if you want to file against the estate.

Of course, I’ll have to take a peek in the trunk. That is, if you don’t mind. It’s standard procedure.

And so Weizmann, weeping to wet his robe’s gilded frill, opens the driver-side door, pops the trunk into a storm: it’s fullup with oversized, overstuffed green trashbags holed and holding they appear to be weeds, acting as padding for plasticpacked frankincense, ziplocked myrrh its freshness sealed in; the stench hits the Keeper in the gut, he goes reeling, gags, recovers, pinches his nose, lifts the trashbags and roots around with his other hand amid wrapped and greasy platters of fish, white and herrings smoked and sturgeon, nova and kippered salmon and sable, alongside enormously risen loaves of pumpernickel and rye both with seeds, without; underneath, a shimmering: uncovered, it’s a glowing golden bundt cake, which illuminates his confusion, is pareve; the Keeper retreats a step, stares at the shvartze driving as if it’s all his fault and so the shvartze kills the engine, gets out, leaves the door open and beeping, proceeds somberly to the trunk, which he shuts as the similarly robed caterer in the backseat gets out, too, stands immediately behind the Keeper with his hands on the Keeper’s neck as if to assuage him by choking.

They’re presents, he says dejectedly, for Him and the parents. His partners weep against the windows. And a bundt cake, consider it yours…the Weizmenn smacking palms against their heads and the Lexus, which is due back by noon.

Standing together, soon holding each other, a huggy group weeping, as an ambulance registered to the Hospital Under the Sign of Everything, Long Island’s premium facility at which no insurance is ever sufficient, goes wailing down the lane, past them and their Lexus pulled to the shoulder, past the hut without a nod let alone a stop or even slowing, no appropriate decal affixed to the windshield of the vehicle, no licenseplate to put through the system, this is an emergency here, we have lives to save, or if not lives then at least our reputation for response time. We’re on the clock, better get out unwell or scram. Doctor Tweiss rides shotgun, the plasticsurgeon twin, we should hope (the other’s a psychoanalyst) — in suit, tie errant in the wind with his window aired down, he’s smoking despite the snow, the weathering gray, a monogrammed DT bag of tools on his lap open and bulging, the glint of stainless steel that blinds the eyes of the crying Keeper leaning up against the shut trunk as they pass: the guardrail’s up, had been up ever since this disaster began, with the cops in their flagrant, almost recreational careening into One Thousand a moment just after midnight’s cold stroke; the shrink who’s daylighting as the ambulance’s driver refusing to yield, driving his fraternal physician in gleeful violation of the speedlimit reduced to twentyfive inDevelopment; Doctor Tweiss attempting to steady his nerves and hands, with one holds onto the forked tail of his tie as if intent on hanging himself from the antenna above. He’s to snip the foreskin from the flesh of a newborn today, they call it a bris, they called it, this circumcision, an operation he’d never executed before but that, since last night’s phonecall in the middle of the president’s latenite address, he’d been thinking about, mentally occupying himself with, without sleep. His other hand smoking as its nails stroke at his nose as if it were the organ to be sliced and not an anatomy more hidden or intimate. With these people, he’s understood, it’d been the same as in the hospital, there were just a few blessings additional, which he’d been assured were unnecessary to the success of the procedure, its validity. Blessed art Thou. Blessed Thou art. Then a little of the woundsucking, that and the schnapps, which he’d had the ambulance stop for, and bought, then stuffed it into his bag with the steel — he’d kept the receipt, he’d be reimbursed.

Though the entire operation’s unnecessary — as they’d discover upon arrival at the house at the address he’d memorized. Apple. Threethreethree. Though that’d never stopped him before, the lack of necessity of a paying procedure — why they’d hired him, whoever They ever were. Hello, speaking, no, that’d be my brother, yes, who’s calling, fine. Hanna and Israel’d asked their rabbi, also a dear family friend, Rabbi Sternstern his name was, who was dead, his own family, too, his wife and their eight kinder or nine who could keep count and his name, those and the wives and husbands of those kinder of his who were married as well, then their kinder those who’d had them along with everyone else, just last night: in dark socks sausagestuffed, with foothair and varicose veins, Rabbi Sternstern collapsed cold at the edge of his bed packing his bag for the morning, promising himself and his wife who was in bed herself though asleep that this’d be his last bris, the last circumcision he’d ever attempt and after retiring and not working as a circumciser, a mohel, for an entire year due to his nerves and an almost anesthetical fogging (instead outsourcing all the work in his synagogue to a young mohel imported from Teaneck who’d had a family young and large to support and old med school loans to pay down), but that he had to do this last operation himself, with his own two liveredly shaky, deliriously wrinkled hands because of the family, because of Hanna and Israel especially whom he’d converted himself, Israel, and their girls the twelve of them he’d studied with and the mazel that after all those prayers in his office and with the consultation of the doctor his brother-inlaw he’d recommended the parents had finally birthed a thirteenth, a son; how he’d said he’d live to officiate at the boy’s barmitzvah, too, a wedding, why not a funeral; how he died in a fall to the floor grasping and tugging the sheets and the bed’s blanket with him and so turning his wife over in her sleep and her death to fall herself off the edge of the bed, over her side, what’d been her side forever since ineligible, unmarriageable girlhood, to lie atop his body as if in embrace. Terrible, in that he would’ve done it for free, would’ve refused Israel inevitably attempting to pay him an envelope and its personal check or with cash and how Israel would’ve insisted, then he would insist himself and again and again no and then yes, then they’d drink to the health and prosperity of everyone gathered who were to be gathered together now only in death, which is the circumcision by angels of the essence that is divine in us all — like the pluck of a harp, the bris of the winged and glowing foreskin known as the soul.

Doctor Tweiss, however, they paid, they whoever they ever are having arrived and too punctually too early that morning at the failing Tweiss Group off the Long Island Expressway at Utopia Parkway, their limousine out front parked across three handicapped spaces as if to make an impression — that luxury knows no boundaries, that wealth respects no borders; them whoever they are passing the arriving receptionist without nod, pass, grope, or even the most mere insinuation, two grim stooped giants and their wiry boss, smoothshaven, with those eruptive ears and the upturned eyebrows and plasticbags under his squinty eyes that held only contempt, who’d handed the doctors a suitcase packed full with money as if explosive (they were afraid to open it, their fear’d advised them to trust), then another of their party arriving professionally late in a livery of his own, apparently their new lawyer who had him and his brother Tweiss sign a disclaim of deutero forms before he let them go with the two and their employer, whom one called Das, another Der, and the lawyer Die, and whom the two of them Tweiss called nothing at all in their confusion, to the hospital to take possession of an ambulance that’d been gassed and reserved while the lawyer remained behind at their offices ostensibly to go through their files, he’d said, which meant they suspected riffling through the most secret drawer of their receptionist whose breasts the lawyer kept describing in the air with his hands in unreliable gestures as the brothers gathered their matching coats up and left. An ambulance being driven by the psychoanalyst Tweiss costumed in the disguise provided by his closet and the approval of that receptionist’s purse, snappy cap, aviator shades — a goy who despite any pretension to the contrary doesn’t know his way around stick, now pulling up on a ruined transmission to the house huge and hugely vacant, screeching at the intersection of Main & Apple to stop short at the address at the furthest nest of the looparound, the twins thrown to the dash, smoke from the ambulance’s tires imbuing the air with the notion of burning corpses they’ve had to swerve to avoid. An expedition that’s to prove unnecessary, however, as not a soul’s at home, at least the door isn’t answered to their ringing, then their knocking of a brass ring distended from the lip of a decapitated lion — though they realize, now, that a newborn solely surviving couldn’t be expected to open the door on His own and admit visitation, put out the coffee and cake, and so they open the door with the copied key they’d been provided, let themselves in to search a stoop for a baby up and down all the floors: here baby, here boy, but find none and so without thinking much about why or what next, they lay waste to the refrigerator for brunch, sating themselves upon any leftovers leftover, then fall asleep atop the furniture to wait as instructed for further command.