Joshua Cohen - Witz

Benjamin follows behind, waddling in white vesture smeared over the slick and snowmuddied; His pointy hanging hood hooking in His lumber on a perimeter’s branch hanging low, snagging Him, choking, breathlessly bringing Him unbalanced to fall — rearing up the saw panickingly revved in His hands to tear from the ancient, ashy tree its moldy boughs and bark, them crashing down on Him to hit on a root exposed, jaggedly knobbed, knotted, to gash Him on His head, the saw remaining lodged in the trunk. An advancing agent in a suit and tie the black issue of what department there’s no time or clearance to tell grabs Him, lays Him out face up, lifts hood to air Him, shakes, slaps, He’s out. At Benjamin’s falling cry, Leeds turns from untying their canoe, his straddle of the gunwale with one foot to steady the thwart while with the other still bleeding he’s stomping to free all from the freeze, then — he’s frozen, too…shrieking, they’re agents, kovert kosher operatives, Gmenschs they are maybe diamond merchanting Hasids, perhaps Mormon Hasidim, militant lesbian activist fascists who the futz knows; him tipping, to almost wading, kicking hard at the ice into water surrounding the bob of the logged canoe, eventually freeing its hollow freeze, shoving it out then over the floeslick, to water open if sludgelike, thick like a pudding or iron soup, bog metal smelt and yet cold: grabbing the paddle by its shaft, choking up for the steering and heading upstream against flow, deeper into the woods, the Kieferöde dim, its piney hide. The canoe, though, throws all downstream, along with the under-current a tug imperceptible and yet stronger than him, fate implacable and should’ve been humbling. Leeds drops his paddle in midstroke to cup hands, yell again a last for Benjamin but by now he’s forgotten the name. Sounds like — I lost it; the whistling water, finally flowing out here, and whiter with force, a froth that’s rabid, that’s thirsty. Purifying, too, washing to swallow. All hands cupped to the bailing. More agents arrive onscene, commence laughing, they can’t stop…and, are you ready for this — it takes six of them, two to His legs, two to arms then two more holding up the saggingly white-sailed, surrenderflagged middle of Him to triage, to lift Benjamin then hump Him herniate through the woods to the clearing, along the way the agents surrounding His path, the trail newly marked, trod and fired, shooting stray at the dogs coming near, never close. Carcasses lie everywhere, theirs, being ravaged, teethtorn, and savagely pawed at by dogs still alive if only barely, though shot through themselves and singed, with others clear burnt, their hair hardened to an insectlike shell, a pest’s exomost skeletal. With existence at peril, they’re less inclined to attack (these instincts so terribly tough to stray lost); they sense out the danger, react with a low. Heads hung with night, they cower and bitch, drag themselves sorrily into loggy dens to recover, to heal; they’re slowed by the bullets lodged in their hindquarters, their flanks — there to lick at their wounds, though still hungry for anger they gnash, as if feeding on themselves never sated.

And far below a raging helicopter — a robotic locust native to a local military installation who knows behind which stump or sump it’s been hiding, its spindly rotors wild with whirr — rising high then north by northeast again through space amid dark; humbling the supplicant trees, a forest bending from the copter’s cresting rise to bow low as in that dream of Joseph’s — it’s Leeds, hurling at them and God Who hovers above and below them, in every tree, as every leaf fallen and under every rock overturned, a handful of dumb, pathetic stones poached in his progress from river’s bottom and weighing down his vessel, his stolen rental canoe, aluminum and holed, weatherbeaten, shorebattered, snubbowed, which’s rapidly sinking no matter how fast he hurls them up, hurls them out; stones dropping, though, always just short of the airlift. One thrown directly up at the gyred glint above the wink of the moon falls directly down, hits him in the upturned face, knocking him over and out, to hold fast to the lip of the tossing, the rapidly whitewatering teeter, the river widening with the force of the current, if still cold and hazarded frozen, sharded sharply with ice toward the shores. He attempts both those banks at once in a flail, a futile grope, inevitably a doggiepaddle, is swept downstream, and further and brackish, toward the salting, the calming spanse of the ocean ahead — just over, it’s said, your run of the mill Joysey waterfall, this kill fluming logsplit, gaping its taillike spume spread as wide as the day; then over it he goes, hugely, whiskwhipped with a snap beyond the effervescent edge, aired to the rocks that rim the tidalpool below, not whirling but stillgray beneath a white unforgiving…to dash there, going under — then to surface; gasping a grasp at the stones he shrieks out of his own mouth now, as the canoe — turned birdy, as if a helicopter itself of one lone rotary paddle stilled by the gravity of the moon — comes down upon Leeds’ head, emptyfirst.

The hall is — what’s that they’re searching for, what is it that they always say— hushed ; filled with bodies still alive if kept as cold as the corpses to which they’re related: this mass of firstborns ignobly birthed from one dream into another, huddled to the floor of the Registry for a meeting. They’ve been woken by sirens; sleep’s still in their eyes, night’s sand and damp in their knees and fingers — they’re so naked, they’re not even wearing their watches.

It’s early.

How naked are they? a voice might ask, a little late.

But listen. All time has been confiscated, to be reset to the hour of the Garden, the timeless Edenic. No clock has ever hung here in the Registry, or been set atop the Great Hall, and no clock ever will hang, and none will ever be set. This is an orientation, in the other direction, the direction most opposite — not east by west cardinally but in time, the past, or in the eternity that is tradition kept daily…O think of the opportunity! think of the spoils to be unearthed in such still! And know, too, there’s no further contingency, this couldn’t have been planned for, mapped out, or plotted. Any better than it’s already been. Among this generation, who’s the prophet, tell me, the navi, I want to know, who merits a vision like this. Bring him to me and I’ll cut out my tongue, I promise, I will — I know I will.

Hundreds of thousands of firstborn males have been forced onto this Island — ingathered they called it once, a making of Zion with their brethren left dead — and you thought seven seals and a prancing white horse were too much, nu.

As for me, I wasn’t there — they left me home alone. I was gazing out my parent’s window.

At a reflection, I don’t know what.

Good Morning, & Shalom…eighteen mouths grilled in rust say at once from every recess of the space in a thousand languages, and this one, too, which is God’s.

You are now in the Great Hall. Our program will begin momentarily. Until then, anyone know any jokes?

That’s how you can tell they’re alive — that they finally silence the silence, ask each other in whispers then roars: the Great Hall, what’s so great about it?

Hymn. Allow yourself to be told.

In the beginning, there’s the schedule, which is the Law, they’re inseparable, of tablets — ten hours given down on metro Sinai. Mondays and Thursdays we wake, we wash, we pray and eat, then buss and clean, don’t forget to rag the sponge; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, sweep and mop, sinks and toilets, too. At every eve of the month, which is the new moon with its silver, you disinfect, you polish polish polish every other. Friday is Saturday, is now the Sabbath, which we call Shabbos. Observe it — it’s the only item on the agenda at which attendance is mandatory, wherever you are.