Joshua Cohen - Witz

And Benjamin, breaks.

Only later, there’s the shame of admission — anyway, it’s all caught on camera…where I was when suspect wasn’t; sir, occupied returning penis to pants, and underwear, which is tight and deliriously striped. Unlike any animal known, or prison: Sing Sing, where he’d supped enough. Hamm turns, spatters drops of stinging piss on his pants, down them to drip below pockets and drear his knees, as if he’s kneeled atop mopping, pitterpuddling through his underwear also to dampen the legs. He gasps his pursuit across the tilefloored veldt, as quick as the sleekest predator though nowhere near its grace, his tongue out to shadow that other massive endowment still wagging, and its even more massive foreskin, too, as if the dark flag for a nation forgotten flapping wildly in the wind of his run, his fast dirty feet in their shoes trampling this foreskin now, liberally powdered, though it might be snow from the floor: how he runs up onto himself, as if his foreskin’s a welcomemat just pulled out from under, tripping, over his unsnipped flesh falling flat, on his face on the slick tile next to the sign that warns Slippery When —is anyone here a lawyer, is anyone else here at all?

Torque Mada, out in the foodcourt, calmly waiting for assistance, anyone who works here, a sentient pimple popped across the register, pussing the keys. Most of the employees have advantaged the tragedy, taken off, personal days, to mourn strangers at home and that with the screen out, only occasional electricity. He has two hands on a tray stacked with hamburgers a week old, complimented by a host of condiments, wilting fries washed with soda wanting for gas; him wondering whom he should pay and why as Hamm glides risen out of the bathroom and across the floor, his hair and hang still proudly out, his head gashed, two front gold teeth of his loosened, kicked in his slide to skittering flight toward tables at the far end of the glare. An echo, he’s screaming, waving hands, doing semaphores of an unintelligible nature though you do get the idea of Jesus, and even more offensive obscenities shouted, him knocking over tables and chairs, the destruction of concessionary displays of myriad intricacy: pyramidry rendered of chocolate candy, toiletry tombs. Mada throws his tray down the line, off the end just for effect falling, scattering burgers, buns, special sauce, lettuce, tomato, onion, grabs Hamm and steadies, then the two of them run arm-in-arm, toward the exit they’d entered from with Mada and as if no one expects slipping and falling himself over his own scatter, a rogue patty with its melted swiss square, on his face, finally spilling his hat. Hamm, what do you think he doesn’t stop he wants out, toward the doors, pushes where he should pull then pulls out into landscape and lot, to head N/NE as door signage indicates deep into the Kieferöde beyond. Heber left in the limo idling with the inside heat on all the way up, the door open and his tuxshirt, too, its ruffles fluttering in the storming midmorning; his shoes dangling over the ice, pants cuffed high to bare his knees, he’s smoking an unfiltered: flakes of ash fly scattered across his chest, which is hairless, and he breezes them off and their embers with fingers gloved, as Hamm ever so fitfully slides across the wetwaxed hood, to ride shotgun, reaches around Heber’s neck as if to strangle his bowtie, a clipon, drags him by it in and behind the wheel shrieking an approximation of find Him.

Who? Heber grabs at his tie as he revs up the limo.

Who, Him, the fatass kike, Jesus the lardy yid I’m talking who else, what’re you thinking?

You let Him get away, Heber’s yelling, futz me, futz us, we’re dead…still, he flips down the mirror over the wheel, inspecting his hair prior to releasing the clutch. Hamm opens, necks his head out the window, then out the roof for the sun.

Benjamin’s just down the lot, lumbering over the asphalt, trash, foodwrappers, and icy oil as fast as He’s able, not having been toddling for long and born this out of shape, making toward the Kieferöde, which is the Joysey forest that trees everywhere beyond the city, anywhere that’s not citybound, set in rings grown concentric, and hung with infernal cones — pining inland to heaven, southwest to hell…

There! Hamm shouts, pointing, He’s almost at the woods…and Heber shifts a turn, throws the limo madly, aiming its speed at the gross quavering tush. Hit Him if you have to, says Hamm, and hard — wasn’t our fault, dumb luck…just get your fender smack on His hynie! Heber floors, topspeeding at this looming rear…Benjamin only a blur of pants and trunk, then embraced by the branches, comforted in the midst of the boughs. Desperately, the limo goes hurled over the curb of the lot, falls into a sluice, slamming into an embankment of woody decay, icemelt, smoke wheezy from the hood: Heber’s thrown over the eructed airbladder and into the windshield, Hamm tumbles through the door, lands tush over head, flails, his hands grasping at logs dead and wrapped loose in diapers; the limo’s wheels turn up dirt, mud, the severance of weeds, the vehicle entire revving one last, worthless assault, raising itself up on its rearwheels as if posed alongside the Unknown State Trooper for a proud example of municipal statuary, prior to flopping its flab metal down again, finally, what a mess. Hamm surfaces with a used diaper perched as a nest on his head, tries to stand, slips on a log submerged, falls again into the sluice as insects unparticular to climate begin their swarming around him, assemble tightly into nimbi, artfully shifting their shapes — isn’t that an elephant, its trunk hovering about his mouth and nostrils, or a lion, a bestial storm, manelike clouds. He finally rights himself, staggers to the other side of the limo from which he drags Heber unconscious out of the dent shaped like Heber in the shatterproof shield; leaves him on the asphalt, propped against the limo pouring fire, tires singeing his tux. Mada mugs over with one hand denting down his hat, the other holding a pilfered plastic sipper, in which he’s iced Hamm’s two lost teeth, found slushed on the reststop floor, having been spit to slide slip under a chair against the easternmost wall. Limoside, he stoops to enshrine the sipper in Heber’s hands limp, taking a moment to arrange them in a disposition of prayer before he and Hamm make their attempt on the Kieferöde.

It’s the wind that rustles them in, a gust of rope, a whipping noose — branches snap underfoot and those under them, sog; at lot’s edge, last scattered lungs of leaves still hang from the boughs, breathe uneasy, giving way to the horripilation of needles, sharply incising of flesh, prickling floor. Staying near, they scurry the two of them as one, a mutant rodent now sundered at its gut by the jut of a tree it has to pass as they, on two legs each they hurry, they run; dense stone foliage snaps up against them, whips into their faces as hard as knots, as barbed chains…Mada shouting His name and it echoes in the voice of Hamm, who shouts to echo Mada with them too occupied in the preservation of their status of employment to notice the difference, if any; them running deeper into the needles’ slice, the blistering cones, then having to slow, the forest treeing denser…rimming these immense windquaked piles of leaves, and huddling, too, around widening trunks dark, deepfurrowed, furry with moss; these piles themselves piling into one solemn pile flaming with ice, identified as Joysey in atlases too soon to be made obsolete: they slip into this pile of piles, and into splenic cranbogs, scumponds of sunken, groping root; slicking on slabs of blighted bark, which is the fallen scab of the wound that is the tree, a scar on the horizon known only as white in this weather. Their feet mire in sap, freeze, they fall then right themselves only to lose each other, themselves, nature fills their mouths when they try to scream, what, why, Shalom, Benjamin’s name — echoes echoing wet leaves around tongues, as tongues, down their throats into stomachs, needles, also, that’d slit throats down to navels, spilling their pursuit all over the floor of the forest, amid the dreck and the imprinting paw.