Joshua Cohen - Witz

He’s dying! my God, he’s dying!

PopPop tearing at what’s left of his hair as if tugging from his head his own response with the dandruff, yelling: I am having a heart attack! I am dying!

As old as death this fall again, back to the kitchen — what a stunt this brunch’s fling, in truth a jump or pounce, prat and rattling glass, rupturing the last act (another halfhour); leaning limply on a doorknob turned with his weight to humble him to knees in the hall, an other hand reaching into the air, still and stale — a wreck, this underventilated apartment with the heating way up and the impotent sun spurting itself through the unwashed, unshaven skylight — his head held snobbish, as if to face away from his wriggling toes, gnarled in yellow nail, he can’t bear them, the weakly veined and restless legs and breathless crotch, in an always last attempt to right himself, to rise. A farewell as extensively meant as Shalom in its every translation, its rewrites, kick-starts, punchups and toneddowns, tightly mouthed: with blessings and curses for all, for relatives, friends, for even just the relatively friendly, the acquaintance and the stranger among them; with obsecrations and wishes, goodbye, the sigh of its syllables again: Sha-lom…his eyes opening after the style of his lips, to the mirror above, around and whirlwinding, to pronounce to himself in reflection an invocation of the worth of his mother, to commend his corpse and soul condemned if soul he has to God. He says his goodbyes now a third time absolute, absolving any prompt: Shalom, Shalom, Shalom…shutting eyes, mouth, face grayed above the flush of heart.

Throughout PopPop’s facility, from towertop to basement bottom, mourning’s been underway for a week already: Unaffiliated though eligible, still attractive and accommodating with money and recipes of their own widows beyond and below, those inveterate cookers and cleaners who’d moved here maybe to land for themselves on Florida’s fishy shore an Affiliated husband, his fortune, their luck, these survivors of intermarriages and failure — they’re out on their own decks below his and rending ritzy their fresh laundry mourning white with spare falseteeth, tearing their sheets and assorted feminine unmentionables to shreds before hanging them out to signal what distress or sentinel under the cool of the coming moon. All day they’re lolling low their sad sag, over their precariously frowning railings like petulant lips, they’re sobbing, weeping the age of water, their flabby hands held to faces shaken out into faucets of flesh, one eye of each the hot water, the other the cold and so, it’s lukewarm tears they’re sprinkling all over Miami, as if to purify or douse. Upon their hair, which is wig, or dyed, ashes heap, luminously scorched particulate blown from the pile of corpses burnt at the furthest edge of parkinglot and, too, atop the roofdeck of the adjacent garage — a great cremate, as who has the time or resources for mass burial. Despite surgery electives and pricey, painful injections their faces, they’re fallen — on the knees of the nose, their cheeks begging for it (compliments) — on the form of a wiry, uniformed official below with the brass, the moustache’s rank, giving orders to the limos parked in the drive. As smoke from the bodies burns off into night, PopPop manages, just manages, to scroll open an eyelid, a brittle curtain or carpet soaked of its red; and with it attempts a wink that’s only to resolve into a roll, dull — which failure damns and so feels itself death; the end of an end come the credits, the stars.

All air’s grounded the days following disaster…not days but an afterlife, which is indivisible, and so even if heaven then truly hell. An avenue, they emptily follow, a street, without escort, the city beckoning: a dark ancestral finger curled to coax, both to bring near and to scold. Laning, leathern strips of tar. A fringe of ice, a knot of tree. Their prayer is only a siren. Two limousines alone together, pass each other, are passed, a gleam of fender, grazing mirrors, bumpthumping and cutting one another off, northeasternward, far up the reach of black, this dim span of everlast cold; the aired flat earth of the seaboard in all its binding chains, a franchise of the known: gas stations lately condemned, treyf eateries just out of business, prospective lots of forested nowhere, On This Site Will Be Built nothing anymore, a plot zoned fallow, this strip retstripped. Though through Maryland at the exit for Silver Spring, while others hold by Virginia and headed toward Fairfax or Langley just south of Washington the district, the government limousine swerves from the highway, the other vehicle stays its course more east and northernmost, on into the day mapped white in noontide light — up and always up the Interstate abandoned, plowing past stakes of evergreen loneliness, relieved every mile or so by pits of firewall dirt.

To follow is to lead if in the direction most opposite, an ordinal most opposed — the route of the landrover in reverse, an Exodus rewinding itself through a desert of ice: snowstorm, galling winds. Hail the hardness of stone the size of the sky falls to the windshield, trapping darkness in the web of its shatter. Our driver, a Mormon minor who seems as young as all Mormons most probably are, and every schmeck as innocently perfect, turns into a skid without concern, his face frozen blond and harmless; then, evens out again with a slight sigh to ride the middle of the highway without end, without middle; the fall effacing lines, the lanes useless, with shoulders slushed to watery shrug. Benjamin in the back, there are two others waiting for their introductions; one seated shotgun, next to Heber the Mormon: he’s the shvartze we’d been getting at earlier, name of Sonny Hamm though he’s known also as Testicles, to be pronounced in a manner more philosophical or poetic than most — Greek, though his people long ago came up from the South, the capital of Africa; the other’s seated alongside Benjamin, hidden with Him behind the window that tints to separate front from rear, two zones of temperature and volume of radio static: a foreigner, the name’s Torque Mada. Despite the smile, the lips as tight as scars, he keeps on his head that fedora without apparent humor. Maybe he’d been told to suit up like this, for the sake of impression: doublebreasted, pocketwatch that needs always winding, the sparkling piss of its chain. It pinches. A sensation of slow burning, a headhaze, a rise in His gerd. He’s slumped against the window, His bones feel weather-made. Awake as of just now, the last pothole, tires’ slide — feeling the slow flow of power channeled once again from the beat of His heart, recovering from the injection that’d fallen Him with midnight, the secularized eve of the New Year. Assimiliated to who knows how or when, there hadn’t been a struggle. He’s kneading at an arm, up toward the pudge that falls from shoulder, its bandage unremembered: a sanitary strip profaned in image with a wondrous array of popular animated characters He can’t hope to know, He’s too young — ratty mice, cats and dogs, and piglets.

In one interpretation, you can forget pain, uncomfortable’s the worst.

Benjamin shifts to make sucking flatulent noise on the wide leather seat. His glands feel hardened, swollen inside Him just under the skin pricked, as if balloons of condolence, inflated with bile. I’m sorry, get well soon. His throat’s thorned, His mouth a bouquet of tongues, wilting flowers. A limousine a womb, its mother luxury — offering every amenity without such twin of guilt: there’s the latest model television screen, which is blaring technological snow, racked alongside a stack of recent magazines and newspapers headlining the tragedy throughout the last week of shock, onto specifics, statistics, facts, then the editorializing calm that is the grind of daily blame; and then a bar, too, from which He retrieves a can of soda in a flavor purporting to be diet, pops the top, proceeds to spill atop a skidding rumble half the thing all over, PopPop’s robe and Israel’s shirt underneath that are actually two robes and two shirts held together only with hope, the pants that’d been three pairs of Arschstrong’s before the surgery to his gut and its effectual weightloss, which’d been extensively scarring — a deepening stain aired as if the twin or mate of the blood let from the road’s shoulderborne, rubberravaged corpses stacked for disposal and slicking the freeze, their flow sustaining the grass giving way to stumps, the stubby trunks of trees the pubic pines of the earth, the needled gravel, which is the death of the earth, its own grave.