Joshua Cohen - Witz

His boots have marched in mud over the tile, which’ll never again be as clean as it was.

For you, this Das says, I’m here in person, the voice the tinhorn tinkle of his own decoration. This is sensitive: we need to brief you, find out if you’ll be cooperative. We hadn’t anticipated so many, all these surviving firstborn — least of all a relation…and there isn’t much time.

PopPop pinches pants to kneel at his visitor’s feet, between those blemished boots, and there on his plastic patens, the tray of the new knees bearing atop a hip or two probably needing to be replaced again, too, and sometime soon — to grope beyond darkness, feeling under the bed, and through the trash there, wrappers, the remains of food hidden, no slippers, no shoes.

We’re sorry it had to be this way, we didn’t know if you’d be willing, but let me assure you, Mister Israelien, you should be — you shouldn’t worry. You have my word: everything will be provided, your meals, accommodation, a seat at the table — I’m saying, the choice is yours, but we’d love to include you in our plans. Behind the door, PopPop righting himself, nothing. We’ll be waiting for you in the lobby, take all the time you need, say ten minutes…you might want to pack heavy, it’s even colder up there. In the closet, lost luggage. You have a jacket, hat and gloves, a warm winter coat?

To the laundryroom, then, and only the scrap of a sock, PopPop limping with it to the kitchen, wiping at his forehead. To open the fridge and there, emptiness, save takeout or delivery discard, containers and bags, foil, waxed paper, wet receipt and grease, sop rung around where a tray once fell, its form held in gravy as if the outline of fatty chalk after a crime. The table, cleared clean. Count them, the chairs are all there and pushed in. It’s been wonderful to make your acquaintance, Das whispers down the hall. Again, hoarsely, I want to assure you we’ll do our best to keep you and your grandson happy, and safe. Tread, such a plodding. Trust me, he’s saying even softer and nearer, you’ll get your explanation. At kitchen’s threshold, he stops; he could do better with the posture, stooped to the clink of his honors. PopPop, he’s stricken. As Das smiles, flaking moustache, clicks heels. The frontdoor’s still open from how he’d come; the boots squish.

PopPop dodders down the hall, back to the room, his wife’s dead now Benjamin’s disappeared, to touch at the head of their bed, the pillow filthy in its case on which whoever it was had just sat. From there, a sudden sodden heat clambers up his arm to shut itself mad into his heart’s inmost chamber. Pop-Pop gives a shudder, a tingle, his arm numbed: MomMom’s pins & needles, prickling flesh from the shoulder’s hock down through the elbow, funnily boned to his fingers, stabbing the writing on the wall, or grabbing at the paper’s pattern of flowers — a consolatory bouquet…to seek support, to stand, live on. Ten minutes downstairs, it’s colder up where, clammy Miami, alone, not safe, never happy. As in time, this is an infarct — these are comments his women once made, these were cues: earthshaking, his wife; unstable, his daughter-inlaw…

Whether judged or not, whether meriting or no, though it’s not up to us — if it was, then…PopPop’s dying. Despite lust for Arschstrong, known as luxuria, or gula, greed’s avaritia, the lazy like — and who knows if in reward for the grace that’d been their one week together, him and Benjamin’s — he the shirker, he the enlightened, the weekday modern and Sunday skeptic dies now how he began: within the tradition he’d once forsaken. All’s vanity, pretense, mere role. It’s dramatic, theatrical, geriatric stock staged for the footlit curtains closing up north and Downtown, Second Avenueways, which though in hiding an illustrious street is at heart a vein that, unlimited, exposed, flows south through the island of his native Manhattan then on down the highways of the coast to bind New York’s beginning to Miami’s deadend — the lifeline, the timeline interminable, the intestate Interstate…the aired path of the snowbirds’ perhiemate migration, and the wavelength of the radio and television signals he’s channeling, too, on their frequency their cries, their overwrought shows.

An honorable, traditional death, heldover for reruns — in that it all takes nearly an hour, in one account, while others hold two or ten times that much and more; or else, in some interpretations given over to the mystic lacking a timeslot, he’s still dying and always will be forever, replayed without redemption, eternally, infinitely, heaven or hell. PopPop staggers from bedroom to bath, its chest of pills, tablets engraved with milligrams of saving hope. Dropping them scattered. To steady atop a mountain of rug tripped over then drug, through the hall, its wall and switch he flicks to dim the light appropriate to such serious passage. A shout to the livingroom, a scream to the kitchen to echo tintinnabulatory within the suck of the sink. PopPop beats his breast, this dizzies him, unsupported with this drumrolling beat he falls, flamed across the livingroom, the familyroom, the den, and the backstage, too, of all other rooms besides, their capacity of other dimensions, mystical, mystifying: his drop to the sofa taking another hour itself, with gravity only just awake, waiting its weather patiently out on the balcony.

Want to talk gravity? eulogize death itself! Talk about PopPop’s fall from that couch to the one floor of the rooms that are all themselves only one room stageset and propped whirling around taking twice the hour of his previous fall, how it feels; he rights himself amid a cushion’s cradle, tearing pillows to the floor to better comfort his demise, the mourning impending. How many days dailied and their nights the run, the rushes, not rushed enough. Upsets furniture. Upsets the janitorial staff, working disposal floors banged below. A wild animal it sounds like. Though a sign out front says, No Pets Allowed . Pop-Pop collapses again with a breath, gathers a loose strand of strength, the fringes of the slipcover, bunching the cut of his robe and the pajamas he on weekends shrouds about in; writhes on the pillowed floor with thumbs in his lapels, exhorts in a voice infused with temporary wisdom tempered with what tempers all the residents of his apartment tower, all the elderly almost over lives facilitated below, to free themselves from sin and do remember him kindly; addressing himself to the Staff Physical and SpeechLanguage Therapists, too, Psychogerontologists and even the hated Leisure Director who’d once revoked from him his pool privilege, in punishment of an accidental locker pish — to him as to others PopPop sermonizes; advice he dispenses, honors he bestows; every scrap, rag, rind and peel of inspiration on pain of insight his life has saved up for now, hoarded from sources both ancient and popular, Scriptural quotation and advertorial slogan, catchphrases dropped for commercial taglines cut, over the years stored up in the gray ham beating between the blue-screened, whitewashed walls of his skull. He turns a trip, this somersault to stand, stumbles again to flip and walk on his hands a stunt, his robe falling open around him, this cheap cotton Wardrobe & Makeup melting…where’d he get this stuff — saved up in Storage?

Naming friends and enumerating enemies, for the cautionary benefit of neighbors downstairs floors forever and his unsuspected Arschstrong, too, his lover and would’ve been his and Benjamin’s heir — PopPop doling out wealth he doesn’t have to people he doesn’t really know, never really wanted to anyway; leaving his sun to his SonSon, and may the larks flown south for the winter serve as witness, let their worms live enough to attest. A window, PopPop stands a last, gropes at the sill. Violas swell from a rooftop string-section, behind them winged woodwinds chirp about balconies. From the elevator in the hall, through the door still open, a chorus rises up from the depths, the basement sauna and surrounding pools lap and wading baldly cast with swimmers synchronized, taking a diver they’re swooning pruned the Kaddish, in harmony to the hunk of lifeguard doing a version of faygele in a shrilly brilliant cameo whistle…