Joshua Cohen - Witz

And so the select — amid the dew and fog to mingle with the steam of the sewer, they arrive at the steps, state occasion somber in their gray leathered liveries, modest limousines impounded from the recently passed: moguls, CEOs, CFOs, directors and producers; stopping short at the tombstone of the Library, at the grave of the Avenue numbered Fifth, their passengers emerging to step the flights to the entrance under umbrellas held by attendants who are moonlighting police officers deployed in uniforms of a laughable contingency falling down the stairs and shimmying down the railings that edge the stairs as these experts keep arriving and arriving without rest from earliest morning. Age holding hands with wisdom, they shuffle out and up with the posture of questionmarks, confused, even scared, not knowing why they’ve been summoned, why they’ve been forced here and on turbulent, securitysick flights and in those dingy, secondhand limos, with classes cancelled and lectures postponed, having received little information, almost no hints, and being scholars who can countenance rumor — to gather in the lobby of the Library, then once identified, fingerprinted, to sign a number of papers attesting to silence with alien pens. They’re escorted in an order even they in their wisdom, insight, and rare instances of genius are unable to understand, not by age, certainly not by the tenure of wisdom, down a wide hall, chandelierdomed and marble, into the reading room, an expanse of extenuating proportions even in the dim of this wintry month and at an hour at which even God is rarely to be found awake to our prayers: a room lined on all surfaces except ceiling and floor with trees split into shelves then spined neatly in books, which are only trees disemboweled, against which lay the rickety trunks of ladders, intermittently runged, boughs bowed under the weight of inspiration and its desperate if meaningful reach, the mating mute of grains stained with stone, the ceiling elaborately high above the gallery, a democracy of wood tempered with kingly gold, the floor below flooded with tables bobbing in the puddles of melt brought in from outside on the bottoms of shoes and the cuffed drag of pants; tables, you should have such tables, such tables as you could write a book on, a Bible, wood wide and wrinkled, topped by coppered lamps that reflect the perilous hang of those chandeliers, hung with light.

A past near the far door giving into the lobby, its steps and the street, its perpetual arrivals, with our tomorrows, if any we have, floating loftily over the gallery by the great bays of windows above, promised behind glass mullioned in steel, beyond which the sun’s just beginning its slow, glorious rise up to noon. Nakedly white, the scalp of the morning, waxed into perfection never to wane — it’s a head, a head nude, the head of the goy or maybe it’s said mensch rumored to be known only as Das, shining over the assembled, presiding over the floor. They’re occupied settling themselves, with greeting each other, shaking hands, arching brows, colleagues long lost, old students, mentors, department heads and deans, friends they hadn’t had the pleasure of in years, and suddenly — the sun comes to rest through the windows, a breath of light across the tables to flicker the lamps, and they stop, find silence, turn heads, which are all also bald, globes of their own reflecting greater light, to gaze at the figure of Das, whose stance alone on the gallery leaning against its rail and whose height augmented by thick, heavily elevated boots render him an astronomy unto himself, his medals, badges, and citations dazzling amid the heavens of woodwork and glass — they become blinded, are burnt, then just as suddenly the figure turns from their faces, whips up his uniform in his hands and resounds his steps out the door.

At his departure, silence remains with its light…though gradually, impatience manifests, and they return to their rumors again, they gossip, grumble, slap at their foreheads, who understands; these are scholars, minds, thinkers, digressers, debaters pointed of bones drycleaned, their minds if not their appearances always buttoned and cuffed, who knows to prophet from power and from profit, reward — and then, yet another question, Is this on? one of them has taken the lectern at the other end of the room; he taps the microphone, then introduces himself as Doctor Abuya; his reputation precedes, nothing. The goy to his left’s the Nachmachen, and as that name, too, means little to anyone here, all becomes clear: illuminated, in that the eye of the sun falls even on the obscure; these days — of lack, such loss — perhaps especially so. Usurpers usurp; these two, always one speaking, always one with the nodding, explain; they take turns — one always broad, patriotically stirring; the other specific, all business.

As it’s soon understood, these scholars have been assembled to settle a dispute quote of global importance, of, quote, international scope: theirs a question that seeks not one answer but millions — eighteen million to be precise, the famed Octadecamega as the pollsters would pundit at the very margin of error; it’s to answer with facts, identities, with names, and current mailing addresses and telephone numbers, who to scape now, now that rapture and our redemption and yadda’s out of the question, which question is ours and not theirs, it’s explained; it’s that the people, in conversion and not in their death (though death is perhaps a species of conversion, not one would later suggest), had been essential to redemption, endtimes salvation, and now that that seemed gone all to hell or to heaven and which, what’s next, any ideas — when do we break, where’s the toilet?

This revivified Sanhedrin has been convened to choose a new chosen, to conduct a new selection — to identify a People, according to their missionstatement: to be selected through the will of God, or through those whom that Deity selects …a directive already drafted and ratified by the usual Washington interlopers and upstartists, as if anything they legislated would be signedover in fire by God, the nibbed forefinger of, that willed and willing Deity party and without the hindrance of dissenting votes, as President Shade — assisted by the Mayor of New York, newly named Meir Meyer, here little more than a functionary — takes the lectern to announce, and with no mean modicum of humility, God’s selection of himself and his subsequently deific selection of this Das (apparently, a former advisor, chief of staff to a predecessor better forgotten, a cabinet member, past secretary of the Treasury a few have to remember, a shadow owed much and by many), invested with autonomy as full as it gets, promised no interference, no accountability expected and, anyway, who has the time; this deicidical Das who in turn has ostensibly selected those assembled below, foremost intellectuals, policy wonks, thinktank wizards, and the odd factotums of fictional government to infiltrate, make report, ensure what we once knew as due process — this in an operation financed by the holding escrow of the assets of the dead: to peruse assorted arcana, pursue genealogies, wills and testaments of every ilk and ink in the hopes of ascertaining the representatives of our impending redemption. Or else distraction, popular ruse. And as an assemblage without a mission is as a mensch without a head, the body of choice is already accounted: there’s policy, protocol, they might even have an insignia, a motto (though none knows what those are; each is urged to bring not only pencil or pen, but their own stationary, too), everything except an idea of what anything means. Still, in the following season the scholars are ordered to apply themselves as diligently as desecration can be, and sooner than they’d ever imagine they’re firing off memoranda and missives discreet, regarding the suitability of proposed scapes to colleagues sitting, sleeping, slumped just to their left, to their right, across tables, down halls; a deluge of notes, reports, inscrutable forests of papered waste: hemicovers of books slam closed, cause enormous clouds, dust to eclipse the above, to obscure the silent morning visits of, among others, the dubiously redubbed Mayor, accompanying the President, Das in his General uniform twostarred one day, threestarred plus purplehearted the next, flanked by his innumerable minyans of minions, plainclothed as decalogues, in suits pieced together of drab tablets.