Joshua Cohen - Witz

To trudge ahead with legs pissheavy, with hands under His arms, digging out the soak of His pits, shvitzing less from His escape than from a motherly exhortation to fear, that and the wet only freezing Him, slowing Him, more. Benjamin’s pants cling tightly to His body, His chest heaves Him out of breath, a babied mass of chattering fat, a shiver tightly wound around a spine. He’s panting for air, air, any air but there’s only the falling flake of ash, smoke flagging a heaven above weather. Then, the burnt wood clears, the trees disposed even sparser until only stumps remain, agelessly ringed, tressed trees within trees, then a fence in the distance, forever far and tall, with barbedwire curled atop, snarled sharp; to lick the metal, and stick. To step over puddling mud, intermittent holes hailed, He’s holding the fence so as not to lose it, its marking there…barbedwire merging with the clouds — they’ve grown into and around each other gnarled ever since the advent of all fall; He’s slowly rimming for an opening, an out, any.

Along the perimeter, scattered postal letters, these unopened, and more postcards, from Florida, registeredreceipt packages addressed to the same address that is none ultimately under a God’s directory of assuming names, stamped in ink wetted smeared into the earth. Benjamin stoops to overturn a soggy envelope, postmarked three years, two weeks ago in red, another letter to Santa or a party so named, c/o the North Pole; these letters forming circles around stockades of large square package, paperwrapped, tied in horsehair twine, darkstained in oil and leaking slow schematic drips that might only be melt, rainbow wires stick from them, and ticks inside. Iced hearts, about to explode, the spleen of the mechanical. And between these markers, sunken pits, ponds rare as they’re not aflame. Small pollutions, poisonous to think. They sizzle, hiss; their gases give a rise; an eruptive skin, tarthick. He thinks, to make ablutions, to stoop to drink from your own sink. Oil stains of the first rainbow. Ask your reflection — to destroy what world no more. Then further, over the last week accumulated, as if by the unlikeliest of weather up against the fencing — as if an offering to its metal limitation, linked indissolubly to authority’s rule: there’s a whole small mammal frozen, kept from decay by clouds and snow, and, unbelievably, too, from scavenge, placed to keep the form of an altar of halves and quarters, of unnibbled wings and thighs and breasts, most probably poultry, those of a chicken, or a turkey or both marked down on sale Aisle 10 from Thanksgivings and Xmases past, a coin lodged in the whole’s gizzard, perhaps, rendering it inedible, unkosher, tainted forbidden…a blemish festooned with rinds of pork and feet and ears and snouts and those other various entrails and meats of the pig, offal and flesh hung with bacon daintily, delightfully toothpicked to the hoarfrost of chops; ringed by a dozen eggs thrownout upon inspection, candled badly, wafting with the stench of the marsh. It’s an occult kind of ecclesiastical arrangement Benjamin finds here, is frightened by, further adorned with an order of oysters shucked, halfshelled, and a meaningful scattering of mussels, shrimp and squid also frozen to keep, a shellfish assortment, a gift basket of clams. High above this gourmandizing tower, a garment of mixed materials flagged from the fence, barbed to the wire to flap in the cold as if a warning, in its pocket two tickets to the opera or movies for next Friday evening (but cancelled). The entire tabernacle, maybe that’s what this is, Benjamin thinks as He avoids, not wanting to desecrate, not needing the guilt, marked at each quarter by cheap plastic lawn ornaments of the Virgin, themselves individually fenced off by lengths of rosary loosed of beads tied off to wire and trees, each miniature chapel, or church, fronted by the planting of crucifixes, splintered, branches and boughs thonged together to cross; all of it dazzlingly packed and floored with a flossy excelsior, shavings not of wood but of a whole Parkway motel’s worth of shredded New Testaments, as if prayers left behind by pilgrims in the hope of appeal — these being the local losses, and shrines like these appearing everywhere of late; heapings, makeshift piles windily scattered, unholy dumps to which all would, late at night, on dunchbreak from work, or on their ways home from work before nighttime’s conversion, haul all their olden, obsolete embarrassment — their sacrifices; that that’s to be given up, rent then lent out to decay out of season, in the chance of living differently, anew.

Benjamin wanders amid this incomprehensible humus until, there’s a noise: that weapon again, discharging its last, a strafe to empty, without warning this time — no longer a bird’s death, but a dog’s bark, the report of a howl; echo and echoed talking at the same time, to each other. He falls to the ground amid the stockpiles of worldly denial, this seasonal abnegation, or potluck — it’s a laughingly rumbling, regretful quake; the sky, slit, split, falls from the trees, lands on His head, needles to pierce Him laid splayed.

An approach sounds on the snow, loud and coldly damn it let them know what’s coming.

Benjamin raises His head, crawls on His back, His stomach, slowly makes forward.

A stump stands inside the fence.

A walking stump, a wanderous wondrous stump, astride the altar, decked with hat and gun.

Benjamin goes to put his hands up, way up, then realizes that if He does He’ll fall on His face again as He’s crawling.

I gave at the office! the thing talks, too, I toll you once I done toll you a thousand times — I gave at the office, goddamnit…the goy’s not quite a log hollowed out, but he’s wearing one, held up over his skinny with rawhide suspenders. His beard’s to his knees, bristled with thorns, streaked with berries suspended in the puke induced upon their careless ingestion. On his head’s a helmet, Kaiser Wilhelm style, an apple impaled on its spike. He nudges the muzzle of his gun to target Him — this here’s a Palesteinmade Mwhatever the hell, it’ll hole you right up…Benjamin half bows into a pond, dripping rims the fenceside altar on allfours still, rises.

You ain’t a dog, is you? the goy asks, lowers his gun, then sets it down against the altar’s fence, squints an eye, the other’s patched with the pad of a waterlily. I ain’t going to say it again, he says. Stand up. Stay. And so Benjamin heels, straightens out, cracks His back. I want you to take off your skins, slowly now, you’re already halfway. And so Benjamin begins to strip, easylike: disrobes His clothes, first shoes and socks, then plural pants, the goy stares, everything, he says, so He gets Himself nude out of the fruity underwear, and the pressed pinned shirts of His father, lays all in a wrinkling heap — throw it over…and the goy slips Him a slop pail on a pulley slid along a downed powerline. Not folding ever, He stuffs His clothes down into the pail, which the goy in the log reels in over the fence, then shimmies up a tree inside, logged torso and legs smoldering trunk, he descends with the clothes he heaps at the rear of the altar. He leans over, strikes a match from his mouth on himself and fires the pile, whistling through oozy gums he blows on it to burn through the soak — puny smoke, the flames gutter: this offering refused, Benjamin’s pants emerge only singed.

The goy lifts his lily, squints what’s his one good eye at Him and asks, what’re you doing here? To stick a twig in one ear, stick out the other. You lost? Got a name?

I’m fleeing.

He scratches at himself, raising splinters — they after you, too?

Benjamin thinking, who isn’t?

He peeks past the goy into the fence’s interior, nudging up on His tiptoes and around the altar between them: the growth seems to clear, comes sparser, unnaturally nude; resembling nothing but a risen scalp, a barren balding from haphazard uprooting, use, trod upon, paced gleamingly naked if not purely white, coldbleached leaves and needles giving way to a covering of only a small stubble of saltgrass up from under the snow — a skinned head, rimmed around to the west by an armband of brackish river, flowing toward the east and its trees, the dogs, the Parkway then the Atlantic, there the water refreshed of its frozen clarity, clouded and heavied with salt; this and its compound — apparently, a vast wall — hidden by the forbiddingness of this altar’s late treyf, pilings secreting all access.